THE CHAOS AND THE GLORY: THE NFTF CLANMEET II REPORT...

HI HO...

For me, Clanmeet II started at 6:15 in the morning, and what I believe was the Farming Program on Radio 4. That hurt.

Clanmeet? Is this some kind of Scottish tribal gathering (for regular readers, I should point out that this question in no way is intended as a demeaning or otherwise offensive comment about the Scots...)? Well, if you've just flown in from Mars, this is Earth, I am writing English, and Area 51 is in America, so if you want to go and mutilate some cattle, go and do it over there. If on the other hand you're simply wondering, Clanmeet II was- yes- the second gathering in real life of the many and varied people who spend their free time, and occasionally time that isn't strictly speaking free, blasting one another over the Internet in the computer game Quake.

Obivously, the Internet-based nature of the game means that many players haven't met most of the people whom they spend their time blasting, nailing or occasionally axing to death, and so the "Netmeet" has become something of a craze, all started by the first Clanmeet, which took place in early March this year. Clanmeet II, as its successor, was always going to be bigger and better than the first event, but as the Quaking equivalent of the Glastonbury Festival, the first, largest and best, no-one was quite sure how monolithic it would become.

I said that the Clanmeet started at 6:15? Of course, that was the time I got up to go to London, in the company of fellow Bristolians Spirit( the chief administrator of the Modem Clan War) , Uther( one of the Clanmeet organisers, Plas( of the Clan Dark Deviants) and Copycat( level designer for the UK One on One League) , but nonetheless, I'd say that for all of us the Clanmeet really begun not with the official start at the pub, but in the car, driving up to London and combining forces to find a mysterious NCP car park in Hammersmith (a considerable challenge in its own right...). No-one, including Uther, one of the organisers of the event, had met all the people who would be sharing the car in real life, and so the netmeet really began to get into gear cruising up the M4, discussing tactics, lamenting the state of the Quake scene in the UK ( Uther's area, not mine...), and discovering that yes, I was the only person in the car who liked playing DM1...

UNRISEN MOON

Car park (" Left at this turn, next right- there it is! Behind us..."). Tube ( We looked at the ticket machine. We tried to figure it out. We used the counter like everyone else). And a short walk to the Meet ("Gay Pride Weekend? And a Kiss concert? On the same weekend?"). And then, we were there, at the Moon Under Water, the venue for both the first and second Clanmeets. Sadly, we were early, and it was shut, but we weren't about to let a little thing like that stop us...

Clanmeet II- The Open Air Event

The start of the Clanmeet was an odd event, composed equally of guesswork, as we tried to decide if any of the passers-by were like us waiting for the Meet ("Him?""Naah- not nervous enough..."), slightly embarrased greetings (perfectly normal, considering I spent a good hour introducing people to two Dark Deviants and the King of the Britons) and the pleasure of meeting people who you only know on-line. Directly after the Bristol Crew arrived four members of the C.I.A. (Criminally Insane Assassins), all of whom were Quake Classic players and hence sadly unknown to anyone present, closely followed by Mystic, late of the Riders Of Telgar Weir, DMS (administrator of the University Quake League) and more. By the time the Moon Over Water opened, the Clanmeet was already in full swing, and the pub echoed to the sounds of people arguing, discussing, meeting and drinking.

THE MOON UNDER ALCOHOL

What can I say about the first half of CM II, at the pub? I can't list the people who were there, as that would take several pages (with at least 40 Quakers present and mostly correct). Early arrivals were Clans Demonic Core, with a turnout of about half their members including Sujoy, Nightwing, Maddog (last seen in a service station on the M4) and Zoser, and TFS, the allgedly Northern Irish Clan (most of whom seem to live in London), who turned out in their entirety. The Quake Lords were meant to be arriving, too, but with most of their members coming down from Scotland, it was hardly surprising that they hadn't arrived yet. No sweat. They'd be there by midday.

