On May 14, 2007 the front doors to Sigil Games’ office studio were locked, the lights were off, and the only explanation was a printed sign taped to the window informing everyone that there was a meeting in the parking lot.  “Brad wants to address everyone,” it said.

For president and founder of Sigil Games Brad McQuaid this was not unusual.  He had always been something of an eccentric.  The driving force behind the creation of the market defining title, EverQuest, was not at home in board rooms or staff meetings where they argued about esoteric topics like budgets and business plans.  Brad had labored to cultivate the image of a digital frontiersman or pioneer, standing on boxes and directing potential investors, would be talent, and the curious gawkers towards his crude demos like the showman at a carnival.  And this crazy impoverished passion always worked.  It struck a chord with the money movers and the dreamers, a real rustic Everyman who was going to be carried by the inertia of his own fever dream, he was just inviting everyone else along for the ride.

In spite of that energy, it was no secret to anyone who worked there that Sigil Games was in a strange position.  A brigade of veterans from the launch of EverQuest and those who were sold on McQuaid’s promise of a grand expedition followed him into the “next step in Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games”.  What had started as an exodus from Sony Online Entertainment, the parent company that had enabled Brad’s earlier vision, was running into problems.

Eight years earlier the market had been turned upside down by the release of EverQuest and companies were swooping in to get their hands in the emerging MMO genre.  Before the arrival of the titan known as World of Warcraft hosts of competitors - Shadowbane, Dark Ages of Camelot, Asheron’s Call - had come and gone, each one brandished as the “EQKiller”.  The fact was, Brad had made the game to beat.

So the highly publicized split between Brad McQuaid and Sony Online Entertainment, like the divorce of two A-list celebrities, rattled the industry with possibilities.  EverQuest dominated the market and a legion of competitors lay at its feet in the early 2000’s, so it was reasoned that Brad must have had some secret up his dreamer’s sleeve, some clue that everyone else was missing.

In gaming circles Microsoft had proven itself no small contender with the XBox gaming system, and was currently making waves with the XBox 360.  Like so many others, they were dazzled by Brad’s charming speeches, excited by the prospect of owning their own slice of the MMO market, and stealing away some of that market dominance that was currently being consumed by their rivals at Sony.

They had become something of a patron to Sigil Studios’ so called expedition.  Their daring experiment on the title Vanguard: Saga of Heroes promised to not only be the EQKiller, but the usurper, the only one who could truly claim the throne.  At first things were looking the same way they had when Brad and his team first threw together EverQuest by skirting deadlines and living on a diet of elbow grease and caffeine.

But after five years and a staggering ten million dollars, with little more than a disjointed tech demo to show for it Microsoft’s patience had run out.  They may have been sold on Brad’s enthusiasm, but they could not muster the same faith in such a gargantuan investment when the only return had been awkward, T-posing skeletons that slid through deserts like they were riding skateboards, descending into cities made up of featureless white blocks.  “Textures are coming later,” Brad promised them, seemingly oblivious to the dismal state of his game.

Microsoft was not interested in any more promises and they quietly severed their relationship with Sigil Studios.

“These things happen,” Brad told his employees, urging them on, dismissing the setback as typical studio and financial politics.  With an engine in place and the architecture of the game’s framework designed it was simply a matter of finding another visionary publisher that wanted the guaranteed success of the world’s next EverQuest.

Brad had not been in the office much in the days leading up to May 14th.  He came in to consult with Andy Platter, Director of Production, sometimes wearing the same clothes he had the day before, always with a fresh thermos of coffee.  That inspired the beleaguered designers, coders, and programmers.  Brad was at his best when he was putting out fires, when he was forced to stay busy.  The man was the kind of elastic that could bend but not break, and it only made him stronger when he finally snapped back.

Even his absence from the parking lot that morning was not unheard of.  Brad, it was reasoned, was probably out in the field somewhere, fresh off some meeting, too excited to share the good news and ordered an impromptu staff meeting in front of the office.  That kind of showmanship fit his character.

Andy Platter was dismissive of questions though.  He was standing on a couple crates stacked on top of a wooden shipping pallet, like a cheap pulpit, glancing down at his phone.  If Brad had been the showman in his fine, tweed suit and his presenting cane, making promises like some smooth music man, Andy was the exasperated preacher of ugly accounting and a prophet of setbacks.

“It’ll all be explained by Brad,” was the only answer he would give.

Finally his phone rang.  He exchanged some words with Brad on the other side, gesturing for the crowd to move closer, then he presented the phone for all to see and hear.

