Quake 2 History || Old-School Clans || REViLLA Profile || REViLLA Quake Autobiography
Old-School UK Quake 2 Clans When I started work on my history, it was always with the intention of producing a separate write-up on many of the old clans. However, it was more difficult than I realised getting any information and I mostly had to rely on my own memory to do each write-up. Because of this, I've limited the list to the eight great clans below. Just to stress that these are from memory, so if you read anything that you disagree with then let me know! Hope you enjoy a bit of nostalgia anyway.
Bookmarks UNR NME FED CFH SS EED HooD CS
One contribution that Unreal made to the scene was their excellent Jumps Site, hosted on Planetquake, which still exists today. Many new jumps and tricks have been discovered since, but this was a brilliant undertaking and taught a lot of players some new tricks. Unreal were also rare in being one of the very few UK clans to be recognised internationally. They competed in the February 1999 Euroquake competition against the great Memento Mori, Clan 9 and 7th Chapter and did themselves proud, even though they didn't win. Unreal won seasons 1 to 3 of the UKCCL, NME won season 4, then Unreal won seasons 5 and 6 before they quit the scene. It should also be stressed that Unreal were into the CTF scene in a big way too and actually "did the double", holding both the deathmatch and capture the flag crowns at the same time. Considering that these games are completely different disciplines and that they used many of the same players, this was a great achievement and one that's never been repeated. Unreal's players are some of the most famous names in Quake, even today. Tasan was the leader and I always felt he was a very shadowy character. I've never heard or read a single word from him and demos are extremely rare. However, he clearly did a great job with the clan. Luke has always seemed like the right-hand man and was well-known as a great dueller. Like his clan, he was one of the only UK players to be recognised internationally and took part in the European Duel League, playing in some LAN finals against Europe's best. Luke was also successful in first being one of the 10 chosen for the first UK team and then one of the final four who travelled to Paris to give the French a whipping over five games. Rude is also very well known, now largely due to the legacy he left of some great demos, his own recam of a practice with Mortal Teamwork and the UK Deathmatch 10 demo. This latter demo features Rude against 9 other top players including Luke, Maskaler, Crazyface, MrBassMan and several others. Rude wins the match and his demo shows him to have been a great, naturally gifted player. Rude also contributed to the scene with a simple website, mainly for links. One final thing to mention is that there's a demo floating around of Rude vs Thresh, which is a proud thing to have. I haven't seen it, but I've heard he spends most of the match running ;). I guess anyone would after seeing Billox's fate at Quakedelica. SPoG was very well known, thanks largely to his mapping. It was SPoG that designed Unreal's great custom map, UNRDM1, which is one of the classic custom maps even now. He also contributed a great map to the CTF community, SPoGctf1 with an amazing design featuring a massive bridge over a valley with a sheer drop either side. There were other well known names too, like Diabolic, Insomniak and Spawny. Yakumo was Unreal's main HPB player and easily one of the best at the time. He was a class act and was frequently seen on deathmatch servers fully tagged up, the only one of Unreal I ever saw in fact, with the single exception of SpoG. One of Unreal's most famous players is Bl0key. He originally played for The Federation as a remarkably skilled HPB. He was so good in fact that FED played him in their Free Cup final against HooD. Bl0key was selected along with Luke and Tasan for the UK team and went with Luke in the final four. This competition was one of the first times that many people had seen Bl0key play lanned and he basically made the team. More: Here's a record of achievement that I plucked from the Unreal site some time ago.