Meanwhile, the Quakers settled into the bar and their drinks as though they met every day, which of course in some senses they did. I alternated between rushing around with camera and Dictaphone, taking photos and meeting people whom I had been emailing for months and sitting down chewing the cud with Mystic, Waldorf (of Minos and Beard fame), Maddog and others. As time wore on, more and more of the Netizens arrived (I might mention Dominion, members of both the Fallen Angels and the rest of the Dark Deviants, Rawmeat, Angel and others- still no Quake Lords), and the pub filled up to bursting point. Entire Clans began to comandeer tables or space at the bar, with ACME (late the Jedi Knights) and TFS occupying the sunny side of the pub, and Demonic Core, the Dark Deviants and the reclusive Special Patrol Group filtering into the shadows.

The French are coming! Danold and others of FSC

Some appearances were certainly more surprising than others. Danold, the well-known French member of the Demonic Core, arrived at about 1:00pm with three other French Quakers, having come on the Channel Tunnel (le Tunnel sous la Manche) over from their home country for the Meet. Later on, we were joined by Refux (former UKCL admin and organiser of the Scottish Gathering, which had happened only a week before) and Leann (Quake Womens' Forum writer), who had traveled down from Scotland to be at the Meet. And even they were topped by- no, I'll tell you about that later.

THE QUAKERS SPEAK

Of course, with this many prominent Quakers about, the conversation was fascinating. Amongst others, I managed to talk to Zoser, leader of the Demonic Core, who had just pulled out of the UK One On One tournament to concentrate on running Demonic Core and pushing them to new heights. Of course, the recent Modem Clan War restart and DC's subsequent loss to the Quake Lords had hurt DC's chances there, and he wasn't entirely happy with the Clan War restart for other reasons:

"We were doing really well in the MCW, and when it stopped we nearly pulled out. I thought it was going really well- the whole tournament was really good. We didn't mind having small Clans- the whole point of the competition was to have fun. I mean, obviously we wanted to win, but..."

In fact, the MCW restart seemed to be a hot topic. Salamander, leader of Dominion, seemed to have a balanced viewpoint of the situation, a viewpoint which most others shared: on the one side, the restart obviously allowed for closer games, but on the other the restart would also hurt the chances of weaker members of a Clan to ever get a game, since with tough games most Clans would always want their stronger members playing. Overall, though, the general consensus seemed to be that the new format was a good thing, with much of the talk centering around tough upcoming games in all Divisions, including tense discussions between the Fallen Angels and the Dark Deviants about their upcoming game, a game that could well decide the future of Divison II of the MCW.

But not all the conversation was that serious: in fact the range of topics spanned Quake in all its shapes and forms, sure, but also beer, gadgets (including Angel's superb Digicam), Tellitubbies, Twin Peaks and much, much more. The originator of some of the wierder diversions in that list was, of course, the inimitable Moose 2000, who also found time to tell me exactly how he got his nickname...

"Well, I've been called Moose since I was in college, because of one of those things that happen when you're drunk. And the 2000? Well, when I installed software I always used to fill out the "company" registration with wierd names- you know, "Fools Inc", hilarious stuff like that. Anyway, one day, I'd been watching an episode of Nightrider, and I decided to do a play on Night Industries 2000, which was Moose Industries 2000. And I laughed. And- I don't know. It sort of stuck..."

You'll never see Northern Exposure the same way again...

Sujoy topped them all, though, with the news that someone had topped both the Scots and the French in terms of distance travelled. BC_Randamar, a German Quaker, was apparently on IRC on the Friday night as people discussed the next day's Clanmeet. And just on the spur of the moment, he caught a plane and left for the UK- when he arrived at the Clanmeet, he hadn't slept for 36 hours...

SHOOT. AND SURF, PERHAPS.

As the day wore on, the pub filled, with Rawmeat, Angel, and countless others arriving (still no Quake Lords) , and then emptied, as people went to catch movies (Uther, heroically not drinking at all in order to be able to drive the Bristol Contingent back that evening), to play at Sega World, or in my case to aquire another three films for my shell-shocked camera (and thanks to Mystic and Sujoy, whose father is apparently a professional photographer, for changing my film on each occasion...). At 6:15, though, it all stopped, and the entire Meet (all 100 yards plus of us) trooped off to Shoot And Surf.

