While not, strictly speaking, the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), Everquest has a notorious reputation as the first such title to truly break into the mainstream. In his Boss Fight history, Matthew S. Smith covers pretty much everything that both led into Everquest’s original creation, and then, the controversies it inspired. Then for good measure, Smith explains all the options for attempting to play Everquest in the present day. There’s a lot more than you might think.
But first things first. John Smedley is identified as the architect behind Everquest, from a fairly odd position. Despite being a fantasy computer gamer at heart, Smedley made sports games for Sony, a role of increasing importance when the Sony Playstation took off. Consequently, when he played the War Wizard 2 demo by Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover, Smedley was able to use his influence to recruit them to make something completely different- an Ultima killer. For most of the early portions of this book, it feels a bit remarkable that Everquest ever got made at all. The whole idea was completely off brand for Sony.
But then, it was off brand for anyone. As mentioned earlier, Everquest was not the first MMORPG. Without getting too nitpicky about how we define that phrase, it’s safe to say that Ultima Online predated Everquest as a similar kind of game. Why is Ultima Online barely remembered at all today while Everquest is still a legend? Well, the short answer is, because Ultima Online was too competitive. As was the style at the time, Ultima Online allowed players to attack each other pretty much everywhere. The term murder hobo, while somewhat anachronistic in this context, is an accurate summation of the sort of playstyle this kind of design structure incentivized.
The exact tone of Everquest as described here is, amusingly enough, surprisingly similar to the ethos behind the Animal Crossing Boss Fight book by Kelsey Lewin which I reviewed here. It’s a game where you mainly just hang out and talk to people. That’s not the only thing you can do, of course, but the multiplayer structure was designed to be cooperative, not competitive. That’s only one of the many paradoxes belying Everquest, with programming influences from as wildly different places as multi-user dungeons (or MUDs) and the now obscure tank game Tanarus.
Some of the factoids about Everquest sound so absurd I appreciated Smith’s due diligence in being skeptical about which stories are actually true, and which were just hype. This ranges from exaggerations like Everquest being so popular it shut down local Internet in San Diego to the notorious litigator Jack Thompson alleging that Everquest was killing people by having its gameplay be too addictive. For what it’s worth, Smith is far more sympathetic to Elizabeth Woolley, a programmer whose dead son led her to creating a support group for people whose relatives had been consumed by online gaming.
This book is more an exercise in breadth rather than depth. Smith doesn’t dive too deep into any individual topic, and each of the eight chapters tend to focus on completely different people, or more often than that, abstract concepts. Everquest didn’t invent the idea of economic value based on fictional virtual objects, for example, but the game’s sheer popularity and the corporate reaction to such markets are what mark this story as distinctive. The sheer timescale of what’s going on in this story is also a fairly significant journalistic challenge. It’s indisputable that those early controversies eventually led to NFTs and gacha games, less because Everquest caused these incidents and more because they were operating on the same basic economic principles.
As this book delves into those principles, there’s discussion of other games like World of Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies. But surprisingly little of Everquest 2, just because…it wasn’t as popular. Not bad, exactly, it just couldn’t scratch that same nostalgic itch of being the first. In one of the happier endings of this story, emulated servers of the original Everquest are able to make peace with corporate masters who see their weird little quirks, like timed expansions, as more flattering than infringement. It’s a little nuts how many of those there are now, by the way. Thirty-one, the most recent coming out last December. At this rate, the thirty-second expansion will come out this December. If for whatever reason you want to catch up with all the Everquest content you’ve missed out on, better start now so you’ll be all caught up by then.