“Can they hear me?” Brad asked over the speaker.

Andy turned the volume up to max.  “Try now.”

“Better?”

“Yeah.”

The people in the back had to lean in to hear but the improvised PA system served its purpose.

Brad explained that the attempts to find a new publisher were not going well, quick to point out, as he always did, that this was expected.  No great journey into the brave frontier was without setbacks and he kept his tone optimistic.

“So I got out of a meeting with John Smedley,” he said through Andy’s phone in that crackling, robotic voice that only made the message that much more dystopian and ominous.  The response from the crowd was mixed, ranging from cautious to disgusted.

As the President of Sony Online Entertainment John Smedley represented the very Old World that Sigil Games was hoping to escape.  At times he was spoken of like an effigy of some corporate boogeyman, the butt of jokes, and gravely regarded like an ancient evil that may one day return for them.

The bad blood between Brad and John had run so deep that they often engaged in petty acts of self sabotage so long as it somehow encumbered the other.  As one of the original founders of EverQuest, Brad McQuaid was still owed royalties and dues for anything related to the game, so John Smedley would pour enormous resources into projects leading to nowhere.  A small army of mobile games, far reaching projects, failed IPs, and sequels devoured enormous amounts of corporate dollars, so long as it meant that Smedley could keep the whole prize without having to share any with his ungrateful former colleague.

For Brad’s part he not only enabled, but fostered the air of hostility toward Sony Online Entertainment.  After all Verant Interactive, the original company to launch the coveted title EverQuest, had been swept away.  The game was now branded with the name Sony Online Entertainment, and the organic days of creative geniuses delivering breathing worlds had been replaced by the soulless machinations of a profit driven company.

Customer service was no longer encouraged to find inventive deterrence for pesky players.  Content had become streamlined and lifeless.  The game may have existed, but it was no longer your tabletop fantasies come to life, but was instead the prototypical service, delivering streamlined technical polish to replace that rustic, hand made quality.

 To many, Brad McQuaid asking John Smedley for help would be akin to John Adams’s making his first act of office a petition to the King of England, humbling himself and admitting that the whole American experiment never really worked out.

He tried to settle his employees’ sense of unease.  “Sony has agreed to an acquisition deal that will guarantee funding, release, and marketing for Vanguard.”  Andy winced as he held the phone and all at once it was starting to become clear why they were meeting in the parking lot, why the doors were locked and the lights were turned off.

With a sigh, Brad continued.  “The acquisition didn’t really go well,” he finally admitted.  “Those of you that Andy hasn’t spoken to yet, well, unfortunately we’re grateful for the help you put in to get us this far, but we’re going to have to let you go.”

Then it was done. There were no more proclamations from the master of ceremonies.  The three ring circus that had been McQuaid’s calling card was now silent and empty.  The call ended with an abrupt click.

There was a token attempt to lay the worst offenses at John Smedley’s feet, but perhaps Brad’s unwillingness to face the people who had carried him on his “grand expedition” in person made it difficult to transfer the blame.  Not that anyone crowded in that parking lot would have believed those types of deflections.

John Smedley might have been the beast, but there was an expected brutality in the wolves and predators of the forest.  It was the willingness of their president, their leader, to feed them to those hungry wolves that stuck with them.

One employee, exhausted and delirious from long crunch time hours that could stretch into hundred hour weeks, raised a hand, perhaps too fatigued to really understand.

“What does that mean?” they asked.

Andy Platter shrugged.  “It means you’re all fired.”


****

John Smedley was a man who was never satisfied with looking at the video game industry for what it was, but instead what it would be.  His gift of foresight was so profound that one would be forgiven for assuming that when he shut the door to his office he was producing a deck of tarot cards from his desk and, as though through some arcane ritual, determined the future of gaming.

In a strange inverse of King Midas, a beleaguered prophet out of some Greek tragedy, John Smedley was blessed with a foresight that puts other speculators, seers, designers, and thinkers to shame.  He is a man who has consistently bet on black and the roulette table has never proven him wrong, yet everything he touches seems to transform into coal, buried away to turn into diamonds for future developers, but never for him.

To say that his mind was perpetually on the cutting edge is an understatement.  John Smedley accurately predicted, and attempted to pioneer, free to play games in an environment that laughed him off as naive for his economic model, distributing through a growing online service known as Facebook, a yet untested and highly doubted delivery system for games.  Before Apple changed the world with the delivery of smart phones John Smedley was creating entire divisions to equipping the world with mobile games for the cell phone.

