Peace, Love and Rockets

This is QuakeCon, and this is not unusual. What is unusual is the next contender. Eyes behind goggle-like sunglasses, hair slicked back, jaw set firm, he announces: "I am Lord Alucard. You don't get to know my name." The audience isn't happy. A guy next to me stands up and starts heckling, but he's drowned out by all the others doing the same. On-stage, our friend grabs the mic. "And guess what - all your girlfriend are belong to me." If it's cringe-making to read, imagine how it was to watch. And then all of a sudden we're laughing again, because the show's presenter has simply walked past him and started talking to the next guy. As Alucard vanishes into the night, the presenter glances over his shoulder. "Geez. We're just trying to have some fun."

And t-shirts.

And we are. I've been schooled in neutrality by a half-dozen E3 conferences packed to the rafters with the fanboys Nintendo's mysteriously stopped bussing to Los Angeles since USA Today started returning its calls. I've been at LAN parties before. I'm here to report. But even my Brit-abroad detachment is thawing under the heat of a thousand suns. Dallas is quite hot, you know. To begin with I feel like David Attenborough skulking around behind a camera and a dictaphone, observing. By the third day, I'm sitting in a hotel room full of knackered Quake experts, one of whom (mercifully female) is busily showing me her tattoos, as we laugh at Gladiator on the telly. Earlier I set up a petition to lobby for a duck joke that lost out in the NVIDIA stage show comedy contest. I've just come in from talking politics on the veranda with a couple of Texans. And I don't know it yet, but later I'll stalk the halls of the BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) section, introducing kids from Oklahoma to Bookworm Adventures Deluxe. At this point, I'm hugging the gorilla. And, whisper it, QuakeCon is one of the most socially engaging events I've ever attended.

"I was at the bar and Robert Duffy left his computer bag there," id's Tim Willits - lead designer on Rage, doncha know - tells me the next day. "I didn't know it was Robert's bag and there's a whole group of people next to us and everyone's trying to figure out whose bag this was because they didn't want somebody to take it. You go somewhere else, that gets stolen." As someone soundbitey told the Dallas Morning News on the morning I left, QuakeCon is four days of "peace, love and rockets".

Literally for as far as the eye can see.

It's not an easy haul either. I figured my combination attack of two-hour bus journey and ten-hour flight would overshadow even the most committed, but apparently I was dreaming. A band of four attendees totalled their van on the way, borrowed a friend's car and eventually arrived after 16 hours of driving. "Before LCDs became the norm, dudes would pile six guys in the car with big CRTs and they would drive from Seattle. We had guys came from Alaska," Willits offers. One of the guys on stage at the NVIDIA kick-off event was Russian (he even did the Cossack dance). Apparently we had an Iraqi in attendance, too. "For some people this is their yearly vacation," says Willits. "They're here with their wife and kids. They get one week out of the year and they come to QuakeCon. It's not like you Europeans with your month off. This is America - we have no vacation - and they come here."

Externally, QuakeCon is viewed as two things: a mountain of announcements from Carmack and co. and, depending on how far you want to go with it, either "a sea of pasty and pale flesh" (Dallas Morning News) or a bunch of devil-worshipping lunatics. (Even attempts to escape the stereotyping fall flat - a plea on the "n00b's guide" to practise proper hygiene is mocked, while the first five paragraphs of this piece originally add up to 666 words entirely by accident. Honestly, it's fated.) Focusing on the first part though, internally it's a lot broader than what Hollenshead and Carmack say on the Friday night. There's tournaments galore, stage shows, BAWLS-chugging, a free Quake Wars beta for attendees to play, a hangar full of free t-shirts and hardware adverts, and the small matter of the BYOC - a 2000-player LAN party where everyone stows their PC.

It quickly filled up.

"People ask me to explain what it's like, the BYOC," says Willits. "I always say - you know when you go to a car show? And all the guys park their cars out front and put their hoods up and wander around? It's exactly the same. The guys with the cool mods, people talk about them. It really is a social event." It's serviced by 10 miles of cable, too. And while the rest of the hotel is icy cold in an attempt to combat the 35-plus centigrade temperatures outside, the BYOC is warmed by the throb of a couple of thousand beefy computers. "I had to get out," says Dave, a twentysomething id fan smoking outside the hotel. "I can do extreme heat, which is this, or extreme cool, which is inside, but after a few hours the BYOC is like being inside someone's pillow when they're asleep - it's too body-warm."

