Format: PC
Release: 1999
Publisher: Sony Online Entertainment
Developer: Verant Interactive

It was a wedding that first blew them away. They watched characters exchange rings and vows, in a world they had made and it was nothing they could have predicted. “There was a GM, me and Brad McQuaid, and we saw a wedding in the game,” remembers John Smedley, the original producer of EverQuest. “It was awesome.”

There had been online worlds before. The Multi-User Dungeons common on ’80s university campuses were a big inspiration to the project team, and Ultima Online went beta eight months into the EverQuest development phase; but EQ was the first to hit upon that elusive alchemy that turns a game into media gold. The first massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) to offer a first-person perspective, EverQuest was also by far the largest. At the height of the game's popularity, Norrath, as Steve Clover, co-creator and lead programer, christened the EQ universe, stood at millions of square feet of virtual real estate, with an eBay exchange rate of 75 platinum pieces to the US dollar, and, according to one economist, a per-capita GNP of $2,266 – at the time, greater than that of China. At the start of development, though, the project team had no idea their creation was to become such a phenomenon.

Clover and McQuaid had been working as database programmers, developing a singleplayer RPG together in their spare time. The few offers they had fell through, so they posted the demo on the Internet. John Smedley saw the demo, and offered them a job. “As much as we loved database programming,” says Clover, “we jumped at the chance.”
   
As Bill Trost, senior game designer, remembers, the team’s saving grace was that they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. “When I joined the project, EQ was just an idea," he says. "They wanted to create a graphical MUD, and had some idea about how it would look, but not many specifics. We had lofty goals but we were lucky: we were too young and too new to realise how difficult it would be.”



Steve Clover created the original map of Norrath, inventing the city names – including the branded capital, Qeynos (SonyEQ spelt backwards) and, with Brad McQuiad, wrote the main design document. They sketched three continents, accessible by boat, where players could fight, loot, barter and even learn a trade. “No one had ever made zones of that scale in a 3D game before,” says Scott McDaniel, EQ’s art director. “We didn’t know what the impact of open geometry or 10,000 in-frustum polygons would be. The programming and art teams got together, and through sheer trial and error we banged out a system that was robust enough to take dozens of players in a zone, but still allowed the freedom to create very different landscapes.”

Their offices in San Diego (Clover still brags that he can “go surfing and skiing in the same day without driving too far”) were the perfect muse for Norrath’s varied terrain. And the eventual population explosion that made the EverQuest phenomenon unique was mirrored in the early days too, by the way their staff quickly ballooned within their small office. “Early on,” McDaniel remembers, “there were maybe 14 people attached to the project. All seven of the artists shared one cube in the old SCEA building. It was… a bonding experience.”