I started with Quake during the QTest era, almost 11 years ago (holy crap I feel old). Back then I was still living in Moscow and being the little computer-addicted child that I was, I often frequented my dad's workplace where they had a bunch of programmers working on computers on a big LAN. These guys introduced me to QTest and multiplayer deathmatch the week it was released :)

Sometime later I moved to Finland with my family and the son of my dad's coworker introduced me to Quake shareware and I became interested in level design pretty much a few weeks of playing the full game on my 486 dx/33 laptop :)

I released my first Quake map titled "Dark, Blue, Scary..." using IKBlue textures sometime in 1997 (I think) and this was also around the time I found this community although by now I can't remember what name it went by at that point in time (Peej 'n Frib's, QBoard, Qmap are all mixed up in my mind) and I also got hooked on #terrafusion. The map was crap, had a leak (so it was not VISed) but I got totally hooked on creating my own virtual worlds.

I made 3 Quake 2 maps and at that point, my interest was stolen by Unreal, so I spent a long time mapping for that (5 SP maps and 5 DM maps released). I had a serious mappers block for a rather long period and when it was gone, I got back into Quake because no new FPS games could keep my interest for a long time, this was around early 2003.

I started playing QuakeWorld every day and got back into mapping. Contributed to the 1000brush DKT-themed map pack, released "Apinaraivo / Monkey Rage" Q1SP in early 2005 and a DM version of that same map ("Enraged") with some help from Bambuz in early 2006.

Wow, my fingers hurt after all this typing :D