About MPQ Archive

This is the archive site for MultiPlayer Quake which was a Quake (and occasionally Quake 2) deathmatch level review site that ran from 1996(ish) to 2002. It changed handed three times during it run, starting with Taskmaster (Warren Marshall), then Smash (Jason) and Xori (Jakob), then myself (Paul Healey).

The idea behind the site was simple, review anything and everything, whether it was good or bad.

In 2000 the site was revamped to allow comments which caused no end of fun. Bad maps were absolutely slaughtered (review ethics was never a strong point when I ran the site) whilst good ones were heavily praised. The site is amusingly littered with profanities because I was (and still am) a swear box. Viewing it now does make me cringe, but that makes me feel like a prudish twat and... Oh bollo...

In terms of the future of this site, my intention is to have it permanently hosted. The switch to PHP and MySQL wasn't just for fun but to make it more portable. There may be the odd tweak and update here and there, but for all intents purposes the content is now static. However please do feel free to post comments and feedback.

Note from Paul in 2025-07

Amazingly the site I cobbled together in 2006 ran, pretty much error free, until 2023. My hosting removed support for PHP 5, understandly. So errors were appearing on pages mainly due to the deprecation of various old PHP and MySQL functions. To keep the site running, I refactored the site to PHP 8. I wasn't really happy with the results code wise but it was running again.

Anyhoo (I still like to ramble), a couple of years later in 2025, I wanted to ditch my current hosting because you can host this kind of site much cheaper now so I decided to bin the PHP and MySQL and convert the site to static HTML. To make it much easier to host indefinitely. So I used that as an excuse to learn Rust to write a console app to do it. And here we are! This complete site is in a git repo that is automatically published. And there's another repo with the Rust code and assets that can quickly rebuild it. I've tried my best to fix various dead links and brought back the old old MPQ site.

As part of the changes, the account registration and comments logic have been removed. In my PHP 8 refactoring it was an open issue that I didn't think was worth the effort implementing and part of the prompt to go static. The search page functionality is still there but more basic but there are the archive listings if you need them.

My intention is still to keep the site running as an archive. So, enjoy!

I've found a broken download link / missing screen shot / etc!

Email me at the following address with details such as the url accessed, angle you were sitting at, amount of sunlight, wind direction, etc. I'll try my best to fix it.

Can I post comments?

Sorry, you can't. I switched the site from PHP to static HTML in 2023 and removed the account registration and comment gubbins.

Thanks to...

RPG, Bal, Vondur and Jay for all that hard cheese! Actually if it wasn't for RPG letting me help write some chaff for his QExpo booth and getting me interested in Quake again I probably wouldn't have sorted this out. So thanks!

Also I'd like to thank the following for their help on the original site: Daz (washing powder), Fat Controller (not from Thomas the Tank Engine), Shambler, Grindspire, xen, Gom Jabbar (missing in action), Excessus the mad Spanish man, Aardappel the Dutch potato, Pingu, SleepwalkR the pedantic vowel missing German, CardO (plays with his wotsit too much), Killer, Escher (of De Bello Quakero fame) and Yogi.

Daz, Fat Controller and Grindspire deserve a special mention since between them they wrote nearly a 100 reviews out of the 500 or so listed. And not one of them a Rocketman map, lucky bastards.

If you want to see what most of these Quake peeps are now up to, pop over to func_msgboard.

Oh and thanks to my better half, Kate, for not minding too much with me working on this!

Can I look at the old site?

Of course you can but it's state is purely as is. Looky here.

Can I see all the site logos?

Since it's you, here's a list.

I have a question that your pitiful FAQ doesn't cover!

Just send me and email at the above address.