Rollback to July 2003. I’m something like 17 years old, and I play video games. I mostly play Quake 3. And mostly Quake 3 with a DeFRaG mod.

We - and by we - I mean me with a group of random internet folks - just released something called “Polish Defrag MAPpack no.1” - 9 maps made by 9 different folks. I met those randos online on an internet forum located under q3arena.gry.wp.pl - a site which was moved around between domains since then, but that’s not the point.

Then we did that again - in March 2004, we released part 2 - 9 maps from 9 different folks.

And the last time we did it in October 2005 (took us more than a year to wrap it up) - again, 9 different folks released 9 different maps. At this point, I don’t recall if the “nine” was a coincidence or if we had some hard limit of how many folks could contribute. Probably the first one.

In total, 16 people contributed to 27 maps over a span of 2 years. Those are the nicknames of those randos which I have never met in real life (and the number of maps created by them):

First pack

Second pack

Third, last pack - seems I was trying to find my inner artist ;) (I did the covers on all packs)

It all happened when I spoke with T4m8uryn0, gave him an idea, he started a single thread on the forum, and then it took off on its own. I never thought about this much.

It was 2003, and yet we managed to collaborate fully async on the private forum on this project - I think we moved to a private forum eventually; it seems it is still online and holds 527 posts and 19 topics - I think we had some huge single public discussion before that. On top, we used IRC from time to time for some real-time interactions. We provided feedback, ran tests on early versions of the maps, created a unified visual identity of map screenshots, and eventually managed to ship something in a self-organized manner. All that twenty-two freaking years ago with a total of zero video calls - I didn’t even knew how those people looked in real life.

In a perspective I find it kinda amazing - we were teenagers, sometimes still kids - and it was - in fact - my very first exposure to a remote work (or rather collaboration) - I just didn’t know it was called like that.

As said - I never managed to meet with any of those folks; we were spread out across whole Poland, a random group of geeks who loved to play very weird Quake 3 modification who decided to make some maps. It’s a pity that Quake was losing its playerbase and the whole forum went dead not so long after. And now I wonder how those people are doing.

The majority of the content from that era is gone and lost forever, I still host quake.net.pl (which I eventually rewrote from PHP as my first Ruby on Rails project). There are some videos on YT but for some reason finding it is extremely hard - thus I created a playlist for anyone who was part of the scene who wishes to take a trip back memory lane.