FROM THE MOMENT Brad McQuaid set foot in John Smedley’s office in March 1996, he knew he’d found a kindred spirit.
Business executives kept their desks neat and tidy to better display their notepads and pricey pens, their calendars and business cards. Not Smedley, whom McQuaid and the rest of the team came to refer to as Smed.
“I'm a big Magic: The Gathering fan, and I walked into his office and saw a Magic deck sitting on his desk. I remember thinking, Is this for real?” McQuaid said.
Smed remembered his first meeting with McQuaid and Steve Clover differently. “I'm not sure if it was Magic cards because I don't know if we were playing Magic by then. In fact, I know we weren't. It was probably fantasy books on my desk.”
Fantasy novels or collectible cards, the effect was the same. The more Smed listened to McQuaid and Clover talk about their ideas for an online, fantasy-themed RPG, the more he knew he’d found the captains to his team. They were ace coders, they had their own ideas about fantasy tropes and the shape an online RPG might take, and they knew the burgeoning PC space, which had started out niche but exploded ever since 1993 when Doom proved to the mainstream that PCs were good for more than text adventures and Minesweeper.
“You could see that they had this idea in their heads of what they wanted to make,” Smed recalled. “I've always said that the major job I do is empowering people to make the things they want. This fit perfectly for me, because all I had in my head was playing D&D. Everything Brad was talking about completely gelled with me. Our connection was instant because Brad was so passionate. Steve was a lot quieter, but the passion came out of him, too.”
McQuaid and Clover also had an ace up their sleeve. Milo Cooper, the artist who’d worked on WarWizard with them, was already working at Sony Interactive Studios (SIS) America in San Diego. He’d needed to support himself and, when it became apparent that WarWizard wouldn’t provide that support, had taken a job creating art for NFL Game Day.
In fact, Smed had consulted with Cooper on the prospect of hiring McQuaid and Cooper before phoning them for an interview. “Milo put in a good word, and later, it all came full circle,” said McQuaid. “Milo said, ‘The heck with Game Day. I'm working on the RPG.’”
While Smed’s primary responsibility was managing production for sports games, his upstart RPG team, and the culture they created together, was like a rock in the middle of a turbulent sea, and talk of sports broke around them like waves.
“We started playing Magic around 1997, maybe even '98,” Smed said. “It had been around for a while, but it became, straight up, all we did at lunch. A lot of lunches went on for an hour and a half. We played with advanced decks, and that's the most fun I've ever had in my life: Being with a group of gamers was just a magical time, no pun intended.”
“Even though his shop was primarily a PlayStation One [studio], he had the vision for where online gaming could go, and so did we,” McQuaid added. “We would go over to his house and play into the night. We'd have 10 guys there and be just thrashed the next day. He was a real gamer. Usually you don't get that in a boss. You get more of a corporate personality. Everything just fell into place.”
As work on the RPG progressed, the sports guys took notice. Like the studio’s projects—half managed by Smed, half managed by his partner—the culture fractured. Programmers and artists working on NFL Game Day and NHL FaceOff would make snide comments about “the ghouls and goblins guys” working on their nerdy fantasy game. As Sony’s PlayStation became a market leader in large part due to the quality of the sports titles SIS America was putting out, the gap widened.
“The ghouls-and-goblins thing was not a private joke; it was said out loud,” Smed remembered. “Nobody really thought anything of the games we were making.”
McQuaid’s fixation on the online RPG more than made up for anyone’s lack of faith. He and Clover bandied ideas together and with Smed, from the races and playable classes they wanted, to names for continents, cities, forests, and bogs. As they talked, they wrote, drafting and redrafting a 20-page design document labeled simply The Online RPG.
“I've always like to deal with the high-level vision on projects,” McQuaid said. “What interested me was more vision level: What is going to make all the pieces of this game work? Are they going to come together? Are they going to complement each other? Will they achieve our goals of making a community-based shared experience?”
On most subjects, McQuaid and Smed saw eye-to-eye. One area where they differed was on the type of world “the online RPG” should provide to players. Smed wanted a seamless experience, fields that fed naturally into rolling hills, into rivers and oceans, into new lands with new characters to meet and quests to embark upon. McQuaid saw the appeal of a seamlessly connected world. He also knew it wasn’t going to happen.
“Not with this engine,” he told Smed flatly on numerous occasions.
Smed stood his ground for two out of the three years he and the team spent developing their game. It was only when McQuaid explained to him, step by step, why the engine used for Tanarus simply could not accommodate an unbroken world that he relented. Due to the tech they were using, the world would have to be broken into areas, or zones, that would load in when players crossed the lines delineating one from the next.
“I'm the sort of manager where, if you can show me why something's not possible, I just say, ‘Oh. Okay.’ That comes from my programming background,” Smed explained. “It was a lot easier to appeal to me [with facts], and I can walk away. Brad remembers how much I was pounding on those guys to get them to make it happen, and I still remember the day he came to me and said, ‘Look, it's not going to happen.’ I pouted for two days.”
On one auspicious occasion, everyone on the growing team was in accord. McQuaid, Smed, and several others were sitting in a conference room, kicking around ideas for a title. They couldn’t keep calling their game the online RPG forever. For their embryonic creation to feel real to them, it needed a proper name.
Steve Clover shifted in his chair. “EverQuest,” he said clearly.
For a long moment, everyone went quiet. Grins broke out around the table. “Everybody in the conference room just knew that was the name,” said McQuaid.
The name came with one potentially enormous piece of baggage. There was a pirate satellite system that, through BBSes, could decode satellite channels so pirates could watch any TV channel they wanted for free.
“It was called EverQuest, but we didn't realize that at the time,” Smed explained. “When we looked it up later, we said, ‘Yeah, that's illegal, and we'll just take our chances.’ Steve came up with the name and it just stuck.”