Yes, Uther really thought "Batman and Robin" was bad...

Even the journey was interesting, chatting with the French Quakers about, yes, Quake in France (apparently a very small and scattered group). However, it was when we arrived, and after waiting on the door for a bit were finally let in, that the fun really started.

The first thing I saw on entering and dropping down to the subterrainian main room of SNS was a computer running what looked like a very unfamiliar patch of Quake, with John Burton (UKCL) totally engrossed in the medieval environment and assorted weaponry therof. Yes, it was Hexen II, which Ben Le Rougetel of Activision had kindly agreed to bring down and show the world. To be honest, it looked like Heretic for Quake, but according to Ben it will be much, much more.

HEXEN AWAY THERE...

" One of the nicest features of Hexen II- I don't know if you've heard much about it- will be that you're playing against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Each of the Worlds- the Greco-Roman world, the Meso-American world, the Egyptian World and the Medieval World- will contain one of the Four Horsemen, who you'll have to face. And they'll really be Horsemen- the horses will rear up, and there will certainly be some things you haven't seen before.

John B gets to grips with the Horsemen...

Obviously, the designers are using a quite far advanced version of the Quake engine- for example, look at the colour palette. The browns and greys have gone, and it's really multi-coloured".

It did look quite colourful, for sure, although the version I saw was running in 320x200, and so looked a little blocky to someone who is used to Gl Quake. I asked Ben about GL support, which wasn't working in the demo:

"Yes, it will support Open GL. There are two levels on this demo which are meant to support GL, and it will be fully GL-compatible come the release date. "

Of course, one of the reasons Hexen wasn't so popular was because it didn't support Deathmatch too well. Will Hexen II, I wondered? And what about customisability?

"Yes, Hexen II will certainly support Deathmatch play. There will be- I'm not sure, either four or six Deathmatch levels built in. As for customising it, importing your own character classes and so forth- I'm not sure what the situation is with that at the moment. I know they're not using .DLLs, so that could cause a few problems with people being able to get to work with that. "

Ben certainly deserves our thanks for coming over on a Saturday with the E3 demo disk to give us a preview. He also mentioned that there's now an FAQ for Hexen available, at http://www.ravensoft.com/hx2faq.html . Cool.

3x3x?

The major event of the evening was to be the 3 vs 3 tournament, in which randomly chosen groups of Quakers would compete for some fairly spectacular prizes, including two Righteous 3D graphics cards donated by Orchid. Setup took a little longer than intended, but Ledge (of SNS) and Rawmeat managed to organise teams, distribute badges, and soon, in a strange, understated way, the tournament began.

Moose gets down to some serious gibbing...

Sadly, there were far too many people present for the number of computers. As a result, only two games (out of the twenty or so teams) could be played at once, and the chances of getting onto a computer for a friendly game were- low. Still, as the evening progressed, each of the teams somehow managed to play their two matches. I can recall Uther, Adze and Amnios getting two straight wins, unintentionally aided by my blinding Cenobite, one of their opponents, with an inappropriately timed flash, and Cantona of Minos failing to notice that his game had in fact started. Later on, we saw the awesome skills of Ettu in full play, with a crowd gathering to watch the master at work, and the not-so-awesome skills of Waldorf, who I believe failed to score a single frag. But he thoroughly enjoyed himself.

Sadly, the tourney took longer than expected, and Ledge announced that there wouldn't be time to finish all the games necessary. Instead, he drew the four teams to play in the semi-final randomly, a decision that seems to have provoked a bit of controversy (although given the situation, there wasn't a lot else he could have done, short of keeping the prizes for himself...). In the end, Angel, Zoser and Alamo won the competition, with Zoser and Angel picking up Righteous 3D cards, and Alamo aquiring the ubiquitous Space Orb 360.

However, to be quite honest, what was happening outside the competition was a good deal more interesting.