He even predicted, and tried to out maneuver, the launcher wars before the ubquitous spread of Cloud storage.  When Steam was still in its infancy, before Origin and the Epic Launcher became household names, John Smedley saw the marriage of all Sony services under a single, easy, manageable program.  It would emphasize the online in Sony Online Entertainment, allowing customers to have one click access to every game, every movie, every song in their library, from PC, laptop, or PlayStation 3.  It was the pursuit of synchronized platforms before the world realized that it was needed.

Like so many of his projects, however, it simply never came to pass.  What began as a bellow came out as an uneasy grunt.  He may have consistently called it at the roulette table, but the chips never seemed to make it back to his side of the table.  The all in one Sony Launcher became the humble Station Launcher, another forgettable program to access EverQuest, EverQuest 2 and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.  Free Realms disappeared into obscurity, remembered in the annals of video game lore as a peculiar oddity that might be shared in nostalgic conversation by the niche of people who played it.

And worst of all, his DNA is in the titans of video gaming: World of Warcraft and Fortnite, crystalline palaces built from the diamonds of his buried coal.

In 1993 John Smedley had one of his first prophetic visions.  The man was paying money hand over fist to play the online phenomenon Cyberstrike, a player vs. player game that charged an unthinkable $6 per hour to play.  At the same time college classes were being forgotten about in favor of Multi-User Dungeons, also known as MUDs, which served as the brilliant stop gap between classic pen and paper games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, and the new era of video games.

MUDs were a unique concept in gaming with no true modern parallels.  Painstakingly constructed and scripted worlds that could be logged onto at any time by a limited number of people, filled out almost entirely in text or at the very best, extremely simple animations, where perpetual characters could socialize with one another and tackle creatures, dungeons, and in some cases, even each other.

John Smedley knew that there was a future in bridging these two worlds.  It became his mission for any who would hear it, to bring down the crippling cost of CyberStrike and create a fully realized service built in the style of MUDs.  At that time he was working for 989 Studios who, with their sister company Sony Interactive, were shoveling largely forgettable titles across the PlayStation platform, a dozen uninspired NHL Faceoffs and Spawn: The Eternals for every Syphon Filter.

The vision for this game dungeoned and moated him and he transformed his energies into finding the architects that could bring his dream into a definitive reality, even if he constantly reminded himself that it was merely a matter of time.

At the same time that John Smedley was looking for his architects a pair of young IT guys named Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover were filled with more passion than resources, scrapping together a game called WarWizard in their off time.  MUD enthusiasts who had lost hours of sleep a game called DikuMUD, they had the dream, if not the resources and were frequently clawing at John Smedley’s back door like cats who smelled an open can of tuna.

“I have some bad news,” John Smedley told Brad McQuaid over the phone after tepidly pitching WarWizard to the executives at Sony.  Brad’s heart was already sinking, his mind was already split like a spreadsheet, ready to listen to whatever criticism let him make the jump from foolish dreamer to recognized game developer, in the style of Chris Roberts, while raising his hairs and ready to defend his creation.

Smedley’s defense of WarWizard had been a token one, however.  It was a forgettable first try by a man with a dream, the first step on what would become a long, strange journey.  Even if he had no name for it at the time, what Smedley was dreaming of was EverQuest.

Dutifully navigating the Byzantine politics of Sony, a gargantuan force that had enjoyed safe, predictable releases, John Smedley watched as his gamble with Brad McQuaid began to slowly pay off.  Years before John Smedley tasted the bitter defeat of watching his creations and his ideas, always at the frontier of gaming, be sliced up by the skilled cuts of butchers who would take his lungs and his liver and transform them into mountains of riches, he defended the manic Brad McQuaid as he gave that dream a name.

That name was EverQuest.

***

No one could have planned for what Brad McQuaid would become, perhaps not even Brad himself.  Oblivious to the cat and mouse game played around him Brad chugged along, fully alive in seeing “something” coming together from the mists of “nothing”.  When EverQuest reached its first playable state it was not the work of professionals who had been carefully groomed for their pedigree.  Efficiency could be mortgaged in service of the dream, resulting in a gaming experience that was a Gordian Knot of ideas bound so tightly together with quick fixes and elbow grease that no one could put a finger on what was their biggest fear with the new game, a gentle breeze might have knocked over the entire house of cards.

