Steve’s demo online and contacted
him, we immediately meshed well,
and he had a great creative vision,”
Smedley tells me. “The only thing
was that Brad didn’t know how to
make a professional videogame, but
I had that experience.”
McQuaid jokes and says he
didn’t have the money to play the
graphical online games that
worlds together—only everything was
described through text. “They were
mostly played by kids in colleges who
could telnet into the college
mainframe or minicomputer. I don’t
know how they didn’t get kicked out
of school, because they were just
playing nonstop,” McQuaid says.
When Smedley said he wanted
this game to be cutting edge,
McQuaid saw an opportunity to do
something completely unheard of—a
MUD with 3D graphics. Two days
after that phone call, he and Clover
resigned from their IT jobs and
joined SISA. “It was an opportunity
we could not pass up,” McQuaid says.
“It was an amazing, life-changing day
for sure. I felt absolute excitement.”
What McQuaid lacked in
professional game development
experience, he made up for in project
management knowhow, extensive
programming skills, and raw creative
vision. The two dreamed up an
outline for a graphical MUD and
created a 20-page design document
to act as their bible. In that
document, McQuaid and Clover
cemented the foundation of its
systems, like class-based combat, an
emphasis on player-versus-
environment exploration, and the
basic layout of a high-fantasy world
that became known as Norrath.
Clover gave it a name: EverQuest.
Smedley loved, but he and Clover
saw the future in a very different kind
of multiplayer game. Called MUDs
(Multi-User Dungeons), what these
text-based multiplayer roleplaying
games lacked in fancy graphics they
made up for in depth and scale.
Similar to traditional pen and paper
roleplaying games, players could
socialize and explore virtual fantasy
ABOVE: EverQuest’s
look was inspired by
fantasy book covers
from the ’90s.
RIGHT: New zones
are being added for
the 20th anniversary.
November 15,
2011
Veil of Alaris
October 8,
2013
Call of the
Forsaken
November 18,
2015
The Broken
Mirror
December 12,
2017
Ring of Scale
October 12,
2010
House of Thule
November 28,
2012
Rain of Fear
October 28,
2014
Darkened Sea
November 16,
2016
Empires of
Kunark
December 11,
2018
The Burning
Lands