| Anniversary In-Game Events - We have introduced dozens of Fabled Luclin NPCs, we brought back all the fabled fiends of years past and there is a new scavenger hunt! Speak with Tyla Filinav in the Nexus if you are interested in helping her collect a few things. These Anniversary Festivities will be available from March 16, 2007 through April 16, 2007. "The Fabled Adventurer" Video Contest - Is your EverQuest character a great traveler, a community leader, or do you have a fabled tale to tell? Want a chance to get an item named after your character? Are you "The Fabled Adventurer"? Then show us the tale of your character. View the Official Contest Page. Festival of Time - March 12th through March 26th. This festival celebrates the anniversary of EverQuest. The Librarians of Myrist, who have been charged with the chronicling and keeping of historical records regarding Norrath, are appropriately heading this celebration. Librarians, and the like, will venture forth into Norrath to spread timeless tales of ancient history and help the peoples of EverQuest remember their past so keep an eye out for these storytellers. EverQuest Anniversary Edition |
Message from the EverQuest Producer
| Eight years of EverQuest... who would have thought that it would have the legs it does? I honestly believe that the original concept of EQ was created to provide a game that the developers wanted to play. It didn’t have as much to do with Ultima Online or other MMO titles that were out at the time. It really came down to a few people with a vision of an online world that they could adventure in with their friends. What it turned into was a run away success that is now known as a classic in the online gaming community. How EQ has changed in all these years, I remember joking about having to kill rats to level and how a snake could kill you in the starting levels. Now I see players coordinating huge raids against some of the most difficult NPC’s ever! The one thing that remains is that EQ is a challenging RPG. EQ players know what it means to have high level characters, the hours of adventuring, collecting and fighting are represented in players that truly stand behind their characters and have an emotional connection that non EQ players have a hard time relating too. We have just rolled out the anniversary content and we will continue to work on addressing Live issues and outstanding bugs. EQ is a huge game and I know that many of you have issues that you would like addressed immediately but I can assure you that we are hard at work fixing bugs, and working to create a better EQ for everyone. One of the areas that I am actually very proud of is our web presence. Our new Community Manager has stepped up the communication between the players and the team and she has quite a few cool ideas that will roll out on the webpage shortly. Since many of you use the page to keep track of the latest news, post and lurk on the message boards and check out all of the other features that EQ players has… I figured that we should focus more of our attention on the actual updates to the page. Ultimately I would like to see the actual players get highlighted on our page. At the end of the day it is the players that should get the recognition, after all we create the world for you all to play in, your accomplishments should be worthy and made public. As we celebrate the 8th anniversary of EQ I would like to thank all of you for helping make EQ what it is today. EQ started as an idea to make a game for people that we thought would be fun to play. EQ has become your game and through player feedback, it will continue to be a game made for the players. Clint Worley EverQuest Producer |
Messages from some members of the original EverQuest Team!
| Bill Trost | Current Job Title: Lead Game Designer, Double Secret Project X Avatar Name: I never had a public avatar name because I wanted to play the game anonymously. It is still surreal to me that so many people are running around in a world partially created around my mom’s kitchen table as a teenager. Thanks so much for supporting EQ and making it more than we ever dreamed it could be. At the beginning, or pretty darn close to it, I was co-creator of EverQuest as well as design lead and sometimes artist. I was one of the first people on the team, hired as an artist to work on user interface as well as develop our first proof of concept game environments. With a long pen-and-paper gaming background to draw upon, I also began to flesh out and establish the lore of Norrath, starting with the pantheon of deities and creation myth and working down from there. Over time, more and more design responsibility fell onto my shoulders as more systems were needed and designers were hired. I touched pretty much every part of the game. The early development milestones were the toughest; working with a tiny team in an overstuffed cube with my sleeping bag under my desk. I have not so fond memories of working on the P90 that was my desktop PC at the time and trying to move a light from one end of a level to another, literally getting seconds per frame. It was not fun. But at the same time, I wouldn’t have rather been doing anything else. That early work really paid off for us though as we were quickly able to demonstrate and get more people to buy into our plan. |
