If you've been watching QdQ for some time, you might know that we have a habit of choosing important anniversaries for releases. You might also know that QdQ includes a group of players dedicated to Doom speed-running. Therefore, what better date could we choose than today, Doom's seventh birthday, for our latest project: Doom done Quicker. These demos, recorded on Ultra-Violence skill, complete the game in 16:05, more than three minutes faster than their predecessors.

We have new demos for you - this time on Blue Hell, a small custom mission-pack for Quake. A gang of runners around Valeriy Burmistrov have created Blue Hell done Quick, featuring two different sets of runs in these maps. Both of them finish the five levels in under one minute. In other news, our seriously outdated Links page has been renewed.

Today, on the third anniversary of Quake done Quicker, we release Quake done Quick with a Vengeance, our new run through Quake on Nightmare skill. You can download the demo here. The new run finishes the game in 12:23 minutes, more than four minutes faster than its predecessor.

In September 1997, one of our most popular projects saw the light of the public: Quake done Quicker, our 16:35 run through Quake on Nightmare skill. Since then, three years have passed and against what some might have expected, Quake speed-running didn't die when Quake2 came out. On the contrary, new runners and new tricks have taken it far beyond what we imagined back then.

Because of this, we thought it appropriate to produce a sequel to QdQr. After one year of work, Quake done Quick with a Vengeance is ready. To celebrate the occasion, we will have an IRC release party on Wednesday, 13th September. The party will start at 20:00 GMT on irc.planetquake.com, channel #qdq.

We hope to see you there - the new run beats QdQr by a large margin and shows some of the finest speed-running we've seen so far.

Clarification: I am told that GMT doesn't necessarily mean "the current local time in Greenwich", sorry for the confusion. The real time is 20:00 in the UK, 21:00 in central Europe and 22:00 in Finland.

Today it is our special pleasure to break the long pause in releases. As promised in an earlier update, we have not one, but two projects up our sleeves. Both of them represent a new type of run to come from QdQ: They're cooperative demos, i.e. two players working together to finish the game. This leads to a very different style of playing; new routes and a completely different set of tricks come into play.

The first on the list is Quake done double Quick, a cooperative run through Quake on Nightmare skill. Exploiting the possibilities that coop running gives us, we managed to beat the time of the single player equivalent (QdQr) by four minutes, leading to a time of 12:35. Quake done double Quick has been the longest project ever in QdQ's history, begun in early 1998.

The other project is a byproduct of the recent Speedrunner's meeting, reported earlier. It takes place not in the id levels, but in a mission pack specially designed for speedrunning - Runner's Delight by Jesse van Dijk. The project, called Runner's Delight at Speedcon, is available in two forms, with and without the mission pack itself. Therefore, if you don't already have Runner's Delight, you can download everything together and enjoy playing the levels, too.

The fun is not quite over yet - we have another release waiting, and this time we're serious about the word "soon" :). Prepare the popcorn and watch this space for more speedruns to come.

We have released a new version of Dzip, the compression utility for Quake demo files. The new version is better, faster, and more colourful, the latter part thanks to the new graphical user interface included in the package.

Dzip compresses Quake demos approximately twice as good as Zip does, and sometimes even better. For instance, the new marathon demos at Speed Demos Archive would be 31MB in size with Zip, but they're only 11MB with Dzip.