The Dungeon started in 1997 when Quake II was released. My friend “Mortley” and I had been playing games like Duke Nukem 3D, the Dooms and Quake on PC but Quake II was really my entry point to deathmatch and online gaming. We were in a local computer / game store looking for a new game to buy and when I saw it installed on a computer there, I think a “switch” in me flipped on. I went from someone who had played games on a PC to a PC gamer.

We started having mini “LAN parties” whenever we could and started playing online over dial-up Internet. The release of Quake III Arena (1999) was another milestone, drawing me deeper into online communities like PlanetQuake. I was interested in game servers pretty early on but didn’t have a dedicated server of my own until Oct 2002, when Mortley donated his old Pentium 120 and Pain sent me enough EDO RAM to max it out at 32MB (yes, MB). PHHucker then introduced me to the wonderful world of command line linux. He helped me install and configure RedHat 5 and with that I had a dedicated machine running Q3A 24/7. I ran a private, 4 slot server hosting small, fast-paced maps, my “website” was three pages hammered out in Microsoft Frontpage and uploaded to free hosting I had courtesy of Rogers (my ISP).

I upgraded server hardware in 2003 and added a LAMP stack to the game server. I also purchased Pleasuredungeon.com and mad_milo helped me point it at my home server. The Dungeon website at this time was an install of Invision forum software. In Oct 2004 I made the jump from home web hosting to proper remote web hosting but it wasn’t a community so much as the output of things I was learning to do.

In Oct 2005, PHHucker formally decided to close the doors on QuaDDamage.net (formerly ThePHHortress.com). The Dungeon inherited some of what was left of that Q3A community but by that time people had already started to scatter to the winds.

Some of us weren’t quite ready to scatter though and in Nov 2005, waY2Kool and I (with the help of some other community “elders”) conceived, planned and launched AbsoluteCarnage.com in roughly two months. Quake 4 was coming out shortly and we hoped it would help us “get the band back together” and maybe even attract some new players to our community. We secured proper game server hosting for a new AC-branded Q4 server while I continued to run smaller servers at home on the Dungeon.

Fast forward to 2007, which was when I made the decision to shut down AC. Through no fault of our own (and through no fault of Quake 4 either really), we just never managed to breathe new life into our Quake community. The reality was, times had changed, tastes had changed and the various inputs and conditions that made online gaming magical from the height of Q2 through to the twilight of Q3A, just couldn’t be resurrected.

Today I keep Dungeon game servers running as a sort of time capsule to that era. Most of the hangouts from those days are 404 now but I’d like to keep the lights on here with “PHHear PHHactory” and “Pleasure Dungeon”.