LOSERS’ CLUB
McQuaid and Clover were a good start, but they couldn’t
build an entire 3D game on their own. As months ticked
by and development on EverQuest scaled up, it was
becoming obvious that no one outside of the development
team had any faith in Smedley and McQuaid. “We
reached out to people in the industry at that time who
were working on these pay-by-the-hour type games,”
McQuaid says. “We wanted to bring those people inBOTTOM: The Planes
of Power expansion
was a favorite of
hardcore players.because they were the veterans of the
day—they had the most commercial
online experience. They laughed at
us and said we were crazy.”
It wasn’t that EverQuest wanted to
be a multiplayer roleplaying game.
There were dozens of those. And it
wasn’t that EverQuest would sport
state-of-the-art graphics. It was that
McQuaid wanted to combine the two
in a massive open world that
thousands of players could populate
and charge a monthly fee for it. “John
was convinced that it was obvious
that these pay-by-the-hour gameswere limited because you had to have
a lot of money to play, but we
couldn’t make it free like a MUD, so
that’s where the subscription model
came up,” McQuaid says. “People
thought it was a crazy idea.”
With no veterans taking them
seriously, McQuaid posted job
openings at nearby colleges. One of
the level designers was a pizza
delivery guy who got the job based
on enthusiasm alone.
Wanting to repay a favor to two
amateur artists who helped him with
WarWizard 2, McQuaid phoned up
Bill Trost and Kevin Burns. Because
they had no real background in
professional art, the pair joined at
Sony as testers to get their foot in
the door, and worked after hours
designing mockups and art
assets before Smedley was
able to bring them on
full-time. Meanwhile RosieEverQuest
FEATURE
WHERE ARE THEY
NOW?Moving to greener pastures
BRAD MCQUAID
PRODUCER
After leaving Sony Online
Entertainment in 2002,
Brad continued developing
new MMOs. He is currently working on
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, an MMO that
aims to revitalize the genre by rekindling
what made it special in the first place:
Social and complex systems.JOHN SMEDLEY
PRESIDENT
John became the president
of Sony Online
Entertainment (now
Daybreak Games) until 2015 when he
resigned. After a brief stint working on
indie games, John is now working at
Amazon Game Studios on an
unannounced project.BILL TROST
LEAD DESIGNER
After EverQuest’s launch,
Bill led development on
several EverQuest
expansions, EverQuest 2 , and several
other games before jumping ship to Trion
Worlds to work on another MMO.
He’s now at Amazon Game Studios
working with John.ROSIE RAPPAPORT
LEAD ARTIST
Aside from a brief
departure, Rosie stayed at
Sony Online Entertainment
(now Daybreak Games) until 2016 working
on various MMOs. She’s now an adjunct
professor at the Art Institute of San Diego
and is working on a secret project with
developer Secret Society Games.ANDREW SITES
ASSISTANT
PRODUCER
Aside from a brief stint at
Zynga, Andrew has stayed
at Sony Online Entertainment working in a
variety of roles across several games. He
is now the executive producer on the
Planetside 2 franchise, and is growing a
big beard as he works on Planetside Arena.“THEY LAUGHED AT
US AND SAID WE
WERE CRAZY”