All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (25 page)

After three years, seemingly endless testing in San Diego and in New York, and $5 million spent, EverQuest was nearly ready to go. But since the budget had ballooned, John Smedley and Kelly Flock would likely be fired at the first hint of failure. None of the suits
on the Sony food chain beyond Flock believed EverQuest would be a success, including Flock’s boss, Howard Stringer. As the head of Sony Pictures, Stringer, though he knew little about games, also oversaw Sony Online Entertainment. Although they had their hopes, many on the EverQuest team, including primary artist Bill Trost, didn’t believe it would recoup its investment either. Sony’s best prognosticators felt that EverQuest might garner thirty thousand players and eventually pay for itself if the expansion packs, smaller versions of the game, were compelling enough. Success for EverQuest would be a Las Vegas–style gamble—a long shot at best.

Even after its initial release, in April 1999, EverQuest was buggy. “EverQuest is down” seemed like a daily warning, as server problems crossed SOE desks via e-mail. The graphics could be choppy, even with a speedy T3 broadband connection. And even seasoned developers felt the game was brutally challenging and often unforgiving. But despite the initial glitches, EverQuest was an immediate success, an all-around victory for those involved, selling one hundred thousand copies in the first day alone. The core team was ecstatic because their royalty rate would be above 10 percent. But more, they were gamers who were proud of the niche they had popularized.

EverQuest succeeded not only because it filled a void at the right time. People were flush with disposable income in the late nineties, so they did not mind paying EverQuest’s monthly fee along with a hefty retail price for the game disk. But it was more than the money. In New York, half of Sony’s Madison Avenue office was still entranced by the game that would make
Time
magazine’s “best of” list in 1999. At night if you looked over the various cubicles, you saw that people in the office were utterly under its spell, staying in midtown until all hours of the night just to play and, on many occasions, to flirt with each other in-game. It wasn’t simply a game in which you played the role of a mage or elf and leveled up. EverQuest was an early social networking experience in which one of the snooty
directors of some Sony media company could fall in love with one of Sony’s equally snooty consultants as they hacked and slayed flying insects together in the early levels of the game. It was love at first fight.

Massively multiplayer online role playing games were considered the next big thing in the 1990s, but they’d been present in some form for decades. As early as 1974, Steve Colley created a game called MazeWar that would work with as many as thirty players on the feeble Apple network. MazeWar’s graphics looked like a black-and-white pen-and-ink drawing come to life. It was, though rudimentary, a 3-D-ish game where you played as a
Chien Andalou
–style eyeball. The goal was straightforward: shoot from your eyeball to hit other eyeballs. MazeWar’s inventiveness helped Colley land a job at NASA, where he worked for a while on the Mars rover. Then, in 1997, Richard Garriott made an admirable foray into the MMO genre with Ultima Online. Within months of its debut, Ultima Online had 100,000 subscribers who paid monthly fees to play in a world that, except for more primitive artwork, was not unlike EverQuest. The financial success of Ultima Online allowed Garriott, whose father was a NASA astronaut, to take a $30 million ride to the Russian space station and to create a remarkable collection of space-related memorabilia—including a Lunokhod 2 lunar rover from the USSR that still is parked on the moon.

To the number crunchers at Sony, the beauty of MMOs was akin to the beauty of cell phone services in which subscribers pay for outgoing and incoming calls. In other words, they get you to pay twice. In the world of MMOs, users bought the retail disk in their local game store. Then, after a thirty-day trial period, they paid a monthly fee of $10 to $15 for unlimited play time online. Most of the online games in the 1990s had merely acceptable graphics because the modems at the time could only handle fifty-six kbps of data—if you were lucky. The computer servers (not just Sony’s) seemed to go down with a steady constancy. But you didn’t moan
all that much, because you were experiencing something that let you dream communally in worlds you before could only experience in solo play. In EverQuest, what amounted to the population of large towns were online at once, cooperating in little groups. They were loving it, exploring a vast world that seemed to have no end—and occasionally becoming so addicted that players nicknamed the game EverCrack. When a couple got married in EverQuest, everyone at Sony’s Manhattan office was elated, marveling over the minor miracle of modern technology. When a guy had a heart attack after playing incessantly, everyone tried to hush it up. The party line on the sixth floor was “It couldn’t be the game that jump-started the heart attack. It was the guy’s own fault if he played for days on end without a break, certainly not ours.”

Thanks to EverQuest, PC gaming felt new again, reinvigorated, magical. You could listen to a song for a few minutes. You could watch a movie for a couple of hours. You could read a book for maybe thirty hours. But EverQuest was the epic’s epic; once you were in it, you didn’t want to leave. It was essential to your existence.

If you were an EverQuest gamer, you were a faithful, committed gamer, one who had to purchase a graphics acceleration card, an attachment with its own memory that juiced the animation quality for your computer, just to get the game to work. You played because the world was so vast, so much so you felt as if your life span would have to be extended by a decade to finish all the quests within. For all intents and purposes, you were living within another world. EverQuest dared you to become addicted by making you sink perhaps forty hours to get to only the tenth level of experience. You would think, “Maybe if I just spend another hour, I’ll level up and be stronger. OK, maybe two hours. And then maybe I can cast that spell and defeat that——.” And then when you looked up to the real world clock, it was three in the morning. At that thirty- or forty-hour point, you would gingerly set foot in a land called Crescent Reach and proceed
cautiously into the ghostly Blightfire Moor. There you would perish if you chose to engage creeping, dragonlike Hedge Devils or the dreaded Southern Moorwalker, kind of an overfed Komodo dragon. What EverQuest was trying to get you to do was to start a gang, a group of six friends who would do more than pillage and fight. Your friends from hither and yon would help one another out, save one another from dying at the hands of others, and try to kill that generally unkillable Sleeper, a dragon the size of the Empire State Building, who, once awakened, would pounce upon all those near and far on the server, killing hundreds of characters unlucky enough to be online in its evil wake. More generally, if you were slashed by a monster, the designated healer in your group would fix you up with alacrity. And if your soul cried out for peace and musing, you could get a pole and fish, or sit and darn clothing instead.

