MAKING HISTORY
On her first trip away from home, in a Burbank, California, mall filled with CRT monitors and Quakefans, Lorie Kmiec Harper’s mouse broke. It was 1997, and Harper, a 23-year-old assistant warehouse manager from Ontario, was playing as a finalist in the first-ever All Female QuakeTournament under the handle Temperance.
“I got kicked out first, you know that, right?” Harper says. “I was number one in Canada, or I was that year,” she reminisces. “But I was eighth in the world.”
In another scenario, Harper’s busted mouse might not have been a big deal. “I don’t know how attached you are to your mouse, but for gaming purposes, it was really bad timing,” she says. She’d spent the previous month training for the finals, playing with people all over the world, sometimes in the middle of the night. It was the first time she’d gotten a passport, and she was excited just to have made it to LA with her plus-one – her then-boyfriend, a computer engineer who had built her first
