people that like this kind of game, or is this something
that could be commercially viable.”
It was at the Game Developers Conference in Long
Beach, California that McQuaid finally realized EverQuest
might be successful. It was the spring of 1998, and the
EverQuest team was there to demo the fledgling MMO in
hopes of getting some valuable feedback. “We set up eight
or ten computers in two rows, and we allowed people to
come up and create a level one character and just run
around, figure out the game, kill stuff, and talk to people.”
To give everyone a chance, players could play for just
20 minutes before they’d have to log out. But “a lot of
them would leave one computer and sneak around to the
other side, and log into their account and continue playingBELOW: Fantasy:
Where it’s never too
cold for a revealing
leather onesie.launched a year earlier, and proven
that online RPGs with monthly
subscriptions could be profitable.
Interest in online gaming was surging
as EverQuest inched closer to release.
And then Sony’s upper
management found out about
Smedley’s little secret.
With the constant mergers and
restructuring of Sony’s various
corporate divisions in the late ’90s, it
was more like a barbarian horde than
a Roman legion—a loose assemblage
of tribes that, more often than not,
devoured each other.
What you need to know is that at
some point, Sony Interactive Studios
of America became 989 Studios, and
then, some time after, shifted focus
towards developing PlayStation 2
games in anticipation of its launch.
For over two years Smedley had been
running interference, and doing his
best to keep EverQuest a secret.
Somewhere in that corporate
shuffle, Smedley’s passion project
was discovered by Japanese
upper management.
That was when Kelly Flock,
Smedley’s boss, gave him his own
dose of good news and bad news.
“Kelly just didn’t have the backing
from Tokyo to launch a PC business,”
Smedley explains. “But he did have
the backing to let us go out and look
for corporate suitors.”
Sony had put enough money into
EverQuest that they didn’t want to
can it, but they weren’t going to
continue feeding it, either. Despite
trying to hide it from his own bosses,
Flock believed EverQuest had
potential, so he had arranged a
deal—Smedley and his team could
continue to work on EverQuest as a
partially-independent studio, but they
would need to find another corporate
investor to split the bill.
Though a Microsoft offer was on
the table ready to be signed, Smedley
ultimately found a corporate suitor in
a different Sony company called Sony
Online Entertainment. The EverQuest
team formed their own company,
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. “Wetheir character” McQuaid noticed.
“We had to constantly police and pull
people away from EverQuest so other
people could experience it. And some
people even got a little belligerent.
When you’re prying people away
from your own game that you’re
trying to demo, that’s a good sign.”
Richard Garriott’s groundbreaking
MMO, Ultima Online, had alsoEverQuest
FEATURE
MEET YOUR IDOLS
Crossing paths with
Lord British
During Everquest’s development, McQuaid
had the surreal opportunity meet his hero
and inspiration, Richard Garriott, and show
him the game. McQuaid has a picture that
he still keeps nearby. “That was just an
amazing moment, sitting down with him,”
McQuaid says. “He’s the nicest guy in the
world too. He checked out EverQuest and
played it for a while, and was asking
questions. It was a mind-blowing day. I can
check that off my bucket list.”
Today, years later, McQuaid and
Garriott are good friends.