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| What are my Favorite things that I added to EverQuest? Man o man. There is just too much to say. I am very proud of Norrath and I’m totally stoked that people bought into it and made it such a “real” place. I care a lot about the characters in that world. In fact, I was often accused of liking the NPCs more than the player characters. As a former dungeon master, I can’t totally disagree with that. I wanted our NPCs and our world to command the respect of the player. I put those griffins out there. ;) I also like how our NPCs didn’t just occupy space, but actually LIVED in Norrath. Things like Tumpy Irontoe forever hassling Faren on the docks of Qeynos or Fippy Darkpaw and his quixotic siege. I like the characters with emotion and personality and touches of humor. There are just too many, I could go on forever. I’m also proud of the way our faction system turned out and feel it added a ton to the game. I can also take credit(?) for the um… incompleteness of certain dark elf pants. ;) My fondest moment is as a player early on in the EQ’s life, playing with my friends in the Irontoe Brigade and having misadventures in Befallen that we still talk about today. Shipping the game was good too. ;) There were tons of crazy development ideas that never made it into game. But then again, at that time, pretty much EVERYTHING about the game was considered a crazy idea by most people. Many more made it in than didn’t. The one I am still bummed about is that we had lycanthropy in the game. Players could contract the disease and at night would turn into a werewolf. They would then see all the other players and NPCs as “Meat” and could attack anyone. PVP rules be damned! But we ended up taking it out for reasons I can’t even remember now. I thought that was really cool. There is a lot that we see now could have been added. Hindsight is 20/20. But if I could travel back in time I don’t think I would add anything. I think a lot of the charm of EQ then was how it felt like a new frontier. Its quirks and frustrations also gave it character. Time has moved on and new features are awesome and great for new games, but I wouldn’t put them in the EQ of the past. The one thing I wish we would have had back then would be even more quests and interesting NPCs to talk to. I can never get enough of those. | |
| Rosie Cosgrove Rappaport | Current Job Title: Art Director on an unnamed but extremely exciting project I was Art Director for EverQuest 1. Here is a then and now picture of me from Feb 1999 to March 2007. You can see I've been developing more than games!! HAHA.  (Now) Happy Anniversary Message - "Glad I did it! Hope I don't have to do it again!!" |
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| Tony Garcia | Current Job Title: Game Designer on EverQuest II Avatar Name: Vhalen Happy Anniversary EverQuest! Let the Tumpy Tonics flow like they say. When did I start working on EQ? Oh my! I can't recall the actual date, but it was way back in the days when there was no road to Highpass. In those days I was responsible for laying down expanded foundation lore, creating base quests and handing out rusty daggers. Nothing was worse than making launch. I recall those days in the trenches, working in those cubes till the break of dawn. But we were all quite passionate about EQ. It was a labor of love. |
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You know, no matter how small it may seem compared to other content, I really enjoyed creating the Soulfire quest. The story behind that sword has stood the test of time and has reached into the Age of Destiny. My fondest memories went way back to our early days of the game when our guild, The Irontoe Brigade, used to meet up and delve into the mysteries of Befallen. Ah! The many glorious adventures we had there upon passing the locked doors- SCATTER! ...Brigade members everywhere and corpse runs aplenty. There is one other fond memory I cannot ignore, and I am sure many players share it- the first run from Qeynos to Early on, I recall trying to devise a way for an army of gnolls to invade Qeynos Hills. While such invasions would find their way into Norrath down the road, at the time, it seemed like an impossible task due to time constraints. Although it is not a crazy idea, it certainly would have seemed so at that point in development. I would have loved to add flying mounts to zones. I wish I had the time to play EQ. Work keeps me very busy. The world just keeps on growing and growing, each expansion adding more flavor to the universe of EQ.  | |
| Scott McDaniel | Current Job Title: Senior Artist on another product Avatar Name: Believe it or not it was Seru "Wonder Pony" As my old sig used to say "If it's outdoors an object or a spell...I did it" The toughest milestones was doing 74 outdoor zones. I made all of the outdoor zones and objects through Kunark. |
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The things I loved the most were the little touches I added that the designers never asked for: The "combine pillars, the faces on the walls of East Karana, the arms coming out of the ground in Butcherblock, the Ogre shrine in Fondest moment? Pizza at 10:30 at night. Here is an original concept I made of Trakanon:  | |
| Roger Uzun | Current Job Title: EverQuest 2, Designer Avatar Name: Ssra The time immediately after launch was the most stressful, followed closely by the last 6 weeks or so prior to launch. My fondest moments are probably camping areas for rare pops and finding them, in the time when the game was still new so these experiences seemed very different from games past. |
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| From An Anonymous Source: “Roger Uzun lost the source code to the level editor at some point in 1998 due to a hard drive failure. To our horror, we had to piece together a new version of the level editor using backup copies that were sitting on other developer machines. All of these copies ended up being out of date, so some features of the level editor were simply lost to history. Of course, over the years, that level editor was replaced entirely.” ~ Anonymous co-worker Yes I did some of the tools programming as well, but it was sort of on the fly. I do seem to recall we lost some of level ed, but it was after it was done I thought, but I might be misremembering. I think it was when I got a new machine at some point, the old machine had its data lost before I got the source code, but I thought the level eds that were floating around were up to date. Early on the tools development was very chaotic and done as sort of a spare time thing, mostly I was working on the actual game code, the world and zone servers for the most part. | |
