Crayola Clan Wiki | CC / The Ungrateful Dead

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Crayola Clan was born out of a frustration with the operation of the Ungrateful Dead (UD) clan.

In the fall of 1996, a group of Quake players regularly hung out on an east coast server named Nachos, which was run by Saint Stephen. One weekend in what must have been October, Saint switched the Nachos server over to run the newly-released Threewave Capture-The-Flag mod. (See this Blue's News Archive for approximate CTF release date.)

Of the switch from Deathmatch to Capture-the-Flag, UltrViolet wrote:

"I was pretty annoyed because I didn't want to play this weird and unfamiliar CTF crap, I just wanted to shoot people. Well I relented and joined anyway and after stumbling around like a total newbie for a while I got the hang of it. (Thankfully everyone else was stumbling around like total newbies too.) I think the first CTF map I played was E2M1. I spawned near the red base and I remember it was utter chaos and there was a mob of people in there and I didn't know what was going on and I kept shooting people but they wouldn't die. (Later, I found out you can't harm your teammates.)"


Screenshots of the Quake map E2M1, running the Capture The Flag mod - from left to right: the blue team's base, the middle ground, and the red team's base.

Soon afterward, possibly in November or December, Saint Stephen announced that he was forming a clan called the Ungrateful Dead to play Capture-The-Flag matches. Other than Saint himself, Infector was the first member, followed by Salamander, Strike, Overkill (the original White), and Hurricane. Cambion and Angel were also recruited. (I think due to a server glitch, Infector and Salamander ended up "evaluating" them on the much-hated Ziggurat Vertigo level.) Later, Rikerman ?, Post ?, and Argon ? were recruited. Other original members of the Ungrateful Dead included Gordhead ?, Brushie, Aerius, Gash, Spike, and Invasion.

Infector and Salamander played one of the first official Ungrateful Dead matches, a 2 v 2 CTF match for the Kings of Capture tournament. The demo is dated February 5, 1997. It was a thrilling come-from-behind victory over a pair of SLPBs. Saint Stephen, Spike, and Riker observed the match. (The completely disorganized tournament folded after the first round.)

(Incidentally, Cambion and Angel also played a Kings of Capture 2v2 CTF match... I think they had left Ungrateful Dead by that time, though.)

Some of the future Crayola Clan met in person for the first time at an Ungrateful Dead LAN Party in Northern Virginia. Specifically, Cambion, Angel, Salamander, and Riker were there. I think it was held at Cambion's house.

Up until 2003, the Ungrateful Dead still maintained a web page at http://www.nachos.net/ud, and they still had a game server running Return To Castle Wolfenstein. As of 2001, Spike and Saint Stephen were the only original members still in the clan. (Update: The Ungrateful Dead clan page is gone, but http://www.nachos.net remains an active gaming-themed message board.)

After the Crayola members left, the Ungrateful Dead, with completely new members, eventually went on to play matches using the LMCTF mod, and later played one of those role-playing mods... Team Fortress maybe? Counterstrike? Something like that.

During this time, UltrViolet wrote a program named QParse which read the log files generated by Quake games and generated HTML pages of game statistics. It was used on the Nachos web page for a while to automatically show statistics of Nachos public games in real time. (Incidentally, Crayola players would frequently appear at the top of the statistics charts.) This program would haunt UV for years to come, as the cries of "STATS!" that came after every match would invade his dreams at night, such that he would wake up screaming in a pool of cold sweat.

Next: Crayola Clan Forms.