QuakeNet was founded in 1997 by Garfield and Oli as an IRC network for Quakeworld players who wanted their own 'haven' from other networks. It quickly attracted players of both Quakeworld and other games and had a few hundred users before long. Mag and Madhacker introduced an early version of the service bot 'Q' around this time. Around the early 2000's IRC became extremely popular and QuakeNet exploded in size alone with several other networks collectively known as the 'big four' comprising of QuakeNet, EFnet, IRCnet and UnderNet (Dalnet had a brief rise during this period too). Before long QuakeNet was one of the biggest IRC networks in the world and regularly claiming the prize as the largest peaking at nearly a quarter of a million concurrently connected users at any one time in 2005.