EYES ON THE PRIZE
Not everyone felt the same – Kornelia Takacs was, by
nature, competitive and serious. “The All-Female
Tournament was tough, because I did not have a lot of
tournament experience at that point and while at
QuakeCon I would be happy to place in the top 16, at a
female tournament placing second was not an option for
me,” she recalls. Takacs was one of the world’s first
professional esports players and also participated in
QuakeCon, The Frag, the GDC Ten Tournament, and the
Cyberathlete Professional League in the late 1990s and
early 2000s. Fitzgerald, who was serious and competitive
about her music, fell somewhere in the middle and
mostly saw games as fun.
Takacs, Harper, Fitzgerald, and
Anna all have cherished, positive
memories of the AFT, but for some,
the prizes were a weird point of
contention – amid the software,
autographed Quake swag, and
computer parts were also custom
wedding garters and cosmetics.
Kornelia’s was black. “Mine was like
a pale, robin’s egg blue and it had the
Quake symbol on it,” Harper says.
Fitzgerald thinks she totally tuned it
out. “Honestly, I didn’t even register
it when it happened,” she says.
Looking back, Anna, who
organised the tournament, doesn’t
see anything weird about the prize
choices. “People like to cherry pick
what they want to remember, but
there were tons of little gifts that Iput together to try to make it fun and
intimate... I don’t personally think,
then or now, that these things are
shocking gifts to be given from one
girl to another. When I have a girls
get-together, I still do this!”
It’s hard to imagine professional
female players being presented with
something like this now, but the
1990s were both fascinating and
difficult for women in games,
especially in competitive gaming.
Anna believes that there are
different social standards for
women that don’t always translateplaying on a LAN meant there wasn’t any lag to deal
with. “[When] I’m playing on a server, I have all this lag,
and I’m able to do rocket jumps [and get away in time],”
she recalls. Fitzgerald agrees – the lack of lag threw off
her timing and made it impossible for her to play her
best, even after a childhood of attending LAN parties in
New York with her brother.
Even then, being eliminated wasn’t an absolute loss
for Harper because the tournament organised trips for
them to such places as Disneyland and Universal Studios
as a consolation prize. “Everybody was having a good
time. I know this sounds terrible, but [girls] didn’t take it
quite as seriously,” she says. “We thought the whole
concept of the game was fun.”
Making History
FE ATURE
THE 1990S WERE BOTHFASCINATING ANDDIFFICULT FOR WOMENIN GAMES, ESPECIALLYIN COMPETITIVE GAMINGA slightly
threatening photo
of winner Kornelia.