Stevie Case

Stevana "Stevie" Case (born 1976–1977) is an American businesswoman. She is known for competing in the first-person shooter game Quake in the late 1990s, as well as contributing professionally to the video game industry.

Competing under the alias KillCreek, she was one of the first notable female esports players, gaining recognition for beating Quake designer John Romero in a Quake deathmatch in 1997. She was the first professional gamer signed to the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL).

Case worked for Ion Storm between 1997 and 2001, conducting quality assurance and level design. She left the company to manage Monkeystone Games with former Ion Storm employees Romero and Tom Hall. After a stint at Warner Bros. managing the production of mobile games, she began working at various companies in business development and sales.

Case was raised in Olathe, Kansas. Her parents are a science teacher and a social worker, and she has a younger brother named Andy. As a child, she enjoyed playing computer games. Her first gaming experiences were with Lode Runner and Joust on an Apple IIe computer her father bought when she was in second grade.

Case attended Olathe East High School from 1991 to 1994. As the student government president, she was one of the plaintiffs in the 1995 court case Case v. Unified School District No. 233. During the trial, students and parents in Olathe successfully challenged the school district's decision to ban Annie on my Mind from the school library. Case later attended the University of Kansas in hopes of getting into law school.

While at the University of Kansas as a freshman studying political science, Case enjoyed playing Doom and Doom II with her circle of friends. Through her then-boyfriend, Tom "Entropy" Kimzey, she became interested in playing Quake competitively. Case joined Kimzey's team, Impulse 9, and began competing under the name KillCreek. This alias was taken from the Lawrence, Kansas band Kill Creek, who had a member Case was friends with. Impulse 9 competed in the Quake competitive league Clanring, and won the T1 championship event in 1996.

After a few months of competing and making a name for herself, Case traveled to Dallas on a pilgrimage to meet some of the developers of her favorite first-person-shooter computer games. During her trip, she got the chance to play a Quake deathmatch against the game's designer, John Romero, but was beaten by him in a close game. After Romero put up a web page jokingly insulting her skill at the game, Case publicly demanded a rematch with him. While Case initially struggled in the best-of-three rematch, she rallied back to win the first round 25–19, and went on to ultimately defeat Romero. As punishment, Romero agreed to set up a web page praising Case.

Case was twenty years old at the time she won the rematch in 1997, and beating one of the co-creators of Quake at his own game brought her a lot of publicity. She gained a sponsor in computer mouse manufacturer SpaceTec IMC that year, and her victory against Romero received coverage in Rolling Stone. Angel Munoz, the founder of the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL), convinced Case to join his league in July 1997, becoming its first signed professional gamer. She eventually became one of the league's original founders. Case competed in the first all-female Quake tournament that year, coming in second behind Kornelia Takacs. With the stability of sponsors and a $1000 monthly stipend from the CPL, Case decided to drop out of university and move to Dallas in the middle of 1997; she said that while she had a passion for political science, she "was not excited about the day-to-day aspects of politics or practicing law."