You may contact us on the Quake speedrunning Discord server.
You may also contact us via email: quake @ speeddemosarchive.com
There are two types of demos here:
Richard "Morfans" Skidmore
Richard is currently the oldest known active speedrunner, having originally spawned in November 1969. He now lives a tranquil existence in the wilds of the Highlands of Scotland where he commits acts of wanton cruelty to a large selection of animals.
He joined the crew in the middle of 2001 and now does the vast majority of the demo updates, mostly written in his long, rambling style that he uses to try and confuse people that don't have English as their first language.
He appears first in this list as a testiment to his collosal ego and also just to annoy the others.
Nolan "Radix" Pflug
Radix founded Nightmare Speed Demos back when the Earth was still young. Once the crust cooled he merged with Gunnar's and Jesse's sites to form SDA in April 1998. In 2001 he washed his hands of the whole sorry affair when people became just too annoying for him to stand any longer, but we loved him too much to let him go.
In Late 2003 Nolan started the "Other Games" section of SDA with his Metroid Prime 100% in 1:37 run, and
started open submissions in March 2004. In September 2004, his continued disastisfaction with GameSpy led him
to purchase speeddemosarchive.com, which simply redirected to planetquake/sda/ until he finished the arrangements
to move the entire site in January 2005.
Thomas "Stubby" Stubgaard
Thomas Stubgaard was born in Denmark in April 1976 and then wasted the next 22 years of his life before submitting his first demo to SDA in August 1998.
Since then he has gone on to dominate the ID Nightmare 100% tables in a way not seen since Nolan/Yonaton in the early days, holding up to 24 of the
32 possible ID SP NHs. He joined the SDA team in December 2000, originally to handle the player profiles but over the following six months he posted more demo updates than anyone in the history of SDA up to that point, including Nolan!!! (Okay, so this fact isn't actually true. But I doubt anyone's going to go back and count them all to disprove it.)
He currently looks after the player profiles, the forum and the Windlash Runs page, as well as doing a lot of the behind the scenes work for the demo updates. When not playing Quake his hobbies include masturbation and pretending to be a nun. He once managed to spend 3 months in a convent before being caught, a time he describes as "the happiest of my life".
Thomas "Lowdis" Bergendorff
Thomas first caught the world's attention back in 1997 when he won the World Sub-Aqua Disco Dancing Championship with his now infamous naked version of "Boogie Wonderland". Since then he has found refuge from reality in the family that is SDA and helps look after our IRC channel and adds new maps on a regular basis. At least, he's supposed to...
Michael "mwh" Hudson
mwh was born in 1978 and caused quite a stir in his primitive homeland when it was discovered that he had two leg shaped heads and one head shaped leg. Once the elders of his tribe realised their rather silly mistake they tried to cover up their embarassment by naming him "King of the Tree People". Thus it is that he has become the first genuine royalty to join TeamSDA. When he's not studying for his PhD in "adding up and taking away" he messes around behind the scenes of The Archive and in #qdq.
Mathias "Mandel" Thore
Mandel suddenly appeared last year and started making himself useful. Since he is semi-coherent most of the time we thought we should offer him the chance to help with the update writing duties. Nothing is known about this enigmatic person except his name, address and full personal, educational and family history, leading him to be known as "The Worst Man Of Mystery In The History Of Everything Ever".
Paul "Lag.Com" Davies
After all the above maintainers somehow managed to graduate and get jobs (or in Stubgaard's case, be forced to spend his days gnawing trees down for a living), we needed another student with lots of free time. Unfortunately for him and for us, we found Paul, but he's learning fast and maybe he will even cut his hair one day...
Apart from today's maintainers listed above, the following people should be credited for their efforts:
Evan "windlash" Wagner
Evan started writing updates in those days which history will remember as "the late nineties". Then he disappeared. In Early 2004 he showed up and started helping out with the update writing again. Then he disappeared. We're sure he's going to show up again some time soon.
Ilkka "Mineral" Kurkela
Ilkka was very important to SDA already even before he actually joined the crew: he was among the first (if not THE first) to
really exploit bunnying and thus breaking lots of 'thought-to-be-optimized' records. Even though he moved his own speedrunning page Mineral's to SDA fairly early, Ilkka joined the actual SDA team in may 1999, when the need for news updaters was great.
Apart from playing Quake, Ilkka is a profound lover of Drum 'n' Bass, and creates his own tracks as well.
Gunnar "Muad'Dib" André Mo, who started SDA when his own Quake page (no longer on-line) merged with Nolan's page, Nightmare Speed Demos.
Jesse "Compsognathus" van Dijk
Back in the days Jesse ran a site for custom level speedruns, NederSPEED.
Jesse always loved custom levels (and even prefered them over the id ones), and when he decided to combine
both his interest in speedrunning and level editing, he created RDE,
the Runner's Delight Episode.
Through Quake Jesse met "all sorts of cool people all over the world", and over the years met quite a few of
them in real life as well, which he described as "just an awesome experience".
Will "ajare" Marsh
Will initially joined SDA to take care of Quake 2 speedrunning, but even though SDA no longer supports Q2, Will has made
himself really useful by updating normal demos as well, but more importantly, by re-opening and managing the Run of the Week. Apart from messing around with Quake, Will seems to spend the rest of his time listening to Trance and Drum 'n' Bass, which isn't that much of a surprise since he's from London :) Will now studies Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. [Will would like to reassure people that he listens to proper trance, not any of that Dutch sh*te.]
Gerald "Tangent" Tan was already a newswriter for Gunnar's Quake page, and was the third of the three that started the archive. While no longer supported these days, the former Quake 2 section at SDA was also handled by Gerald.
Chris Longden. While Chris joined the archive as a news reporter, he soon wrote an entire database to handle all the tables dynamically, which eventually crashed and left the site offline for the first six weeks of 2000.
Stefan Schwoon. After the dramatic crash of the old database that relied purely on CFM, Stefan wrote an entirely new script based on his legendary 'history.txt': a complete listing of every speed-demo ever recorded. Today's tables are created by Stefan's scripts.
Matthias Belz wrote all sorts of funky additions to Stefan's scripts, such as the player statistics.