TITLE
Inside the groundbreaking 1997 all-women Quake tournament
AUTHOR
Alexis Ong
PUBLICATION
PC Gamer
YEAR
2021
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
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 don’t know how attached you are to your mouse, but for gaming purposes, it was really bad timing,” Harper says on a FaceTime call. She had spent the month before the tournament training 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.
“I got kicked out first, you know that, right?” says Harper. “I was number one in Canada, or I was that year. But I was eighth in the world.”
COMPANIES MENTIONED
id Software
GAMES MENTIONED
Quake
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Anna [NabeO]
Aileen Carlstrom [Shadyr]
John Carmack
Stevie Case [Killcreek]
Bridget Fitzgerald [Tonka]
Lorie Kmiec Harper [Temperance]
Kornelia Takacs
TOPICS MENTIONED
Esports
Gender