The BYOC is worth braving though, even if it's only to catch sight of the amazing case modifications. The most impressive of these is an Optimus Prime model that stands nearly seven feet tall. "I actually built a smaller one," creator John Magnus - whose middle name is presumably 'Ultra' - tells us on the first morning, "but I was taller than him, so I thought I'd better start again." The result is brilliant - it's even got the openable chest compartment that's meant to house the matrix of leadership. Instead there's a dancing ball of neon atop racked PC components. Another QuakeCon attendee glides past, pockets full of free BAWLS soft drinks. "Does it transform into a laptop?"

BlizzCon, taking place on the other side of the country, has cos-players, which QuakeCon admittedly lacks. Although we do have a ninja who does backflips. (What's your name? "Ninja." Where are you from? A pause. "Japan".) But BlizzCon probably doesn't have BAWLS-chugging, which I don't even know how to describe. There are probably videos on YouTube. And BlizzCon may have tournaments, but believe me, the kids who practise tournament-level Quake were terrifying back before the Asian kids doing 300 clicks-per-minute in StarCraft even knew what a Zerg rush was. If Splash Damage needed an advert for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (due out at the end of September), the sight of top clans competing on three new maps for a share of USD 50,000 will have done it. "People bitch about the asymmetry on forums, but if we like it at clan level they'll probably get used to it once they figure out how to rebind 'lols roflcopter'," one of them shouts at us over the din. Meanwhile Johan 'toxjq' Quick takes USD 20,000 in the Quake Quad-Damage Tournament - a not unexpected result, although it would be unfair to say he walked it.

The groin panel is showing the film, incidentally. No no, the good one.

If watching a tournament game isn't to your liking though, a more general time-waster is to trawl the vendor area next to the BYOC. Full to the brim with hardware and software developers, it's partly there so that the people who sponsor QuakeCon (the lifeblood of the 'Con, as Todd Hollenshead will call them on Friday) can speak directly to consumers with surveys tacked onto huge prize giveaways, and demonstrate their products (the Valve boys, as you already know, found it invaluable for Left 4 Dead). But it's also a way to keep attendees happy. Key to that is free stuff. There are blow-up banging sticks and of course endless pens, but the main event is the two-dozen or more t-shirts, supplies of which are restocked every morning. I wasn't even after any, but I seem to be wearing an XPS effort, and my laptop came home wrapped in Left 4 Dead. "It only cost a couple of thousand for our booth," says John Alden, biz-dev manager of GameRail, a service that aims to improve latency for online gamers, "and the exposure we get is unbelievable. These are our guys."

Even the guys behind the guys are our guys, and none of it costs to attend. "This is the world's largest free LAN party," says Willits when we bump into him for a reflective chat on the final day. "It's volunteered. We love the volunteers. I always try to thank the volunteers when I see them because there would be no QuakeCon without the volunteers." It may not be entirely down to them, but there's also absolutely no trouble that I can spot. The whole time I'm there, I don't think I hear a single word spoken in anger. "I've been here a couple of times," says one of the very few cops strolling around the event. "You get what you'd expect from a massive coming together of people, but you don't get as much of it as I expected. These guys are shooting each other on a computer and then hugging each other." Does it make you want to play games? "Tell you the truth, I've been sneaking onto the Pac-Man in the hall."

There was a good bit of 'ink' doing the rounds. Which this probably isn't.

The enthusiasm, as I've said elsewhere, is infectious. And it helps that it's such a haven for Quake fans. The id guys are all wandering around, happy to chat, full of anecdotes. Brandon James, president of Nerve Software (currently working on Enemy Territory for 360), tells people the story of how he invented The Longest Yard. Robert Duffy's just sat at the bar, shooting the breeze. Todd Hollenshead strolls around doing likewise. id makes its announcements here. On a calendar that's given the studio GDC, Apple's WWDC, E3 (where they sat in a room with people for 45 minutes a pop preferring to keep quiet about Rage, Quake Zero, et al) and Leipzig later on, not to mention E for All in Q4, the company chose a hotel conference room in Dallas packed with its biggest fans instead. "John loves this," id's Steve Nix says of Carmack's relationship with QuakeCon. "He really loves it. He's always excited about QuakeCon. I'm not sure, because I had to go grab dinner finally, but I imagine he was there at least an hour after answering questions." He was.

In the end my quest morphs into one for what's missing. I never do quite put my finger on it. But on the last day, I'm told that Wendy Zaas, one of id's helpful PR associates, has figured it out. "Wendy's goal," says Willits, "is to get someone married at QuakeCon." "Are you seeing anyone?" she asks me. Sorry, no. "I'd love an id guy!" she declares, sitting down opposite Tim, who plays along and looks over his shoulder for the invisible person behind him. Oh well, there's always next year, 31st July to 3rd August 2008. "Are you ready to book your flights?" Hollenshead yells, to rapturous reception at the Friday press conference. I do.