because they were the veterans of the day – they had the
most commercial online experience. They laughed at us
and said we were crazy.”
It wasn’t thatEverQuestwanted to be a multiplayer
roleplaying game. There were dozens of those. And it
wasn’t thatEverQuestwould sport state-of-the-art
graphics. It was that McQuaid wanted to combine the two
in a massive open world that thousands of players could
populate at any one timeandcharge a monthly fee for it.
“John was convinced that it was obvious that these
pay-by-the-hour games were limited because you had to
have a lot of money to play, but we couldn’t make it free
like a MUD so that’s where the subscription model came
up,” McQuaid says. “People thought it was a crazy idea.”BOTTOM: The Planes
of Power expansion
was a favourite of
hardcore players.With no veterans taking them
seriously, McQuaid posted job
openings at nearby colleges. One of
the level designers was a pizza
delivery guy who got the job based
on enthusiasm alone.
Wanting to repay a favour to two
amateur artists who helped him with
WarWizard 2, McQuaid phoned up
Bill Trost and Kevin Burns. Because
they had no real background in
professional art, the pair joined at
Sony as testers to get their foot in the
door and worked after hours
designing mockups and art assetsbefore Smedley was able to bring
them on full-time. Meanwhile Rosie
Rappaport, an artist, worked in the
same bullpen as McQuaid and the
team, and once she found out what
they were doing she asked to join the
project. Trost and Rappaport would
become key ingredients in
EverQuest’s success.
Most of the people at Sony were
just as sceptical as the industry
veterans Smedley tried to recruit.
Rappaport says other developers at
SISA took to calling the game
“NeverQuest” while Smedley adds
that the team was mockingly referred
to as the “Ghouls and Goblins Guys”
when they’d gather to play Magic:
The Gathering in the lunchroom.
“This was a studio that was filled
with sports people,” Smedley laughs.
“And then this small group of us that
was into Dungeons and Dragons.”
EverQuest was so audacious,
even Smedley’s boss was a little
embarrassed by it. Sony, like
many Japanese tech
companies with American
branches, was a hydra withEverQuest
FEATURE
WHERE ARE THEY
NOW?
Moving to greener pasturesBRAD MCQUAID
PRODUCER
After leaving Sony Online
Entertainment in 2002,
Brad continued developing
new MMOs. He is currently working on
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, an MMO that
aims to revitalise the genre by rekindling
what made it special in the first place:
social and complex systems.JOHN SMEDLEY
PRESIDENT
John became the president
of Sony Online
Entertainment (now
Daybreak Games) until 2015 when he
resigned. After a brief stint working on
indie games, John is now working at
Amazon Game Studios on an
unannounced project.BILL TROST
LEAD DESIGNER
After EverQuest’s launch,
Bill led development on
several EverQuest
expansions, EverQuest 2 , and several
other games before jumping ship to Trion
Worlds to work on another MMO.
He’s now at Amazon Game Studios
workingwithJohn.ROSIE RAPPAPORT
LEAD ARTIST
Aside from a brief
departure, Rosie stayed at
Sony Online Entertainment
(now Daybreak Games) until 2016 working
on various MMOs. She’s now an adjunct
professor at the Art Institute of San Diego
and is working on a secret project with
developer Secret Society Games.ANDREW SITES
ASSISTANT
PRODUCER
Aside from a brief stint at
Zynga, Andrew has stayed
at Sony Online Entertainment working in a
variety of roles across several games. He
is now the executive producer on the
Planetside 2 franchise and is growing a big
beard as he works on Planetside Arena.“THEY LAUGHED AT
US AND SAID WE
WERE CRAZY”