MORE QUAKERS

What was happening outside the tournament? Well, a good deal. Ignoring the scurrilous rumours of "interesting" rollups outside SNS, and skipping quickly past the assorted Quakers who were looking a little the worse for wear, and more importantly, an afternoon in the pub (I'll not name any names, but- Smiley, Alchemist, Rebel Scum, Dibbler...), all life was present in SNS that evening. For starters, the camera level had gone up. In addition to my hyperactive shutter finger, Net Gamer had a photographer, Moebius (apparently shanghaied by Lumpy, who was writing the article), Angel was waving his Digicam in a threatening manner, and DMS had produced the bog-standard variety from somewhere and was threatening to take pictures of, of all people, me. Oh, and the Quake Lords arrived at last, trooping down the stairs and appearing at least two feet taller than anyone else in the room.

"Toilets? OK, across the room and past the unconcious guy." Even in sleep, Rebel Scum still had a purpose...

Even more amazing, the sudden reactions when I brought out the Dictaphone ( screams and panic, mostly) had subsided. Indeed, some people even asked to be interviewed, amongst them the University Quake League admin team.

UQL...

You may well have heard of these guys: the UQL was formerly known as the Varsity Quake League, but has recently been expanded from just covering Oxford and Cambridge to universities all over the country-

"The world." Eh? DMS broke in:

"Yes, we've got quite a few teams from America lined up now. We've also got teams from Holland, Denmark, possibly Australia, Canada, and possibly Germany and Japan."

The team (DMS, BigSquid, and Tarquin) were certainly enthusiastic about the prospects for the new league, which they describe as "the only league dedicated to low-ping players". However, the first question that arose in my mind was indeed that of ping- how are they going to cope with the ping problems caused by having teams in different countries?

"Yes, that's obviously a big problem. What we're hoping to do is either run matches in two halves, like the International games, with half the match being played on a server in each country, or find a server in "neutral territory", where we could run a game, and people could join and get approximately the same pings. We're not sure which yet- we're going to give it some trials before the season starts, and see what works best."

And what about LPBs who aren't at University?

"Well, the real problem here is that the League is evolving in a series of jumps. We started off with DMS administrating eight teams in the Oxford league, which we could handle quite well with one person. We're jumping up to a much grander scale of things, including Universities from across the world. If this works, we get a good response, and the teams are working out, we'll just jump to the next level, and allow any team in. But we think that academic insitiutions will always contain people who have good connections, and we're taking it a step at a time, basically. "

"Of course, the UQL doesn't exclude HPBs. If you're in a team, but you happen to have a modem, or a low-speed connection, you're still quite welcome to play."

The UQL is based around academic terms, and as such, thinking as they are at least two seasons into the future, I wondered whether the games that would be coming out through that time- Hexen II, Unreal, and of course Quake II- would cause problems for the following of the UQL.

"Well, what we have here are a large body of very interested players. Naturally, these people are going to be the ones who will immediately be jumping onto Quake II. When it comes out, we'll get our hands on it, we'll get our hands on server admin mods, and run what our supporters are after. If they're going for Quake II, we'll continue the league in that vein. "

Finally, I had heard that academic teams aren't limited only to students- indeed, they've said they'd like to see a team of lecturers?

"We'd love a team of lecturers! Age is not a concern for us, really. Anyone is welcome. I mean, we've had people from Ministry Of Defence insitiutions saying that they're interested, and I hope that they'll put forward a team..."

SNS

Of course, all this was taking place inside Shoot 'N Surf, the games cafe in London. However, very few people know much about SNS- how they're doing, and where they're going. I decided to talk to Kelvin, one of the founders of SNS, to remedy this, and we adjourned to the SNS Interview Suite (the kitchen...)

Well, the first thing to ask was how things were going with Shoot and Surf generally?

"Well, pretty well, really. We've just taken 18 Orchid Righteous 3D cards onboard, and a whole load of Sidewinder joysticks for the PC Zone competition we're hosting, and games are coming in. We've got new furniture too! We've been open for about a year now, and so the games companies who we've been trying to establish links with are taking us seriously, which is good for the games industry, and for us, and of course for the end user as well, who they've neglected for a while. Now, they're using us as a base for beta testing, beta presentations, and some launches as well, like the Carmageddon launch. "

I hadn't heard about that. Beta tests at SNS?

