It was May fourth, 1998 when the words “Crack Clan” ended up morphing in to more than just an adjective in front of a noun.  Initially formed as a group for like-minded gamers that wanted to get more out of their pubbing experience crack clan has grown in to an international, long-lived e-sports clan with amateur and professional aspirations that cross several games and many timezones.

Our recruitment mantra has acted as a long-term filter which has been responsible for accumulating a ten-year growth of unique individuals that have all heard about and believe in “skills build with time, but assholes are forever”.

Over the years we’ve learned many lessons the hard way, from being able to cater to a growing diversity in areas of game environment and gamer evolution we know that we offer a superior experience to that of our short-lived rivals.  Battle-hardened we have met victory and defeat many times over, enough to know how to masterfully handle both while keeping expectations realistic.

Having started out in the days of Doom, through to Action Quake 2, LMCTF, CS, TFC, CSS, the Battlefield series and almost everything in between we also balance ourselves out more than most by emphasizing the offline with several international gatherings and LANs under our belts.

HISTORY

It was in late 1996 and early 1997 when the first iteration of this organization began to regularly get together and enjoy time spent online, e-killing stuff.  As is rather typical it started in some offices in Toronto that already had decent-enough machines to run the titles of the day, though if we’re to be honest there was really only one worth considering: Quake.  We went through several months of sporadic yet dedicated activity in this regard, mostly focusing on LAN-only deathmatches with the occasional engagement across the Internet.

As these gatherings increased in size and regularity and overall activity had expanded to include participants in Montreal and New York City, a decision was made on May 4th, 1998 to officially name the group and partake in outside-office, non-LAN, I-use-ISDN Internet competition.  This was the day when during an IRC-based meeting the name “Crack Clan Ten” (along with {CCT} tags) were settled upon and we mark as our official birthday.

Later that year we were enthralled by the subsequent release of Half-Life 1 and Quake II and the resulting mod scene that erupted keeping us endlessly entertained by way of mods like AQ2, LMCTF, TFC, CS and more.

It was once Battlefield 1942 was released that we experienced a massive first-boost in to our activity and membership as well as a name change: Crack Clan 42.  With the Desert Combat modification garnering the majority of our time we threw ourselves head-first in to the competition there, coming out in the end as one of the world’s top clans, now with truly international membership and a lot of lessons under our belt.

Improving netcode and overall network infrastructure found us almost accidentally gathering steam and expanding rapidly on the European continent with members joining us from the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Sweden and beyond.  At this point competition was happening simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic while our organization matured with more attention being paid to operations and structure eventually leading us in to being a fully functional global organization.

Expansion happened organically and naturally from that point onward. An announcement which placed CC in the middle of the professional gaming scene was inevitable and brought great success and global recognition. Learning lessons about market realities and correcting management failures now finds Crack Clan enjoying a finely tuned existence which allows true support of online competitive gaming within a proper environment.

ETYMOLOGY

If there’s anything that can be identified as the number one way we are misunderstood it would be the word ‘crack’.

Originally ‘crack’ was selected over a decade ago as a word that was nearly monosyllabic, strong and slightly ambiguous.  We knew that we wanted some kind of adjective in front of the word ‘clan’ which would somehow summarize what we were about and was potentially able to adjust with us as time went by.

A lesson on: adjectives.

What is an adjective?  Most commonly it’s explained as the description of the attribute of a noun.  Something like: big barn, white house, fast car, crack clan.

crack, [krak] adj.: ace: of the highest quality; “an ace reporter”; “a crack shot”; “a first-rate golfer”; “a super party”; “played top-notch tennis”; “an athlete in tiptop condition”; “she is absolutely tops”