Each month the number of EverQuest fans grew by leaps and bounds, often by the thousands. It was like the stock market at the time: Nothing could stop its rise into the millions of players. If EverQuest only sold three million copies at retail stores, it would have been a talked about hit. But that crazy monthly subscription revenue added to Sony’s coffers in an off-the-charts way.

In this new world, Sony was unprepared for the cheaters and snake oil salesmen, those players who would hawk items on the auction site eBay that would make your warrior become stronger, like spinach to Popeye. Sony was forced to assume the role of politicians and policy wonks who needed to police a city and keep people safe from harm. When a member wrote fan fiction that included the rape of an underage girl, that player was banned forever. Customer service phone lines were often jammed, leading the company to create an army of part-timers at phone banks in San Diego, who would eventually number more than the full-timers.

Yet EverQuest’s days on top of the MMO heap were numbered. The first blow came when Shawn Woolley, a clinically depressed
twenty-one-year-old player from Wisconsin, shot himself in front of the computer on Thanksgiving morning, 2001. It happened either after a friend known online as “iluvyou” stole his achievements in the game or after he decided to no longer be friends with Shawn. His family firmly believed the MMO was the tipping point in Woolley’s demise.

Woolley’s tragic death was an aberration. The vast majority of those who played felt they were made better by the social experience that led to a collegiality among gamers, gamers who would actually meet one another face-to-face at the EverQuest Fan Faire convention. In this new world of PC gaming, CD-ROMs were the old thing. The new killer hardware was the graphics card and the modem, for with that online connection, social gaming exploded. In the process of leveling up, you made virtual friends in addition to the friends you hung with every day. You felt worldly when you talked online with a pal in Vancouver or Los Angeles, and you had a stake in his or her life, too. If you were shy in a crowd, you could let loose online, where no one could see you. In other words, you could reinvent yourself and become the character you always wanted to be. And you could cosplay, dress up like your character at conventions or meet-ups, playing the role you had online in real life. It was nerds together and nerds as one, up all night and having the time of their lives. Once EverQuest hit, every publisher had to think about making an MMO. No one wanted to be left behind. It was that powerful a force.

But even as EverQuest’s popularity skyrocketed, someone was building a better nerdtrap. By 2005, there would be a new behemoth in the shire, one that would make many forget about the joys of Norrath. Three college kids, generally unassuming but very aware of the state of games, knew in their Orcan souls that EverQuest was too difficult for many gamers to play, something that Smedley, McQuaid, and the team hadn’t realized when they made their first version.

Chris Metzen was finishing a wry but passionate set in some dump of a coffeehouse off the Imperial Highway. He was not singing about games, for games really were not his true passion; rock and drawing ruled his life. The comic book lover and speed metal musician had named his metal band Ouroboros, for the serpent that constantly devours its tail in Greek myth. In
Timaeus
, Plato describes Ouroboros as “a being that was self-sufficient,” and that was part of Chris’s reason for giving that name to the band: They would take things into their own hands to be successful. That night in Brea, Metzen was playing under his own name with a bandmate, and the crowd wasn’t large, to be charitable. But they liked his songs and they liked Metzen’s banter. Metzen was blessed with a brilliant gift of gab, and he exuded enthusiasm, kind of like Handsome
Dick Manitoba, the philosophizing front man of punk rock’s the Dictators.

Metzen was a natural when it came to comic book art. So he performed his set for a few people, sat down at a table, and started doodling an intricate dragon on a napkin to pass the time before heading back to the stage. He drew constantly, sometimes just to take himself out of a situation, sometimes just to calm down. He gravitated toward rendering superhero teams, like the X-Men or Fantastic Four, where family structure had been broken down by often acerbic personalities who were broken themselves. But in the end the freaks with superpowers always seemed to come together and bring out the best in one another as they endured severe adversity. As a kid, Metzen would pedal his bike to the local liquor store to plunk down 60 cents for, say, Walt Simonson’s magnificent version of Marvel’s
The Mighty Thor
. Once at the liquor store, he couldn’t stop buying, stocking up on as many comics as he could afford.

But neither the artwork nor the band gigs were going anywhere as far as money went. He hated school, and school hated him back. He was a teen stuck working on the loading dock at the local JC Penney, breaking his back and making about $8 an hour.

Later that night, a friend of a friend stopped by the table to shoot the shit and noticed the drawing with the winged dragon. “Geez, that rocks, man,” he said before passing on a business card for a new company called Chaos Studios (soon to be renamed Silicon & Synapse). The guy told Metzen that they really needed artists there. Metzen put the card in the back pocket of his jeans and didn’t give it much thought. Two days later, he set up a meeting. If the interview in Costa Mesa went badly or if the boss dissed his portfolio, it wouldn’t matter too much. He would forget any failure by heading to Arizona for some wild days of off-road racing—right after the meeting.