I will maintain to my dying day that this is one of the greatest videos on the internet, and it remains so no matter if you've never played Quake, if you've never played a shooter in your life, if you're not really sure what video games are. It doesn't matter that you know these records were absurdly untouchable by 2009's standards and remain similarly legendary today; it doesn't matter if you couldn't explain strafejumping if someone held a railgun to your head - this is 100% grade A, killer, absolutely next-level shit, and you can see it no matter what.
What KOS does here (and in his movies in general) is build a kind of aesthetic from the ground up based on whatever insane footage he happens to be manipulating at the time; here, the introductory snapshot, dark as fuck, slinks in set to the first minute of Amon Tobin's "Four Ton Mantis" as w3sp's freestyle is chopped and screwed irretrievably. Everything is blurred, silver, black steel, hazy lights, explosions punctuating each soaring leap like emphatic, florid but brief fullstops that fade quickly into the fluxing background. It's druggy from the get go, and the surreal opening footage of w3sp's stargate run throws it into dreamspace. There is a kind of jaw-dropping precision to it but with a strange fluidity, the viscous leaps of w3sp's neon Bones model underpinning each swivel, each smooth snapped turn, and what else would you expect? KOS wants to show us that this is something else - not just mechanics, not just skill - and the best way to do it is to disorient the watcher, draw them in with the pretty lights and then make them really concentrate on the ethos behind each click.
And ethos there is; there has to be. The soundtrack for f33l - Boards of Canada, Autechre, Soundhacker, Self Oscillate - is so obviously in line with that organic-supercomputer transcendence; the "warmup" section, scored by ghostly, analog-wailing "Oirectine", is already neck deep in it, KOS's lens distorting in time with the skeletal DJ's finger slipping on the vinyl as w3sp tears strafe3 to pieces, manipulating it beyond belief, stretching and bending along with the camera, at first seemingly at random but eventually with a strange pattern to it, as each impossible corner is made, each pinpoint overbounce is placed. There is magic happening here: some kind of supernatural phenomenon is the only explanation for all this time dilation, hurling w3sp down each corridor like he's caught in his own crazy current, like he can't help but keep moving. Never has there been a defrag movie that gave the impression of so much speed, so much motion, with so much stretched and torn footage.
The spidery, raindrops-in-dark-cells "Further" accompanies some of the crazier footage in the movie, w3sp tearing down imoor's black halls, KOS rewinding the one perfectly arced jump through the triangle like he can't help but watch it again, but it's when the summit of Soundhacker's "Phxone" breaks open the sky and KOS follows w3sp through cityrocket at 6000+ ups with a spiraling third-person camera, every shot blurred with speed, slowed down to its lowest framerate, that things get really insane. KOS spends so long in the first ten minutes of the movie holding back on the sensory overload that when it finally comes it can't help but overwhelm you; it's nothing more than the same oozing, weird aesthetic turned up way beyond breaking point. It's no coincidence that he puts the brightest run in the whole movie immediately after the darkest: he doesn't do contrast much, but when he does, by damn you're going to notice it.
The real height of the whole thing, though, is in the fucking credits, of all things - w3sp's now-mythic ra3map4 freestyle as a kind of natural coda to it all. The absolute purity that comes to bear in this run - KOS stepping back with the edits, letting it speak entirely for itself at this point - is breathtaking, blinding, heart-stopping, every element distilled and pushed to the absolute limits of movement. People love to use the word "perfect" but in fact the hesitations, the swivels and the tiny, almost imperceptible flaws in this freestyle are what make it something else: w3sp flying, untouchable, unstoppable, utterly and totally free, pushing back the boundaries of the space he's in so completely, nothing but his mouse and keys and an engine that doesn't seem like it could belong to anyone other than him at this point. It's a kind of freedom that's easy to be jealous of; the fact that it's in a virtual space is really a minor detail. To call it art is no stretch of the imagination. w3sp seems to be elevating the run above a simple display of skill by riffing each jump off the top of his head, shredding through takes until he's satisfied with the last shining one, improvising fearlessly, like we wish we all could.
I think what KOS saw, and brought out in f33l, was the ability in w3sp to feel that tactile, primeval sense of the space and of each run, the kind of attitude that raises mere noisemaking to music, to art, filling the whole universe with it. Everything about f33l screams "not normal" - every chemtrailing blur in the camera pan, the careening angles of each shot, the mescaline-addled, ropy time-stretched jumps and turns and skims. I would hope, anyway, that if you're following this blog for music or pics or whatever falls outside the purview of "general nerdage", that you get something out of watching this; I know I certainly found f33l incredible before I ever touched Quake.
Note: the occasional detractors of this video and w3sp in general love to point out that he never released the demo for the ending freestyle, that it could easily be timescaled, and a whole host of other wet-blanket statements, to all of which I can only offer the simplicity and the purity of the run itself as rebuttal. It's not simply a matter of wanting to believe that it's legitimate; it really does look like something completely natural, w3sp just kicking it from his head, having more or less the basic ideas of where he's going but nothing more concrete than a game plan. I admit his attitude regarding accusors (no denial, simply "Prove it!") probably has not helped the situation but I think this is more a case of an understandably nettled player responding badly to what have been for the most part pretty blustering accusations.