Collection of
9535 speed demos sent to the Quake section of
Speed Demos Archive. Includes categories of 'easy run', 'easy 100%', 'nightmare run', 'nightmare 100%', 'marathon', 'coop', and 'madcoop' on many maps.
Shortly after Quake's release in 1996, the first speed runs were done and uploaded to ftp.cdrom.com. In early 1997, Nolan Pflug made the first page to keep track of records: "Nightmare Speed Demos". A few months later, Gunnar Andre Mo made a page to keep track of records on easy skill. On April 12 1998 the two pages merged to launch SDA, which would expand into other games in 2003.
Unfortunately, some of the early demos are lost because they were not kept, although many were recovered. The file
history.txt details all runs that were done.
The demos are compressed using a special compression program designed in summer 2000 to compress the Quake .dem files more than generic algorithms such as zip and rar can. The 1.4 GB file would be over 3 GB if the dem files were compressed with zip or rar. To extract the .dz file you will need the Dzip program. The windows version is
dzip29.exe, the linux x86 version is
dzip-linux, and the source code for the command line version (easily ported) is
dz29src.zip.
Many of the thousands of demos are on user made maps, although there are still hundreds on the original made id software maps, and for the two official mission packs. The file
maps.zip contains all of the maps for which speed runs in the collection have been done for. As the Quake engine is now under GPL, you can install it and view the demos on the custom maps without ever having bought Quake.
Reviewer:
Michiel Sikma -
favoritefavoritefavoritefavoritefavorite -
September 1, 2005
Subject:
Speedrunning at its best
Like expected from a community that has been speedrunning one single game for almost a decade now, the quality of the runs contained in this huge file is outstanding. A large historical value is also part of this collection, as you can see the runners, (most notably the default Quake levels, which are the most prestigious records to hold), get better and better, and the techniques more sophisticated.
Quake is most likely the most difficult game to speedrun, with its misemployable physics engine. Dozens of tricks are performed in order to ensure the fastest time, including bunny hopping, rocket- and grenade jumping, monster jumping (which takes advantage of a monster's attack to gain more speed), slope jumping, and many, many more incredible things that you normally wouldn't even consider to be possible.
Highly recommended for every speedrun fan who has access to this game.
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