Owing to its roots EverQuest was, in many ways, a MUD with a simple user interface thrown over it.  The graphical experience was dazzling and exciting because it was everything that players had envisioned in their heads over games of Dungeons and Dragons or MUDs, articulated in real time and shared simultaneously with thousands of other players.

And it was all held together by bubble gum and shoe strings.  With no real idea of how to manage complex programming, servers, or scripting languages, the entire game was constructed on systems far beyond “primitive”, with many of the developers learning important lessons as they went.  Original art assets were compressed and saved, with their raw data tossed out for space, meaning that zone art could never be edited again.  Core functions of areas were not dictated by scripting languages, but NPCs communicating with one another using the chat function, looking for carefully hidden messages coded inside of the dialogue like Cold War spies and numbers towers, allowing important features such as spawn rates, the movement of boats, and sometimes even pathing to be manipulated right under the players’ noses.

None of this mattered, of course.  What mattered to the players in those early days was that their MUD and fantasy dreams were something much closer to a reality, where they could log into a game and see the colors of a feudal city fly over a gate whose size stretched as far as the eye could see.  Friendships could be made among knights and wizards who wandered into dungeons teaming with monstrous creatures and treasure.

The cracks in EverQuest’s foundation could be overlooked, and later forgotten, in part because they were drowned by the enthusiasm of two visionaries.  As John Smedley saw his rising fortunes install him as president of Sony Online Entertainment and bring him into the complex inner circles of the business world, Brad McQuaid was already enjoying his far more humble pursuits of godhood.

It was an intoxicating feeling, watching one’s dreams materialize in front of them, doing something that had not never really been done before, not at this scale.  Even EverQuest’s most immediate predecessor, Ultima Online, was a stringent adaptation of an older experience, a top down, experience that was still grappling with the new concept of perpetual characters and gameplay, not yet tackling the principles of those old MUDs.

The initial response was enthusiastic and Brad was there during their early beta tests to watch over all of it, logging into the client under the green armored character of Aradune to discuss his creation in depth with the players who had been chosen for this early, first look.  Increasingly Aradune was becoming associated with the vision of EverQuest, a personality that was pulling away from Steve Clover, Bill Trost, Anthony Garcia, and the suit, John Smedley.

EverQuest was a multifaceted project that could not have existed without a collaborative effort of equally passionate minds, but it was the personality of McQuaid that began to dominate the scene.  Whether the ideas began or ended with him, Brad McQuaid was vocal in popularizing what came to be known as “The Vision”, the guiding principles behind what made the core EverQuest experience.

Even today no player could truly define “The Vision”.  It was a misty, distant concept, alluded to and invoked, an abstract idea that vaguely represented the principle behind Brad McQuaid’s video game philosophy.  It was used not only as the guiding principle behind design decisions but also the defense of those visions, a near religious exclamation that others would simply nod toward in agreement.

When some classes in EverQuest simply performed better than others it was regarded as a part of The Vision.  When encounters and bosses proved nearly impossible or required ludicrous amounts of time to consume they were merely a part of The Vision.

In 1998 would be players, investors, journalists, and doubters who had heard whispers of EverQuest had their chance to play it for the first time at the Game Developers’ Conference.  It was here that Brad McQuaid and John Smedley felt the confirmation of all of their labors.  The curious oddity, the online spectacle of Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy adventure in its purest form, was available in twenty minute segments.

Brad McQuaid watched on, slick and vindicated, a million miles away from his humble WarWizard, as play testers blew past their allotted twenty minute demos and snuck around to other stations to try to get another fix on a game that would become notorious in gaming circles for its nom de plume: EverCrack.

***

Restructuring and rebranding caused Sony Interactive Studios to be replaced by 989 Studios.  Sony Online Entertainment became dominated by Verant Interactive.  And Verant Interactive, despite its origins in John Smedley’s careful reading of market trends and aggressive pursuit of that next brave step in the gaming world, became synonymous with Brad McQuaid.

The culture of the time period could not have been more supportive of a wedge growing in that ancient relationship, as The Vision, for all of its lack of definition and arguable flaws, became the definition of principled game design under the careful hand of now producer Brad McQuaid.  The common history of the time was murkily understood by the gamers at large, who saw a collaborative relationship in the most convenient style of a 19th century innovator and the tedious suit who cast a shadow behind him.

As expansions began to roll out and EverQuest flew off the shelves, successes were attributed to Brad while failures were attributed to John Smedley and what was perceived as his meddling.  It was a temporary cloak of invincibility that had been given to Brad and his Vision, but there were early signs that it was beginning to affect him.