Whatever you thought of him personally, however, you can't take away from the fact that he ran FED very well. FED didn't just rely on skills, they had a brilliant tactical game, too. They were one of the first UK clans to develop the lockdown tactics on The Edge where almost every spawn is covered and the enemy can't make a comeback. Maskaler ran the team with an iron fist. I remember playing a practice against them with HooD and heard him giving Liquid bollocking after bollocking for things like nicking the ammo pack in the megahealth room when Maskaler had the chaingun and for any other minor mistake ;). In Hood we were all really laid back and this raised some eyebrows. I also remember playing a practice against them in my first clan, Deadly Force. We were hopelessly outclassed on the Frag Pipe and lost by a ridiculous margin, something like 200-5. I remember how we watched our spectator's demo and saw Maskaler holding the pipe and their teamskills and weapon-dropping blew us away, we'd never seen anything like it :). Maskaler was clearly a great player but there was another in FED to rival his skills and that was Cruxis. Cruxis was a foreign player but was always in the first team and had a killer rail. Other FED players of note included Rain, Che, Fuze, Homi and Bl0key, though Bl0key eventually left to join Unreal in the middle of 1999. Adam is another well-known player and was the leader of Acura, who formed in 2000 as a rival to CS. He also went on to found and run the NDML. Some months after FED was ejected from the UKCCL, it reformed in 2000 led by ex-[NME]combatjoe, aka mame. They made a brief comeback but got frustrated working their way through the low divisions winning easy games and eventually quit again. All in all, FED were easily one of the best ever UK clans. They were about as l33t as you get but generally speaking they weren't abusive during games and generally only annoyed people with their constant trademark => smilies after every kill ;). In my mind FED rank with Unreal and Clan Stealth as one of the three greatest Quake 2 clans.
CFH were one of the early clans and were up there in
Division 1 from the second season or so. Generally they were competing
with Suicide Squad for the third place spot, with Unreal and NME
in first and second. I don't remember a great deal about their actual
performances as I've never even seen a demo of them play! CFH, like
UNR, competed in the CTF scene as well. CFH had some very well known
players on the scene, including Comatosed, who was a sound player.
He also gave something back to the scene by co-running a separate
league, the UKQ2A. In the same way as Unreal, CFH were one of the few clans to play CTF and had some success. Their other claim to fame is being one of only two clans (with NME) to beat Unreal in a UKCCL League game. CFH retired towards the end of 1999 along with most of the other old-school Quake 2 clans. Many of their members went on to compete in the world of Quake 3 and also combined with members of SLH to form one of the best ever RA3 clans, Clan X. More: Their modern day site.
The Suicide Squad suffered the same fate as CFH to a certain extent, and always had to play second fiddle to the top-runners UNR and NME. That said, they were easily one of the best teams in the country with an excellent attitude and good community spirit. What more could you ask for? Before SS quit Quake 2 they won the Season 7 Free Cup in January 2000, defeating Massive Killing Capacity in the final. Another thing I remember SS for is the groundbreaking new website designed for them by Stab. This was the first time I remember a clan getting a professional PHP website with automatic user updates and all the extras. It was launched over two years ago and it's still in use today by the Quake 3 team and still looks the part. Players I remember are Just Ade, the clan's founder, Stab, who was a great FFA player and always very sound on the servers. The infamous Shadow AKA The^One AKA Railden was also a member for some time. Other top players were Panther and in the later days, Drugz. The Suicide Squad were also struck by Crazyface who was well known for moving from clan to clan each time with a new persona. He joined SS as Medusa and when it was discovered I seem to recall they had a win reversed for fielding an aliaser, which was quite controversial at the time. Crazyface joined several clans like this, the clans always being attracted by his excellent skills. I remember him infiltrating Hood in this way too. He came for a trial as Imbruglia and gave a story about having moved from Canada. He was very good and we needed an LPB, so even though we knew it was a suspect story, we recruited him. Bit dodgy of us but you know. The supposed real name he used still cracks me up. Try to think of a cool name you'd love to have if you were a filmstar and what would you come up with? Something like Jack Steele maybe? That was the name he used, hehe. Anyway, I digress. Suicide Squad are one of the oldest clans on the scene and have probably contributed to the scene more than any other. On top of this they had an excellent and mature attitude and were perhaps the soundest clan around. More: Here's a history of the clan written by Just Ade, which I got from their site before it was taken down in late 2003. Hope they don't mind.
Their most famous player is of course Billox. Billox was a great player and made the first UK Quake 2 team. However, to older players he is best known for the utter mauling dished out to him by Thresh on The Edge. To be fair Billox wasn't the best dueller in the country as many top duellers hadn't bothered with the Quakeadelica tournament. He made it through though but was hopelessly outclassed and lost by a pretty disgraceful 56 to -1. All credit to him though he took it like a man and kept coming at Thresh. Thresh's superiority shocked a lot of people in the UK who weren't used to seeing such amazing prediction skills, which are old hat now. Billox kept going for the railgun repeatedly and Thresh would be there every time with rockets and the chainer to finish. Sadly for Billox this became Thresh's most famous match, but like I say, he got over it and became one of the country's best. The leaders of the clan were Slim and Lurker. Lurker eventually went on to play a major part in one of the first professional gaming organisations, the OGA. DNM also played for EED before later joining CFH. Another EED player I still remember was Lotta who was very strange. He would join a server and say the phrase "I'm naked" before disconnecting immediately. Odd :). More: Here's a link to their current blog site.
