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 this 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. Taking a larger timescale into account, many thousands of users flooded to QuakeNet, to make it the (at time of writing) largest IRC network in the world.