In the wake of EverQuest’s first expansion, EverQuest: The Ruins of Kunark, Verant Interactive decided to increase its marketing and merchandising presence.  No longer settling for cover art that invoked the ages of fantasy from the 1980s and 1990s with the brilliant late artist Keith Richardson it was decided to create a comic book tie in to the franchise that explained the story so far.

Harvey Award and Inkpot Award winner Jim Lee and comic book artist Dan Norton were called in to create a comic book that captured the style and essence of EverQuest into a tangible thing that could be held in one’s hands.  Featuring a story that helped to explain the back story of the expansion’s cover art, it featured a group of heroes in pursuit of an elven princess who had been abducted and spirited away to an undiscovered continent, waiting for the players to explore.

A visible relic of its age, the comic book was only barely readable even in its day, couched in player specific jargon, turn of phrase that would be regarded as game related memes today, and a baffling story line that was interrupted by what was becoming the hallmark of Brad McQuaid’s personality.  As the heroes are being gathered to rescue the missing princess the name Aradune begins to come up as characters humbled themselves at his very mention.  Although the character that had become Brad McQuaid’s avatar never truly appeared in the story of the comic book, an entire page was taken aside devoted to describing him as the “bravest among us”, but one who is too busy single handedly fighting eldritch horrors beyond the planes, to explain his absence, alongside an enormous, richly detailed portrait of the green armored hero.

The Ruins of Kunark and its follow up expansion, the Scars of Velious, were extremely well received, but Brad McQuaid was not content.  Despite their features and improvements to the game they did not satisfy that burning itch to create something new once again, the way they had when EverQuest first launched. Verant Interactive’s prior two installments had been good, they had been more of the same.

The only thing that could satisfy Brad McQuaid’s new itch was his third, and most ambitious expansion: The Shadows of Luclin.

To describe Shadows of Luclin as an ambitious expansion does not do the title justice.  In many ways it was a tired and bored Brad McQuaid trying to tread a familiar ground of reaching for the stars and defying the odds.  This was no simple addition of new player zones with new encounters, nor was it simply new armor.  In many ways it might as well have been regarded as EverQuest 1.5, a complete overhaul of the structure, mechanics, and experience.

There was no time to delay and hold out for new ideas.  It became a cauldron, boiling a stew of every mad, fever dream that he and his development team could think of.

In addition to twenty four new zones, seamlessly tied together so that a player could traverse the entire globe of the moon of Luclin and return at the point in which they started, Brad McQuaid insisted on an entirely new playable race, who could begin at level 1 and reach their maximum level of 60 without ever leaving the expansion.  The new race needed a new playable class, viable in both solo play and parties that could squeeze its way into the already crowded 72+ person raids, and so the Beast Lord was created.

It was decided to reward players who had reached their maximum level with new ways to customize themselves and their power, so the Alternate Advancement system was created, allowing players to allot their experience points to what came to be known as their AAs and assign them across a spider web of skills.  The in game economy had been driven by players finding safe, well traversed areas of the game and shouting across the zone to try to manually sell their wares, so Luclin would feature the Bazaar, a whole new system that allowed players to become merchants and drive commerce even when they were not physically at their keyboards.

Horses.  Raids.  Hosts of new factions.  New spells and abilities.  A highly complicated, scripted, zone wide war.

To replace the archaic method of having NPCs trigger encounters by literally talking to one another in the chat function and looking for hidden trigger phrases they invented a brand new scripting language.  Compliant with The Vision, however, Brad McQuaid would be beholden to outside source, so C++ would never do and instead its own offshoot was invented for the game, an entirely proprietary language that was built to be an imperfect echo of the then industry standard.

Even this was not enough.  Already buckling under the weight of features that would have beleaguered a team working on an entire sequel, the already aging and archaic graphics of EverQuest were going to have to go as well.  A new engine was employed, all the player models were updated, requiring complex skeletons, new animations, and armors.

Fans waited eagerly as Brad McQuaid promised them the moon, and all of the features that were coming with it, but it was no secret that this promised magnum opus was troubled, buckling under the weight of its own innovations.  The sheer expanse of content had come at a time before staggered content patches became the norm in video games, and each of these promised features, every upgrade and every zone, every encounter had to be ready, and available, on the day of Luclin’s launch.