Anyway, some history. Hood started out as a Wireplay clan. The Wireplay community was completely separate to the Net community at that stage. People used the special Wireplay software and connected to private servers with good pings and they formed their own leagues and community. This community was strong and the remnants of it can still be seen on Q2Central and Blueyonder. Hood went on to dominate the Wireplay scene and won three seasons of the Wireplay Deathmatch League. Some of the original players were Riprock, Nimrod, Z, Adamantium, Shadow/Railden, Glory and B-Boy. Their great rivals were Clan Revenge. Eventually Hood moved on to the net but this coincided with a period of declining interest amongst many of the early members. Stormkeep joined after they made the move and quickly became co-leader with original player Adamantium. Together they recruited several new players to replace the now inactive originals and worked their way up the divisions. Some of these new players were Requiem, Zero, Kajun, Soulthief and SHAFT!. The Wireplay community was generally ridiculed by the wider Net community so when Hood reached the semi-finals of the Season 5 UKCCL Cup with Unreal, the great net clan as opponents, this generated a massive amount of interest. The resulting match was amazing, with Hood emerging victors. It's one of the great demos and still confuses me today as Hood don't seem to use any of the standard tactics and somehow sneak a victory back from the confused UNR :). This is probably HooD's greatest achievement, even though they then lost in the final to FED. Hood were also one of the first deathmatch clans to play RA2 at the same time and performed very well, reaching the final of the UKRA2L cup in their first attempt and becoming runners-up in Season 3 of the league. The final end of the Quake 2 side came in December 1999. Despite having won Division 2 in straight games, interest had again begun to wane and the commitment wasn't there for the Division 1 campaign. Also, Quake 3 had come out and many players were interested in that. This included some of the original players from the Wireplay days who planned to come back and reshape Hood as it was of old, at the expense of the new Net players. This led to a major fallout and every player left. You can read more of this in my bio. TO summarise, though, Hood as a clan were a very skillful bunch of individual players. The team ethos was important though and getting ideas above your station was frowned on. A great clan, with a great image, and I'm proud to have been a member.
Some say that it was easy for CS to dominate the scene because so many old clans had left the scene, but I don't think this is fair really because, while some top players had left for good, namely those from Unreal, most continued on in different clans. Players from NME, like combatjoe, strudles and MrBassman joined clans like FED and HIV, and there were many other examples, too. There were also plenty of experienced old-school clans on the scene, like PK, DS, AMG, LE, WW and =Mr= and so on. Also, the standard of play was stronger and good connections were no longer just for the top clans, everyone was suddenly on ISDN which had evened up the playing field significantly in my view. The main reason why they dominated is obviously due to their talent, but they were also very well organised and always fielded a quality side without problems. In the early days, Clan Stealth was run by Rob* and Syrus and early players were Reality, CHEEFleBEEF, HiLife, Thermopyle, YaMother, Koolcat, Watusi. However, with the exception of Rob*, who continued to lead the clan through their glory days, most of these players will be unknown to most people. The later squad, which won everything included players like Jakkel, Jay, Puppetmaster, killa, Jubbers, Rufus, Tango, Skydancer, Doomeh, THE^BEAST, UreaL, Dev, caw, Hellhound, Liquid, placid and Jecks(marteee). Clan Stealth were seen by most as a very l33t clan, in the same kind of mould as FED, and, indeed, these two clans were great rivals. However, it seemed that FED and CS always seemed to try to avoid playing each other and I remember FED defaulting on one occasion when they were due to meet. In fact, in early 2001 a new clan was founded by Adam from FED, called Acura, which was basically an amalgam of FED and CS, but it didn't last too long after stunning everyone initially. My old clan, MKC, used to practice with CS from time to time (in Quake 2 and later in RA3 in their guise as Exclamation) and they were always pretty sound I thought and never gloated when they thrashed us :o). CS more or less came to an end at the beginning of 2001. They disbanded and many of their players joined CoG. Cog then won the Savage Cup - go figure. Then CS reformed and won the second Savage cup. However, this was the end really, and though they did reform as Resistance, a merger of CS and German clan ALS, the glory days were well and truly over and a lot of their players were now over in Quake 3 and RA3 land. Were CS better than Unreal? It's tough to call really. On the one hand, Clan Stealth dominated like no clan ever has before or since and managed the incredible feat of five straight league wins, which even Unreal didn't manage. But on the other hand, the scene was in definite decline and Clan Stealth never achieved the European recognition attained by Unreal. To be honest, I think don't think it matters - it's fair to say that there have been three clans that have dominated the three ages of Quake 2 in the UK and it's impossible to judge them against each other because they existed in different times and conditions. A clan can only play the games and the clans that are available, and on that score they were all unstoppable in their respective eras. Unreal in the childhood and teens, Clan Stealth in the twenties through to middle-age, and, to a lesser extent, XTC in old age :o).
