On 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. Stevie ‘Killcreek’ Case was a competitive player infamous for beating Quake designer John Romero in a highly publicized deathmatch. Rounding out the final eight were Aileen ‘Shadyr’ Carlstrom, Mars, LaEl, and Queen Beeatch.
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Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.
Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big. Four years later, its successor Inkbound’s launch from Early Access was looking more like Sandwich Big.I’m not just saying that because of the mountain of lamb and eggplants I ate while meeting with developer Shiny Shoe over lunch, to feel out what the aftermath of releasing a game looks like in 2024. I mean, have I thought about that sandwich every day since? Yes. But also, the indie team talked frankly about the struggle of luring Monster Train’s audience on board for its next game.
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