Just two days from the end of our Season 7 Kickstarter, it's time for another author Q&A! This time, DDR author Jessica Doyle interviews Matthew S. Smith about his EverQuest book. They discuss MMOs, launch drama, crunch, addiction, and the best ways to play a 25-year-old online game.

Jessica Doyle: You played EverQuest when it first came out in 1999. What was the experience like? And what made you decide to write a book about the game?

Matthew S. Smith: Playing EverQuest on release was like nothing else before or since. Stepping into an online world with no information besides what was available in the manual is something most players just can’t experience today. It was unpredictable, fresh, and exhilarating. Getting lost in a forest after dark (and I did, because my first character was a Human, which lacks night vision), was genuinely scary.

Of course, I didn’t decide to write a book until years later, around 2014 or 2015. At that time I saw some MMORPGs, like Wildstar, come and go, and also saw Bungie launch Destiny, an FPS-MMO hybrid (though it took them a long time to admit the second part). I began to realize many of the trends I was seeing started with EverQuest.

One of the stories you tell about EverQuest’s development is the horrific crunch period that immediately preceded launch—one developer was apparently put off pizza for life. Terrible working conditions at crunch time are well-known in the video-games industry now, but was that true in 1998? And did the crunches continue?

I’ve dug into the development of many mid-90s computer games for my YouTube channel, Computer Gaming Yesterday, including titles like Baldur’s Gate and Homeworld. And what I’ve learned is that, yes, in the 1990s, intense crunch was common.

Something that’s different between then and now is that in the 1990s, though, is that virtually everyone in the industry who wasn’t in an executive position was young (usually in their 20s — often, early 20s, and sometimes even late teens, though I don’t think that was true with the EverQuest team). They were energetic, didn’t have much on-the-job experience, and had less commitments in their personal life than older employees would, which made them prone to throwing everything into the game they were working on.

To be fair, in some cases, that worked out really well for them! Some of the people who worked on EverQuest made a decent living out of it, or went on to high-paying roles at other studios.

But the crunch also had its consequences. A lot of the EverQuest team was burnt out and wanted to work on a different game after the original launch. Because of that, there was a definite “changing of the guard” from the original developers to their successors, who in some cases were EverQuest players. But eventually, EverQuest’s development did reach a more reasonable pace. And that was the result of a very intentional effort by the team’s leaders to lessen the crunch, because it just was not sustainable.

You make the point that EverQuest’s launch problems, such as new players not being able to create accounts for hours on end, didn’t get the same scrutiny that a game releasing today might. Why is that? How do you think EverQuest would have been received in today’s gaming-consumer environment?

I think it comes down to the slower pace of news, and lower player expectations, at the time.

Many gamers were still getting their news from magazines at the time, and those that were publishing online had plenty of blind spots in their coverage. There was also less of a sense that fans of the hobby had to be plugged-in to news about games 24-7.

Plus, game reviews often didn’t appear until several months after release! By the time that happened, many problems were fixed.

Much of the criticism, where it did appear, came from the nascent blogosphere of ultra-passionate players: sites like Dr. Twister and Lum the Mad. But even as influential as they were in their niche, I think the vast majority of players didn’t see those sites until after they’d bought an MMORPG and started to look for deeper information about it.

Absolutely, EverQuest would be received differently if it suffered launch problems today. But also, developers were much less experienced in running online persistent games back then, and had far fewer tools to work with. So I think a team with a level of experience and budget has an easier time launching an online game today.

And we are actually seeing that happen: Embers Adrift and the upcoming Monsters & Memories are examples of MMORPGs built by small teams, something only possible with modern software tools and online infrastructure.

I thought one of the most fascinating chapters was on the idea of “EverCrack” and video-game addiction, which was a big public concern in 2000 and really isn’t now, despite statistics showing people play more video games, for longer, than they did in 2000. Are we all just addicted to video games now and not admitting it?

That observation is one reason I wanted to include this chapter. Valheim had just released around the time I was outlining the book, and that’s the kind of game where many people in the community will insist you haven’t really experienced the game unless you’ve spent 500 or 1,000 hours in it. And that viewpoint is hugely disconnected from views on gaming around 2000, where news reports often depict gamers who play for two hours a night as having a problem.

The other reason I wanted to talk about the game addiction controversy surrounding EverQuest is to highlight the real impacts, positive and negative, that can happen when a person becomes obsessive about a hobby.

The story of Shawn Woolley, who committed suicide while playing EverQuest, is one that I highlight in the book, and which I remember seeing in the paper at the time it occurred, as it caused me to reflect on how I was playing games in my personal life at the time. On the other hand, a great many people met friends and even fell in love in EverQuest, and had their lives tangibly improved forever. The EQ Fan Fairies are a great early example of how games can create community. And again, personally, games like EverQuest have brought me plenty of social connections and friends over the years.

To get back to the question - “are we all just addicted to video games now and not admitting it?” - I’m not sure there’s a broad answer to that. What counts as addiction? What’s positive, and what’s negative? It requires a personal look at how a person is playing. And that was a challenge of concluding the chapter. Because I think this debate will continue for literally the remainder of human civilization.

People can still play EverQuest, though they have to jump through some extra hoops to do it now. (That’s often true of Dance Dance Revolution now, too, by the way.) What effects does that have on the player base?

Anyone can download and play EverQuest for free on the official servers, and I think that’s the easiest and most sensible way for most people to jump into the game today. EverQuest’s official servers were also among the first to explore the idea of time-locked progression servers, and those servers become available on a yearly cadence, with the latest launching in mid-2024 as part of the game’s 25th anniversary celebration. The emulated servers, which often target older expansions, require a lot more steps, which makes them less appealing to some newcomers, but they preserve the game’s earlier incarnations.

While the variety of TLPs and emulated servers is mostly good for the game, I think EverQuest does suffer from a divided player base. Contrary to what some claim, there’s at least in the low tens of thousands of people playing EverQuest routinely. But you might not know that from the number of players you see on any one server. It’s a big community that’s spread too thin.

I’m not sure what can be done about that for EverQuest, but it’s something modern developers in charge of an MMORPG should consider as it ages. World of Warcraft is a great example, and once again it’s following in EverQuest’s footsteps. The effort to expand on World of Warcraft: Classic is already causing division inside that community.

What do you think EverQuest’s biggest legacy is? (Is it World Of Warcraft, whose developers loved EverQuest? A change in the way people approached video games? A change in the way people approached role-playing more generally? None of the above?)

I think that EverQuest contributed greatly to a change in how people engaged with video games, at least in the west.

Before EverQuest, the western games industry, and gamers themselves, seemed to subscribe to a “Hollywood” model. A game was released, enjoyed, and finished. If it was successful, it would get an expansion pack. If it was really successful, it would get some sequels. But it was ultimately something designed for a player to appreciate and then move past.

EverQuest was a game that showed, in a wide variety of ways, games can have deeper, sustained relationships with their players, and that players would pay a lot of money over the box price for the privilege. The extent of this impact surprised even the EverQuest developers: they were caught off guard by eBay auctions for in-game items and characters, because they had no idea that people would find their game so enjoyable they’d be willing to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have more fun or get ahead.

There’s a line to be drawn from EverQuest to modern live service games. Of course, that line is interrupted by other games that are more popular today, like World of Warcraft or Destiny and then Fortnite. But EverQuest was a turning point, for sure.