Today I’m going to talk about a subject that is near and dear to my cold, dead heart, but is also entirely useless: video game frag movies. The frag movie likely got its start in one of the early Quake games, or perhaps Unreal Tournament. It’s hard to say. Regardless, I will be focusing on Quake movies for the most part, as I have more knowledge in that area, and I consider the games in the Quake series to have some of the most technical skill possible for a first-person shooter game.

I’d like to ask you to watch this video, please. You don’t have to watch the whole thing, but try to watch at least a couple minutes.

Watched it? Good. There are other, more impressive frag movies, but this one is easier to follow.

You probably noticed some things.

For starters, people move around. A lot. Very quickly. I’m not going to get into how that’s possible, but it goes without saying that it makes aiming more difficult. You probably also noticed that the players have lots of different weapons, including lasers, rocket and grenade launchers, shotguns, and more. These can generally be grouped into two classes of weapons: hitscan and projectile. With a hitscan weapon, like a shotgun or a laser, if your mouse is over the opponent, and you click, you will hit them instantly. With a projectile weapon, like a rocket launcher or grenade launcher, what you fire has a speed slower than the speed of light; it takes time for your projectile to hit the enemy. So, if your opponent is running forward, and you want to hit them with a rocket, you have to aim ahead of them. Another wrinkle. Finally, you may have noticed that a lot of the clips in that video were captured of killing enemies in the air. This is known as an airshot, and it is one of the most technically difficult techniques one can use.

Let’s break down the anatomy of an airshot very quickly. Please go to 2:16 in the video above and watch the clip. Watched it? Good. So, as per usual, our player is moving very quickly. Despite this speed, they spot an enemy jumping up. Our player flicks their mouse around, not to where the enemy is, but to exactly where they will be in a fraction of a second. Our player determined where the enemy would be by doing some math in their head: how fast is the enemy moving from their jump (caused by firing a rocket at their feet)? How fast is the acceleration due to gravity? And, most importantly, how is the enemy likely to move in the air? Airstrafing (moving in the air) will completely change where the opponent ends up, so our player has to think about where the opponent is most likely to go. Think you can figure all that out? Ok, now do all those calculations in a tenth of a second. Our player does so, over and over again. Of course, to our player, they weren’t calculations; it’s mostly muscle memory, honed by playing this game, and others like it, for thousands of hours.

This is where I admit to you that I’ve never actually played a Quake game. Rather, I’ve put an embarrassing number of hours (don’t ask how many) into Team Fortress 2 [or TF2], a game very closely inspired by Quake. I’ve hit plenty of airshots in TF2, but even at my peak I was nowhere near as good as the professionals. Here is a TF2 frag movie. You’ll notice lots of similarities with the Quake movie I showed you; this one, however, has a sillier vibe, partly due to what kind of game TF2 is, and partly due to the sensibilities of the moviemaker. I skipped the annoying animated intro for you.

Here is perhaps a more serious movie made up of clips from Insomnia 52, one of TF2’s greatest tournaments of all time. It’s long; I don’t expect you to watch everything.

Here’s a video starring TF2’s greatest player of all time. He’s been playing since the game came out in 2007. He’s still going.

As a fun sidenote, I’d like to show you the frag movie’s gentler cousin, the jump movie. You may have seen, in some clips, players shooting the ground with rockets or sticky bombs or any manner of things in order to propel themselves through the air, presumably for some kind of tactical advantage. Doing so does a not insignificant amount of damage to the players; the players sacrifice their own health in order to gain mobility, almost always a worthwhile trade. This gave way to a whole custom gamemode, in which mapmakers create custom jump maps designed for players to hone their explosive jumping skills. The best jump videos are gaudy, overproduced, and generally feature awful soundtracks. Here’s one now, made by Afterglow, a legend in the jump scene.

Here’s a really good jump movie by Dellort.

Those are both just one kind of jump movie, though, generally made up of freestyle jumps on lots of regular maps, where the person doing the jumping is just trying to do cool tricks. Most jump maps are designed to be completed as fast as possible, in a fashion similar to many other speedruns. This one’s absurdly long, because the course, made by a jumper known as Quba (who was actually in both of those earlier videos), is an absurdly long and difficult map; please don’t watch the whole thing. If you’re only going to watch one jump, skip to the last one, at 14:04, in which the jumper has to synchronize 5 rockets hitting the ground at the same time, as well as another three rockets not three seconds later. Here it is.

Frag movies continue to inspire creators around the world. I’ve shown you examples from first person shooters, but the frag movie (or montage as it is perhaps more commonly known) has found its home in games from a variety of genres, perhaps most notably fighting games. Lots of people have made fighting game frag movies (myself included. No, you can’t see it, and you can’t see my jump movies either), and they’ve used lots of different fighting games to do so. Here’s a Melee video.

I’m not really one for smash, though; my fighting game of choice is Brawlhalla. Here’s a montage from the World Championship in 2018.

The winner of the tournament went on to dominate the scene, and won the 2019 World Championship, too. He’s the best player the game has ever seen.

Appreciate the clips. Consider how many thousands of hours of training went into every single clip, each of which lasts for just a few seconds, and all of which you will forget about by tomorrow. Consider that, for many of the players you’re watching, this was their one moment of glory. To try to distill their entire life of experience into a 5-second clip feels almost insulting. It’s cruel, really. Enjoy it. It’s all for you.

Originally written 09/24/2020, published on Medium.