This article tells part of the story of MMORPGs.
It isn’t always or even usually the pioneers who reap the rewards of the trails they blaze. As often as not, some pragmatic Johnny-come-lately pops in to make off with the booty.
Such was the case in the MMORPG space in the late 1990s. There Ultima Online demonstrated that there was an audience for a persistent fantasy world where people could live out alternative existences together through the magic of the Internet. Yet it was another game called EverQuest that turned the proof of concept into a thriving business that enthralled hundreds of thousands of players for years on end, generating enormous amounts of money in the process. For, while the first-mover advantage should not be underestimated, there’s something to be said for being the second mover as well. EverQuest got to watch from backstage as Ultima Online flubbed line after line and stumbled over assorted pieces of scenery. Then, with a list in hand of what not to do, it was able to stride confidently onto center stage to a standing ovation. No one ever said that show business is fair.
EverQuest came to evince a markedly different personality than Ultima Online, but its origin story bears some uncanny similarities to that of the older rival it demolished. Like Ultima Online, EverQuest was born as a sort of skunk-works project within a larger company whose upper management really wasn’t all that interested in it. Like Ultima Online, EverQuest enjoyed the support of just one executive within said company, who set it in motion and then protected and nourished it like the proverbial mother hen. And like the executive behind Ultima Online, the one behind EverQuest plucked a pair of designers out of utter obscurity to help him hatch the egg.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the EverQuest origin story is the name of the company where it all went down: Sony Interactive Studios America. Suffice to say that, if you were to guess circa 1996 which publisher and studio would launch a market-transforming MMORPG later in the decade, Sony would not be high in your rankings. The Japanese mega-corp was flying high at the time, with a prominent footprint in most sectors of home electronics and mainstream entertainment, but it had hardly any presence at all on personal computers. The Sony PlayStation, launched in September of 1995 in North America and Europe, was on its way to becoming the most successful single games console of the twentieth century, a true mass-market cultural sensation that broadened the demographic for videogames and forever changed the way that the public perceived them. With a mainstream pile driver like that to hand, why should Sony want to waste its time with a wonky virtual world for nerds cosplaying as dwarves and mages?
It wound up doing so thanks to one man. At the beginning of 1996, John Smedley had been working for a few years as a producer at Sony Interactive, which focused almost exclusively on sports games for the PlayStation. Just 28 years old, Smedley already had a corner office with a view and a salary to match, as he and his colleagues rode the wave of the console’s incredible early success.
There was just one problem: Smedley didn’t particularly like sports, whether they happened to be played on the field or on the television screen. He had grown up as one of the kids that the jocks made fun of, the kind who walked to school every day with a Dungeons & Dragons rule book or two under his arm. It was only thanks to opportunism and happenstance that he had wound up helming projects aimed at gamers who worshiped John Madden rather than Gary Gygax. Now, he thought that the burgeoning Internet would soon make it possible to realize an old dream of 1980s nerds like him: that of playing Dungeons & Dragons online, whenever it suited you, instead of only when you could arrange to meet in person with five or so like-minded friends — assuming you even had such friends. He had a rough blueprint for how it might work, in the form of Neverwinter Nights, a game on America Online that let you effectively play one of the old single-player SSI Gold Box CRPGS over the Internet, taking a persistent character through a series of adventures with friends and strangers. It was limited in a thousand ways, but it was, so Smedley believed, the harbinger of a whole new category of game. And, after working for so long on games he really didn’t care about, he wanted to make one that he could feel passionate about.
Smedley took his idea to his boss Kelly Flock, the newly arrived head of Sony Interactive. It was a crazy thing to propose on the face of it, having absolutely nothing to do with anything the studio had ever done before nor any of the strategic priorities of the mother corporation; the PlayStation didn’t have any online capabilities whatsoever, meaning this game would have to run on personal computers. But Sony was flush with PlayStation cash and bravado, and Flock was apparently in a generous mood. He told Smedley that he could take $800,000 and hire a team to investigate the feasibility of his idea, as long as he continued to devote the majority of his time to his primary job of churning out crowd-pleasing sports games.
Those of you familiar with the tale of Ultima Online will recognize Sony Interactive standing in for Origin Systems, and John Smedley taking the role of Richard Garriott. EverQuest’s equivalent of Raph and Kristen Koster, who swept into Origin from the obscure world of textual MUDs to create Ultima Online in their image, was a pair of friends named Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover. They were programming automation and bookkeeping systems for a San Diego plant nursery during the early 1990s, working on a single-player CRPG of their own during their off hours. They called it WarWizard. Unfortunately, it was for the Commodore Amiga, a dying platform in North America. Unable to interest a publisher in a game in an unfashionable genre for a computer that was fast disappearing, they released WarWizard under the shareware model in 1993; the following year, they made an MS-DOS port available as well. By McQuaid and Clover’s own later reports, it garnered about 1500 registrations — not bad for a shareware game, but definitely not enough to let the friends quit their day job.
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