10 Years Ago is a recurring feature that looks at
whatever the new hotness was around this time 3,652 days ago.
Ostensibly it will look at the game’s impact both in past and present
terms, but mostly it will just make you feel really old.
While not the first successful MMORPG (Ultima Online is frequently cited for this accolade), EverQuest (released March 16, 1999) was undoubtedly the first truly culturally relevant MMORPG, and the first one to achieve critical mass in its player base. The things EverQuest did in its five years at the top of the genre defined not only the way MMORPGs are designed. It also codified how the MMO business is structured, cemented a great many aspects of massive game player culture, and began the controversies that continue to haunt the genre to this day. It’s hard to overstate how much EverQuest has contributed to the medium, and you could certainly make an argument for it being the most important game of the last ten years (though you only have the rest of the day to do so).
In retrospect, it’s easy to see EverQuest as the culmination of the interesting online game experimentation that went on in the mid 90s, in games like Meridian 59 and The Realm and at companies like Stormfront and Mythic. In addition, Ultima Online proved that there was a significant market for subscription-based online gamine as far back as 1997.
EverQuest has gone through many UI and graphical overhauls in the last decade. This video represents a long defunct version of the game.
EverQuest made all of those projects look like relics. At a time when just being an MMO alone was considered a marked technological achievement, EQ managed to render its large-scale world in an incredibly modern 3D engine. With its graphics alone bringing in newer, more casual players, EverQuest also sought to take some of the harder edges off the genre, taking (for the time) major steps to limit player killing and encourage more cooperative play. It still wasn’t completely intuitive—the original interface (which has since been iterated out of existence), for example, was a rather kludgy attempt to keep massive amounts of game data available to the player at all times—but it was an improvement over the intimidating MMORPGs that it was competing with.
This more casual slant, combined with gameplay that pulled the most addictive parts from MUDs, D&D, and its predecessors, made EverQuest a sensation. Reviewers loved it, simultaneously praising and warning against its incredibly addictive nature. At the end of 1999, it was simultaneously winning game of the year awards while surpassing the incumbent UO’s subscriber base. Bolstered by frequent updates and sizable expansion packs, “EverCrack” quickly became a gaming institution.
The industry immediately took notice. EQ proved that a single living game could not only do strong retail sales for years, but could also draw high monthly fees from a satisfied player base of up to nearly half a million players. It was a temptation that few publishers could resist, and the ensuing years were filled with “EverQuest killers” that looked and played similarly to EQ in the hopes of drawing a positive comparison.
And which that much, um, sincere flattery, tropes were created. It’s almost impossible to count the number of MMO memes and standards that began in EQ, but here’s a fairly prominent one: raiding did not really exist before EverQuest. Today these large-scale uber-challenges are standard issue content in most MMO end games. Interlocking guild-based character classes like tanks and buffers also came to prominence in this game, as did jargon that is now used across the entirety of the genre—phrases like, you guessed it, “tank,” “buffer,” and “raid”.
Like any work at the vanguard of a new cultural movement, EverQuest drew controversy. Most of these issues were non-specific to EQ itself, but rather endemic to the genre the game led. The idea of game addiction became more prominent than ever in discussions about the game, and anecdotes of people who flunked out of college or were left by their wives because of their EverQuest habit rapidly made the rounds. An even more fascinating cultural problem cropped up in the form of gold farming, as third world-based sweatshops began playing the game nonstop and offering spoils to the highest bidder. When World of Warcraft did prove to be the EverQuest killer of legend, it inherited these and similar issues of psychology and economy.
EverQuest’s PC version is still actively maintained and updated by Sony Online Entertainment; its most recent expansion came out last October. Of course, a free trial is available. There is also a Mac version, but it exists mostly as a curio—it hasn’t been updated in years, meaning it lacks the game’s rolling graphical upgrades as well as the content of the last eleven expansion packs. The effect of this lazy maintenance schedule means the Mac version acts as a time capsule of EverQuest at the height of its influence. So it’s an interesting historical artifact, and one that’s freely accessible until Apple inevitably breaks the game in an operating system update (and that assumes you can even get it to work at the moment, because it sure did look funny on my machine).
Previously on Ten Years Ago This Week:
Army Men 3D
Silent Hill
Syphon Filter
Alpha Centauri