"Yes. Well, of course there was the Carmageddon beta, and the Dark Reign beta from Activision, and I assume that something of Quake II will work its way in here eventually, although who knows about that one! We also had the Red Alert beta copies in- they're beginning to see us as a good launching ground- obviously, we've got the established network, and all the catering side of things as well. "

"Overall, we're trying to go for a complete overhaul of things around here at the moment- basically, grab everything by the balls, and give it a shake. I mean, it's been tough- for both myself and Tony (the other SNS founder) this was our first job, straight out of college (I actually left college because of DooM). The first year's really been a bit of a proving ground, and a bit of a learning curve: yes, we can play games, and we know about the network, but how do you run a business on top of this. I think the second year will be a bit more of a marketing challenge, to be honest. "

And the future? Does Kelvin see SNS branches across the country, perhaps, like Cyberia?

"I don't see us anything like Cyberia! I think if we ended up like Cyberia, I would be long gone."

"From a personal viewpoint, no. We were never really in this for domination of the market- we're here, and I feel I'm here, to provide a service. Obviously, I'm partly here as a way of life, and to provide a way to pay for that way of life, but mainly I'm here to provide the service. I'd be quite happy, personally speaking, if we stayed as just the one shop, dealing with just the London customers, dealing not antagonistically with the regional varients of us who are now beginning to crop up, but I'd rather work with them as an independant federation, dealing with the games companies as a much more integrated network of end-user development and marketing.

There are a lot of possibilities there, all of which are vaguely in my brain!"

The Clanmeet was being held on Kelvin's one day off a week. He was there "just to try and oversee things." If only everyone was this dedicated.

AND LASTLY, THE AWARDS...

Finally, as the evening drew to a close, we arrived at the moment that everyone who had been promised free drinks was waiting for: the UK Quake Awards 1997. An awful lot has been said about these, and I can't think of anything new to say, except that I think everyone who recieved an award (possibly excepting Nightwing and The Desperados) deserved them. If you don't know who got what, check the Awards Homepage.

However, I think that one major section of the awards was missed out- the awards for the Clanmeet itself. Appropos to nothing, therefore, I present the NFTF Clanmeet II awards...

...

THE COMEDY BEARD AWARD Winner: Rockburn, for reasons that should be entirely obvious.

Runner up: Waldorf. Ditto.

THE BARRY NORMAN MEMORIAL: Uther, for his scathing critique of Batman and Robin ("It's crap. No, really crap.")

THE UNSTOPPABLE MARCH OF TECHNOLOGY AWARD: Winner: Angel, for the Digicam.

Runner-up: Moose2000, for the Teletubbies homepage...

WAVE OF THE FUTURE AWARD: JnrStorm(LordStorm's 6 year old son) , for being quite scarily good at Quake.

JIM HACKER MEMORIAL FOR ADMINISTRATION: Ledge, for admin under pressure.

"ABOVE AND BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY": Lumpy and Meoebius of Net Gamer, who came for the writup, but stayed for the duration.

RELAX! AWARD Winner: Rebel Scum, for having a little lie down.

Runners up: The Minos Gang, for making the table their own.

AND SINCERE THANKS TO: Uther, Ledge, Kelvin and Rawmeat for the CMII organisation.

Angel, for the awards, and all of you, for voting for NFTF.

Mystic and Sujoy, for allowing me to keep taking the photos.

John Burton, Spirit, Onyx and every other admin. for everything they do for Uk Quake.

THAT'S ALL, FOLKS.

Wow, that was long. I'm sorry if I didn't mention you or an interview I did with you- I had so much material I could have spent a week writing this. I really enjoyed CMII, and I hope to see you all again next time...

News From The Front and all written material therin is copyright 1997 The Nomad Report News to nomad@easynet.co.uk