n her first trip away from home,
in a Burbank, California, mall
filled with CRT monitors and
Quake fans, Lorie Kmiec
Harper’s mouse broke. It was
1997, and Harper, a 23-year-old
assistant warehouse manager
from Ontario, was playing as a
finalist in the first-ever All Female Quake Tournament
under the handle Temperance.“I got kicked out first, you know that, right?” Harper
says. “I was number one in Canada, or I was that year,”
she reminisces. “But I was eighth in the world.”
In another scenario, Harper’s busted mouse might
not have been a big deal. “I don’t know how attached
you are to your mouse, but for gaming purposes, it was
really bad timing,” she says. She’d spent the previous
month training for the finals, playing with people all
over the world, sometimes in the middle of the night. It
was the first time she’d gotten a passport, and she was
excited just to have made it to LA with her plus-one –
her then-boyfriend, a computer engineer who had built
her first gaming rig.
The other finalists came from all over North America:
Bridget ‘t0nka’ Fitzgerald blew off her freshman
orientation at Juilliard to play at the finals (“My teacher
was like, you are leaving to do what?!” she recalls).
Kornelia ‘Kornelia’ Takacs had made a name for herself
at the GDC Ten Tournament earlier that year. StevieWANNA BET?
The tournament was created by Anna ‘NabeO’, who still
prefers anonymity to keep the focus on the competitive
players. In the lead-up to the tournament, she did her best
to stay in the background because she’d started getting
hate mail. Anna was fed up with the perception that there
weren’t many women who played videogames, much less
Quake. “It became so annoying that I thought I should get
a bunch of girls to form a clan and play together at a
competitive level,” she says. “I guess that’s where the idea
of a female tournament started.”
After reaching out to id Software for their official
blessing, she ran into a snag: nothing was going to happen
without cofounder John Carmack’s approval, and
Carmack didn’t think there were enough women for a
tournament. So they made a bet. “I
think we bet something silly like $100
or something insignificant – it was
the bragging rights that were
important,” she says.
Armed with $1,000 of her own
money, a home fax machine and id’s
public backing, Anna got to work and
ended up with more than 800
registrants. It was the first
tournament of its kind for the wildly
popular shooter, which was, like
esports today, dominated by men.
After securing sponsorships from
Total Entertainment Network and
Burbank’s Slam Site, the game was on.
For Harper, the AFT was
definitely not the same as what she
was used to playing at home. She
played Quake online, on a 14.4 or
28.8kbps dial-up connection. Once
in California, she realised that‘Killcreek’ Case was a competitive
player infamous for beating Quake
designer John Romero in a highly
publicised deathmatch. Rounding
out the final eight were Aileen
‘Shadyr’ Carlstrom, Mars, LaEl, and
Queen Beeatch.
Case was favoured to win,
according to a New York Times
article from 1997, but Takacs
triumphed. “No two matches are
ever the same. [Quake] reminds me
of chess in a way,” highlights Takacs.
“One of my role models is Judit
Polgár, one of the best chess players
in the world.”
While an all-women’s
tournament doesn’t seem like a big
deal today, it certainly was then. And
AFT – a pioneering event in
women’s esports – only happened
because of a wager.PRINT IS FOREVER
It’s not the first time we’ve
written about AFT
PC Gamer covered
the tournament at
the time, including
this admittedly
grainy photo of the
eight competitors.
Thanks to friend ofthe magazine Frank
Cifaldi at the Video
Game History
Foundation for
digging this blast
from the past out of
the archives for us.LEFT TO RIGHT: Queen Beeatch,
Temperance, Kornelia (the winner),
Killcreek, LaEl, Mars, Shadyr, and t0nka.Making History
FE ATURE
DM2: Claustrophobopolis probably
taught a generation of teens how to
pronounce ‘claustrophobia’.Quake was one of the
first games ever
considered an esport.