Introduce yourself shortly.
My name is Mikkel Kvorning better known as 'GEKKO', 28 years old and from Denmark.

Talk us through your Quake career. How did you get into the game and what still keeps you around?
Back at the WSVG-days around 2005 they suddenly introduced Painkiller. Nobody played the game but I quickly found out that it was amazingly entertaining to watch. Until that I had only watched Counter-Strike, which in comparison to deathmatch shooters actually is kinda boring to spectate, so Joe Miller and DeadEye got me hooked instantly. Since Painkiller didn't really have any player base, Quake 3 was the obvious choice when I soon after wanted to try playing some deathmatch-shooter. Right from the start I began playing duel, since it was the game mode I fell in love with in on the Painkiller streams. so I started playing on the norwegian Catch-Gamer servers. I quickly found out that it wasn't newbie friendly territory, and often players like fox could be found in there, bashing newbs like myself. It felt like I lost the first 500 matches or so, before I actually started winning some in there. Luckily my mentality is that if I lose a match I just wanna play even more in stead of just rage quitting.

Ever since I have improved slowly but steadily, and have kept playing much due to my love of the game. To me duel is such a pure and beautiful game which in all its simplicity has an incredible complexity which makes it the best game out there. The fundamentals of Quake are easy to learn, but impossible to master.

In duel you have to strafe jumping effectively, dodging enemy rockets while keeping your shaft on him, predicting his dodging, while timing multiple items (sometimes without seeing and hearing them being picked up), considering possible escape routes for him and yourself, setting up traps, delaying items and much more on the fly. If both players are of equal level, just one mistake can cost the game, and often you have half a second to decide if you have to aggress, back off, hold your position, spam, shift weapon and so on. It's a next to impossible challenge which makes me respect the best players more than neuronsurgeons :>


Did you play any other games competitively besides the Quake series?
Before playing Quake I was hugely into CS 1.6, which I had played since the final beta versions. I really loved the game but never really achieved more than a few lesser LAN victories, although we were sometimes able to challenge some of the top 15 clans a bit. At that time it meant a lot more than it does today, since everyone were playing the game, and the scene was so much more competitive and stacked skillwise.


You have been on the semi-pro level for a long time now, reaching the playoff stages of Zotacs in the early days of Quake Live. What do you think keeps you from making the final step to get to the next level?
To be honest I don't really know exactly what in-game aspects I need to improve. My improvements seem to plateau a lot. I suddenly figure out something that levitates my game a bunch, during which time my performance spike. Mostly I am able to keep that new level of play, but then experience a long period where my skill doesn't really improve.

My guess is that I could speed up that process a lot if I found some practice partners to play with like I had when I started playing the game. The usual practice regime has always just been to connect to a public server with challenging opponents and try to do well against them. With a practice partner you get a lot more feedback and usually isn't too agitated by losses.

What are your goals in Quake Live? Are we ever going to see you on any lan events?
I don't really have any goal other than to keep improving. For fun let's say to keep a top50 spot on QLranks.
So far it has been too expensive for me to go to DreamHack by myself and just get eliminated after a few matches. If I went with a few other guys on a team that sent us there, the trip would be a lot more attractive.

How would you describe your playstyle?
Reactive and positional based. I have a passion for the ideology of the 'perfect duel'. Already I mentioned that duel is a very pure game, and the prospect of playing a perfect duel where you given a situation always pick the perfect decision is a motivation. I hope you could say that my playstyle has taken shape of it, but so far it haven't really been close :P


What can you tell us about the Danish community? Are there any regional tournaments? Who are the best players?
I started out by playing CS and during that time I did not really give any attention to Quake at all. Denmark have had a produced a lot of successful teams in CS which I think influenced new gamers to adtopt that as their game. My impression is that the danish Quake community has always had a very small player base to draw talent from. It is now as everywhere an even smaller base, which mostly consists of the oldschoolers gathered on #quakelive.dk. There are only rarely held danish tournament, which mostly are channel in-house tourneys.

The best players I would say is PsY, amOKchen, Brescia, Niyala and myself. TDM is a different matter of course :)


What’s your stance on the current duel mappool? How would you change it if you had the power to do so?
I like the current map pool a lot. If I had the power I would instantly put in pukka3tourney5! I have no idea how well it would work in the long run, but it's a really entertaining map to play with an interesting layout.

Besides that I would love it if a completely new map was introduced to the map pool every 3-6 months. In my eyes the best way of doing this would be having the Zotac-cup dictate it, since they are the stable reoccurring tournament. Many would eliminate the map to begin with, but as the old maps along the way disappeared from the pool they would be forced to try out something new. Maybe 2 spots could be reserved for shuffling already used maps, which could assure classics or just the best of the new maps to be used in the long run. That way the bad maps would disappear and the good maps stick around.


Let’s talk about other gamemodes. Have you ever played any of them with a clan and if so why didn’t you stay with it?
Duel has always been my main mode. CTF is a bit to simplisitc to me and I quickly get bored of it. On the other hand I would love to play some more TDM. I really suck at it as I often can't keep track of where the teammates and enemies are which makes my positioning awful. It is a completely different game mode that I would love to learn more of, but it would take a long while. CA is just an unintelligent, primitive and boring game mode :>


Thanks for this interview! Anyone you would like to thank, or any final words?
Sorry for way too long answers. A lot of thanks to Twister, Memento_Mori and Zoot for being awesome and producing great content just motivated by their passion! Aside from that Sykofanten and PsY should shape up and represent, and amadoR should go fuck himself and start carrying some more. :>