NO FAITH
All throughout its development,
Smedley was working to keep
EverQuest a secret. “It was exactly
the right incubator,” Smedley says.
“There was a lack of attention
focused on us, but that same lack of
attention gave us room to breathe life
into what would become EverQuest.
There was not a shred of interest
from one executive period. Not one
of them looked at it a single time.”
Over two years passed while
EverQuest’s team of two dozen
developers worked day and night to
make their dream come true. When
Trost says that people were sleeping
under their desks at night, I mistake
it for hyperbole. But then Rappaport
says the same thing. “That was the
hardest that I’ve worked on any
game,” she admits. “There was a ton
of overtime, and we were just 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 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 ofFEATURE
“EVERYBODY WAS 110
PERCENT ALL THE TIME,
EVERY LAST PERSON”