How EverQuest Changed Online Gaming

How a group of nobodies made EverQuest and forever changed online gaming.

- Steven Messner

You don’t know what success feels like until you’ve tanked the biggest internet pipeline into San Diego for a week minimum. Sure, most online games have network issues on day one, but in 1999 EverQuest wasn’t just coughing out innocuous error codes. It was so popular that the internet provider hosting its servers had to physically run more cables to Los Angeles just to accommodate the tens of thousands of players dying to explore its cutting-edge 3D world.

“We used it all,” laughs John Smedley, one of EverQuest’s creators. “All of it. It was the largest internet connection into San Diego, and it was constantly going down. It messed up internet here in San Diego for a good solid week.”

During that seven-day nightmare, every corporation on that network had their online operations sabotaged by a bunch of nerds who’d somehow been given $4.5 million dollars and a mission to create something extraordinary. And for its time EverQuest was nothing if not extraordinary.

It was a Saturday morning in February of 1996 when Brad McQuaid picked up the phone. The man on the other end introduced himself as John Smedley, an executive from Sony Interactive Studios America. As 27-year-old McQuaid struggled to comprehend what was happening, Smedley cut straight to the chase, “I have some good news and some bad news.”

Many months earlier, McQuaid and his friend Steve Clover had made a desperate attempt to realize a childhood dream. Since he was a kid playing Ultima 2 on his school’s Apple IIe, all McQuaid wanted to do was make a sprawling, inventive RPGs like Richard Garriott did with Ultima