always there and sleeping under our
desks and going home at 2am night
after night. I remember one time I
took a Saturday off and I was like ‘oh,
this is what weekends are’. I’d
forgotten. It was a culture of do or
die. There was nobody on the team
that was just doing it halfway.
Everybody was 110 percent all the
time, every last person.”
McQuaid says it took almost two
years before he started to think that
EverQuest might actually work. “We
knew that these MUDs were
extremely compelling,” he says. “But
the big question was whether we
were just a strange microcosm of
people that like this kind of game or
is this something that could be
commercially viable.”
It was at the Game Developers
Conference in Long Beach, California
that McQuaid finally realised
EverQuest might be successful. It was
the spring of 1998 and the EverQuest
team was there to demo the fledgling
MMO in hopes of getting some
valuable feedback. “We set up eight
or ten computers in two rows and we
allowed people to come up and create
a level one character and just run
around, figure out the game, kill stuff,
and talk to people.”
To give everyone a chance, players
could play for just 20 minutes before
they’d have to log out and let
someone else try. But “a lot of them
would leave one computer and sneak
around to the other side and log intoEverQuest
FEATURE
“EVERYBODY WAS 110
PERCENT ALL THE TIME,
EVERY LAST PERSON”