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.”
Even Smedley’s boss was a little
embarrassed by it. Sony, like many
Japanese tech companies with
Smedley would later realize, it was
the perfect place.ORIGIN STORY
EverQuest’s development team had
no idea how to build a massively
multiplayer online game, which
sounds like a bad thing. It 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 ‘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 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 different way.
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 seedsAmerican branches, was a hydra with heads prone to
biting each other. Smedley’s hardest challenge was
keeping EverQuest away from 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 laughed
at it and thought we were wasting money. In meetings I
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 it would fail. AsEverQuest
FEATURE
LEFT: Keith
Parkinson created
most of EverQuest’s
early art.