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Unreal
were a class apart from any other clan around at the time and they
were the undisputed champions of the UKCCL winning both the league
and cup competitions on several occasions. As a clan, however, I
always felt that, whilst they were brilliant, they were too enigmatic
in many ways. When you watched their demos they would never say
a word, never express any satisfaction in winning or frustration
at losing. Their website was barren and demos were almost impossible
to get hold of.
Clan NME were Unreal's great rivals and always seemed to come second to Unreal. However, they did win UKCCL Season 4 after a close, deciding match with Unreal. Stopping Unreal's unbeaten run of three seasons was probably their greatest achievement. NME seemed to me another quiet clan and their website was even deader than Unreal's. However, you would at least see NME players on public servers from time to time, which was refreshing. NME were in Division 1 right from the early days and quit the scene around the same time that Unreal did in late 1999.
FED were always a very controversial clan, thanks mainly to their very controversial leader, Maskaler/Exor. FED were very highly skilled and their proudest achievement was surely winning the UKCCL Season 5 Free Cup after defeating HooD decisively in the final. FED never actually played in Division 1 of the UKCCL because they were relative late-comers and had to start at the bottom, but had they had the chance I'm pretty sure they would have given Unreal a run for their money at the top.
Suicide Squad are perhaps best known for their Academy. This was an amazing idea, which involved recruiting new players into the Academy to train them up. They wore a [SSa] tag and would play in internal league matches. It wasn't all selfless of course because SS could recruit the best ones into the top team, but it still must have taken a massive commitment from all members of SS. The only player I can remember from the Academy is Gaspig who used to be on the FFA servers a lot when I started out.
I
don't remember a great deal about EED except perhaps that they are
the second clan I ever heard of, even before I got online. What
finally got me online was a series of articles on online gaming
run by PC Gamer in mid-1998. There were sections each week devoted
to particular clans and EED were one of those featured. Their website
always referring to their celebrity status and to EED merchandise,
which I presume was a joke. Hope so. Hehe. I don't remember any
particular league or cup achievements from them but they did reach
division 1. They were also one of the very first Q3-only clans and
made the move extremely early when the Q3 test came out in mid-999.
A
lot of people used to associate me with Hood, but I was only a member
for six months. Still, in that time I really enjoyed it because
Hood were a very relaxed and cool clan. Some may assume Hood were
l33t but nothing could be further from the truth and l33t attitudes
were generally frowned on. A good attitude was vital. To a certain
extent this is why Hood didn't fulfill some of its potential because
the players were too chilled out to even bother practising half
the time, and as for teamplay, forget it ;).
CS
certainly qualify as old-school because they've were around from
quite early on in 1998 and went on to become the most successful
UK Quake 2 following the demise of the clans above. CS completely
dominated the scene in 2000 and early 2001, winning every competition.
Just for the record, CS won five straight seasons of the UKCCL,
seasons 7-11, until the UKCCL folded. Also, in June 2000, they were
Division 1 Wireplay and UKCCL champions at the same time - the first
time this had been done.  |
Contact Information - E-Mail: REViLLA, ICQ: 21345065 Site Created on 1 January 2000. All Content, Design and Graphics by REViLLA.
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