The story of 1997’s QUAKE AFT – the first ever all-female professional gaming tournament.

By Alexis Ong

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 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,” says Takacs. “One of my role models is Judit Polgár, one of the best chess players in the world.”