heads prone to biting each other.
Smedley’s hardest challenge was
keeping EverQuest away from the
teeth of upper management. “My
boss at the time, Kelly Flock, he
didn’t even want to admit that he was
doing this game to the Japanese
management team who had no idea
we were making this game,” Smedley
laughs. “It was kept very quiet.”
“I was having to protect the
development of EverQuest and it was
pretty difficult,” Smedley adds. “They
actively laughed at it and thought we
were wasting money. In meetings I
Like most of the team, Trost had
grown up going on imaginary
adventures with his friends in
Dungeons and Dragons. But Trost was
a natural-born dungeon master. He
lived to create worlds – and the rough
narrative outline detailed in
EverQuest’s 20-page design bible
wasn’t going to cut it. “No one had
articulated there was a need for
EverQuest to have a lot of lore,” Trost
laughs. “It was just something that,
coming into it as a dungeon master, I
was like, ‘ugh, if we’re going to have
people play this game we need to
figure all this stuff out’.”
McQuaid and Clover had mapped
out a rough sketch of EverQuest’s
continents and the various races who
resided there. Trost took those seeds
and cultivated a garden. When he
wasn’t building art assets or helping
design the user interface, he was
dreaming up Norrath’s pantheon of
deities, penning the histories of its
people, and moulding a vast army of
non-player characters that would
populate the world. But much of the
work had already been done.
“A lot of what became the world of
Norrath and EverQuest, I used from
my Dungeons and Dragons campaign
as a kid,” Trost says. That included
EverQuest characters like Mayong
Mistmoore, a conniving spymaster
and elf who would become Norrath’s
first vampire. He was actually Trost’s
primary D&D character.
Meanwhile Rappaport was
bringing EverQuest’s aesthetic to life
in much the same way. “The high
turned out the opposite was true. “We had no idea of what
could or couldn’t be done,” McQuaid says. “That was the
key, though. We didn’t have any veterans in there that said
‘no you can’t do that, that’s too ambitious’. We were like,
this is what we’re going to create, and we’re going to go
for it, and we’re going to make it work, and we’re going to
keep trying until it all comes together.”
As development ramped up, the team also expanded
and the initial members were all promoted. McQuaid
became EverQuest’s producer, Clover its lead programmer,
Rappaport its lead artist, and Trost its lead designer. Their
first mission was to build a working prototype of a
multiplayer dungeon for a party to run around in. As
EverQuest was coming to life in a technical sense, Bill
Trost was bringing it to life in a very different way.was constantly having to justify why
we were doing it.”
That’s how EverQuest first came
to life, in the bullpen of a PlayStation
studio where everyone was either
ignorant of its existence or convinced
that the bizarre high-fantasy RPG
would fail. As Smedley would later
realise, it was the perfect place.ORIGIN STORY
EverQuest’s development team had
absolutely no idea how to build a
massively multiplayer online game,
which sounds like a bad thing. ItEverQue t
FEATURE
LEFT: Keith
Parkinson created
most of EverQuest’s
early art.