PLANO, TX - Youichi Shibuya traveled all the way from Japan for it. Ryan Sparrow and Adam Blake planned their summer road trip around it.

　　They came, the three of them, along with more than 500 of their fellow Quake fanatics - from North America, Germany, Australia, and England, as well as Japan - to Plano, north of Dallas. To QuakeCon 97.

　　They came for four days of playing Quake, talking Quake, smelling Quake. They came to watch Quake movies, to take in demos of Quake II and Hexen II, to clue in on the latest industry gossip. They came to hear of level-building, of 3-D modeling, of clans and IRC channels. They came to watch and learn from (and if they're lucky or incredibly skilled themselves, defeat) legends of the game, legends such as Thresh and Kornelia and KillCreek.

　　But perhaps most importantly, Sparrow and Blake and Shibuya - and their 500 fellow Quake players - have come to put faces to the handles of players they've fragged and been fragged by time and again in Internet Quake clashes.

　　Sparrow's handle is Son of Sam; his buddy Blake goes by Glock 7. Blake founded the Quake clan Knights of Ni, and when they heard about QuakeCon 97, they decided to use it as a destination. And so they set out from Toronto to Texas and, along the way, visited - met for the first time in person - members of their clan...visiting and crashing with other Ni Knights in Hamilton, Canada; New York; West Virginia; and Tennessee.

　　They registered for the QuakeCon deathmatch tourney, but they didn't think to bring their PCs with them and so were left out of competition. That didn't seem to bother them, though. It was enough just being around people who had devoted as much time to Quake as they had. "Everyone here has been cool," Sparrow said. "They've let us use their computers. You see someone, anyone, you say 'Hey, how's it going?' and they'll stop and talk to you. For us, it was well worth the drive."

　　Shibuya has written strategy guides for Virtua Fighter and other games for the Japanese market - he knows his games. A self-professed Quake nut, Shibuya came to QuakeCon to soak up the essence of the game. "Quake is popular in Japan," Shibuya said through a translator. "But you can't compare the level of interest and enthusiasm in Japan to America. In America, things are at a very high level." Shibuya plans to take what he learns here back to Japan as a "Quake evangelist."

　　And nothing would please Jim "H2H" Elson more. "QuakeCon is all about strengthening the sense of community among Quake players. And that community is one of Quake's real strengths."

　　Elson is one of the founders of QuakeCon. He started out as an amateur builder of levels for Doom. But then id picked up a product he and some of his fellows had worked on and released it as Final Doom. Now Elson works for WraithCorp (its current project is Defusion, a Quake conversion add-on).

　　He describes the origin of the convention this way: "We had had meetings of the minds on IRC channels related to Quake," he said. "We would talk about the game online and share ideas. But we wanted to do something that would take it to the next level. You can talk on IRC all the time, but there is something different about face-to-face communication."

　　So they put together QuakeCon 96, held in Dallas - "the undisputed world capital of the action game industry," Elson said - and, though the word was spread strictly via word-of-mouth, 60 Quake fanatics showed up. As did a troop of people from id.

　　"That was a chance for us to meet the gods of this game, the Carmacks and Romeros," Elson said. QuakeCon 96 was an unqualified success. Elson and his compatriots decided they must do it again. Bigger.

　　And so this year they've got 200 computers set up in a 5,200-square-foot ballroom in the Plano Holiday Inn. They filled the room - the crowd mostly male, mostly young attendees sporting baseball caps and T-shirts, ponytails and goatees. And they deathmatched until the wee hours of the morning, attended seminars on "copyrights and the amateur developer," the future of computer hardware, and level design and 3-D modeling.

　　Friday also brought the Ion Storm-sponsored party at the Harvey Hotel. By then, the deathmatch tournament was well under way - 350 competitors having been trimmed to 128.

　　Saturday promises more presentations, more demos, more face-to-face interaction. The tournament is headed for its final rounds.

　　And what was that rumor about some kind of match between Thresh and John Romero?

　　Stay tuned. Our QuakeCon 97 coverage continues tomorrow.