I got so good it become boring, and I began looking around for tricks, and new interesting ways to play. I started by trying to exploit the monster code. I would lure them into interesting situations, find spots where I was invulnerable, or get everyone to fight everyone else. It had yet to occur to me, but I was learning how much you can do in this game without using a weapon.

Also due to my boredom, I put '+skill 3' in my autoexec.cfg. The increase in difficulty meant searching for new ways to exploit the game code, and it was not long before I began learning the art of inter-monster fighting, which is rather easily triggered in Quake. Beating the game on Nightmare is actually not difficult at all if one exploits this.

Between beating the game on skill 3 and scouring for tricks, I stopped using any weapons. That become the code for whatever this new type of playing was. Most of the maps (except maybe on Nightmare skill) were still very beatable, even easy. It was then that I recorded a skill 1 demo on E1M5 in which I killed the majority of monsters using only traps, in under 5 minutes. I sent it to the Speed Demo Archives, but the lack of any consistency or spectacle made it too uninteresting to catch on, and perhaps the idea would have died.

Then one or two weeks later Evan revealed his plans for an axe run through Quake on skill 0. I quickly watched the demos and emailed him about how exciting and cool I thought it was, but I also mentioned my interest in beating the game without even the axe.

"Quake done naked, you say?" was his reply, and the name was coined. He sounded interested but there wasn't anything for him to work with. So, inspired by his E1M1 axe run, I ran E1M1 on skill 0, and got 10/10 in over four minutes (I just got 2:44), but I didn't use one weapon.

I received an extremely enthusiastic reply the next day, the idea of having the last grunt fire at the barrel to blow himself up had really surprised and excited him. With his support, Quake Done Naked was started. It wasn't long before he had set up the web site. The goal remains to kill all or as many enemies as possible in a decent amount of time (currently 10 minutes), and the primary ways of doing this are exploiting inter-monster fighting and the maps intended or unintended traps. I would love to see the speed running community embrace this type of play, as it could make for some very interesting demos.