called Verant Interactive, and moved
to a different office building just a
short walk away. It was a close call –
not that anyone on the team knew it.
“After EverQuest had shipped, John
told me that it was almost cancelled
five or six times,” McQuaid says. “He
never told me at the time and I’m
glad he didn’t.”
“I knew that something was
happening,” Rappaport says. “We
were getting new business cards,
but I just rolled my eyes and thought
it was something for the executives
to deal with.”
Ignorant of the bureaucracy that
almost killed it, EverQuest’s team
thundered along toward its official
release in March of 1999 relatively
unscathed. Unable to match their
initial scope for Norrath, continents
and a few features were trimmed
from the original release, but
EverQuest was a near-perfect
manifestation of McQuaid’s and
Clover’s original vision.
“Almost everything in that original
design doc made its way into the
game,” Smedley boasts. “It was very
impressive. I’m almost 30 years into
this business and I haven’t seen that
another time, ever.”LAUNCH DAY WOES
After running the gauntlet for three
years together, no one at Verant
Interactive doubted that EverQuest
would be good. What they never
expected, though, was how
successful it would be. At the time,now, where we have all these fancy
administration tools and everything,”
Sites says. “At the time, we had a
datacentre and all the servers were
like desktop PCs and they were in
these racks, and we had to cram as
many as we could in there because
you had to pay for more space. We
found if you pulled the little rubber
feet off the bottom you could squeeze
in one more row of PCs, which were
the EverQuest worlds at the time.
There was no remote administration
hardware, it was literally 144 serial
cables to each of the worlds
connected to one PC with a switch
box and a monitor.”
When EverQuest’s servers first
went live, they crashed. To keep it
online, three employees would sit in
that freezing cold network room
wearing parkas and manually reboot
the servers. “Keeping that game up
when you didn’t know what you
were doing, which we didn’t, was
very hard,” Smedley says. “Back then
there was no one with launch
experience. We were just making it
up as we went along.”
Few, if anyone, could reliably play
EverQuest that day. Smedley, Sites,
and the networking team were left
scratching their heads until they
finally discovered the source of the
problem. “One of our network
programmers had done his math
wrong and it meant we were using
eight times more bandwidth than we
thought we were,” Smedley laughs.
EverQuest was using a network
managed by a local service provider
called UUnet, also used by several
major San Diego corporations. But
demand for EverQuest was so much
greater than Verant Interactive had
planned for that it was exceeding the
physical limits of the internet
pipeline into San Diego. As a result,
not only could thousands of players
not explore Norrath, several massive
corporations had their networking
operations accidentally sabotaged.
“Once you go over the limit, itMODEL CITIZENS
Spot the similarities
When designing the female versions of
EverQuest’s playable races, Rosie
Rappaport says she sometimes took
inspiration from real-world supermodels.
“I liked creating these beautiful female
characters, and for a lot of them I chose
different supermodels at the time,” she
says. The two that she distinctly
remembers: using Salma Hayek’s
likeness for wood elves and Tyra Banks
for dark elves. Can you see the
resemblance?only Ultima Online offered insight
into the new world of commercial
online RPGs. By the time EverQuest
launched, Ultima Online had
shattered expectations and sold
120,000 copies. But EverQuest was a
cutting-edge game that required a
computer with a 3D graphics card, a
somewhat novel piece of hardware in- The team would be excited if it
sold even a quarter as many copies.
Instead, EverQuest sold 10,000 on
its first day. No one was prepared.
Andrew Sites, an assistant
producer, remembers getting phone
calls from friends telling him that
EverQuest players were lined up out
the door at retailers hoping to buy a
copy. That was his first clue that
EverQuest’s servers were about to be
destroyed by a flood of eager players.
“You have to understand things were
way different to how this stuff works
EverQuest
FEATURE
BELOW: Naturally,
EverQuest contains a
lot of dragons. Too
many, even.