| John Buckley | Current Job Title: Senior Technology Architect Despite our passion for the game, there were many doubters during the development of EverQuest. Pursue the things that others consider to be impossible, because the impossible is something worth doing. I joined the EQ team in 1997. I programmed most of the low-level rendering, animation, collision, and lighting systems found in the initial release. The toughest milestone was final. Everyone put a lot of overtime into the game during the last year of development, and this eventually took its toll on the mind and body. |
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| My favorite thing that I added to the game was the avatar rendering and animation systems. I think that the core elements of the game are cooperatively exploring a virtual world, building up the power of your avatar, and building relationships with other players. Actually being able to see the gear that another player has acquired in the game is where all of these elements come together when a player stops to ask, “Where did you get that sword? Can I inspect it?” I really enjoyed spying on the players during Beta to see how the game was actually being played in practice. Although the design made a lot of sense me in some abstract way, it was still just a theory until the beta players joined the game. It was a lot of fun watching the story of one player’s avatar unfolding right in front of you, and then realizing that this was happening to thousands of players simultaneously. The boat system that ferried the players was going to be an entire game mode. There was going to be a dwarf bartender down below that ran a casino with all sorts of mini-games to play. The players were going to have pirate and sea monster encounters, and I think that there was even a debate as to whether players should be allowed to take control of the boats. It turned out that just simply keeping the players on the boats for their entire journey from point A to point B introduced many problems. I always wanted to add an EQ Kart mini-game, but every time that I suggested it people would roll their eyes at me. I say, if the gnomes can build clockworks, then surely they can build racing Karts. Am I the only one? I played it for about 9 months after launch, which was the longest that I have ever played any one game. | |
| Rich Sjoberg | Current Job Title: FX Lead Artist, EverQuest II Avatar Name: RicoEQ I wish we had a photo of the original cubicle that contained the entire EQ team in the beginning! The cube was designed to hold four people but eventually it was packed with the young team's programmers, artists and designers. They put a sign at the entrance that said "Maximum occupancy: ∞ + 1 (infinity + 1). This cubicle was surrounded by game teams all working on Playstation games, who wondered what this PC game would ever amount to! Happy Anniversary Message - The world of Norrath is EverLasting!! |
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| I came on to help with the launch of the game. I redesigned the web site and the front end interface of the game (login, splash screen, etc.). I became the first artist in the newly-formed Platform department. Later I made the installer art. In Platform, I found it a real challenge to convey this cool, animated, 3D world on a web site. Especially with everyone on slow, dial-up modems, how could we show the depth and scale of Norrath with just static screen shots and text? Luckily the game had a great word of mouth following. After launch, a big goal of the web site became conveying information to the players, especially info for the new players, like Customer Service, Tech Support and server status. Our president knew the site was a good conduit to the player base and he was always adamant about getting the word out promptly. It was fun incorporating the fantastic artwork from Keith Parkinson's box art. I integrated it into the game's front end and load screen, as well as the installer and web sites. My fondest moment was visiting the game team's artists while they were toiling to complete the game before launch, seeing their dedication and talent manifest itself in the world of EverQuest. | |
| Don Vercelli | Current Job Title: Senior Vice President of Sales Avatar Name: Anthony I started in 1997 for Sony Interactive Studios America, 989 Studios, Verant Interactive. I was working in sales and marketing. We had 5 titles come from the Studio before EverQuest was released - Twisted Metal, Jet Moto, Tanarus, Cyber Strike and Game Day. When the game was first in development, getting retailers excited was the toughest milestone. Until then they really never had a MMO. UO really gave them a sample and EQ gave them a full taste of what a real MMO could be. |
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| My favorite thing about the game is the living breathing aspect of the world. It’s unique, never the same and always new people to meet. My fondest moment was falling through the tree in Blackburrow about 11:30 at night. I called Smed to “Get me the hell out of there”. He spawned in and we fought our way to the top. The feeling of not wanting to die in game. My heart was pounding. Until then NO game made me feel so excited inside and nervous of the outcome. That is a good game! | |