In an attempt to slow down players and buy time so that the development team could properly balance, fix, and arguably finish the final content of the expansion the gameplay experience was blighted by what came to be known as time sinks.  Long grinds to accrue keys that would allow access to the dizzying number of raids were further exacerbated by reputation requirements with Luclin’s various factions and the need to forego the equipment that the characters had accrued up to this point in favor of what were called “bane weapons”, the only weapons capable of inflicting harm on some of the game’s bosses.  Recognizing that this was not even enough, further stop gaps were created by putting punishing amounts of hit points on bosses, all in an attempt to slow players down, to buy just a few more days at a time to try to handle Brad’s dreams.

Yet Brad was still asking for more.

A sticking point for him was Luclin’s most ambitious, but unrealized feature.  In one of the expansion’s zones, the Tenebrous Mountains, were a unique faction of Vampyres, who were waging war against a city that was friendly to the players.  These Vampyres had become an obsession of Brad McQuaid, deaf  to the dying state of the Bazaar, oblivious to the bloat of his expansion.  He might have already been delivered the Vah Shir, the playable catman race whose art had been featured on the cover of the expansion, but he wanted more.

He saw in the Vampyres of Tenebrous Mountains a new and novel concept in MMORPGs.  Already a fan of divergent gameplay and allowing players to discover rather than be led to, it was determined early on that the Vampyres would be a faction with which the players could curry favor, to abandon the friendly city that had welcomed them and receive quests from the Undead.  What Brad wanted, however, was player Vampyres.

Brad McQuaid drew up an enormous document that outlined his vision for player Vampyres, arguing that not only should a player be allowed to create a Vampyre, but that the characters they had created should be able to become a Vampyre.  He carefully laid out the consequences of lingering in sunlight, the affects on stats, the way players would no longer rely on food, but on blood and he gleefully imagined the conflicts that would arise as players tried to navigate this new network of gameplay.

“There is simply no time,” an email from a baffled development team told Brad McQuaid in the waning days of Luclin’s development.

They had assumed this was simply another one of his creative itches, just another way that the man with the Vision reached for the stars as he brainstormed.  But Brad was adamant.  The email with his design document, full of his rejected features, was covered in red highlighted comments explaining how the barely functioning core features that had been promised in the expansion required too much nurturing to make room for such an ad hoc improvisation.  It was believed this would be the end of it.

Brad answered back by cutting several of his proposed features from the Vampyres, deleting what he felt were the most time inefficient ideas in what he decided served as a compromise.

The following weeks became a game of hot potato as the document was passed back and forth, increasingly exasperated developers attempting to extol to him the impossibility of including not only a new race, but a total conversion of every playable race in the game, this late into the development cycle.  The standoff became so intense that the development team shut Brad McQuaid out entirely on the matter of Vampyres, choosing simply to ignore their leader rather than entertain him any further.

Shadows of Luclin, perhaps one of the most aggressively dense expansions of all time, launched, but Brad McQuaid was not satisfied.  Even as players chewed through the content and embraced the new world - albeit to some mixed results as the bubble gum and shoe string way that it was held together began to reveal itself - it had been a taste of creation, that same intense feeling he had experienced when John Smedley had reached out to him and Steve Clover all those years ago.  Whatever success had come with this expansion had been the extension of a growing reality in Brad McQuaid, his Vision was calling him elsewhere.

Even as Brad McQuaid drew the roadmap to the next expansion, the Planes of Power, it should have been obvious that he felt caged at Verant Interactive.  Rumors swirled that encroaching control imposed by John Smedley, at the behest of his handlers in Tokyo, created friction for Brad McQuaid and his team of talent that had shaken up the industry, but it was in that rare defeat over his vampyres, when McQuaid realized that there were limits to his Vision in his brainchild, that truly drove him to part ways with his long time partner.

In his words, he went on the road again, to make the next big thing.


***

The departure of Brad McQuaid and what he described as an all star team of MMO developers was a rocky one that left John Smedley in a peculiar place.  It was widely regarded that the relationship, which had once been all futures, dreams, and smiles was now deeply strained.  Although John Smedley harbored a deep respect for the man who had become Aradune, the face of EverQuest, he begrudged the man’s departure, the way he threw down the gauntlet with his own title and tried to curry favor with Sony’s emerging rivals in Microsoft.

It became an open secret in the office of Sony Online Entertainment that John Smedley felt as though he languished into writing smoldering checks to Brad McQuaid for the royalties he was due.  Acrimony lingered in the air during Brad McQuaid’s grand expedition.

Meanwhile the EverQuest title was underdoing a rapid transformation of culture as the departed had to be replaced.  Owing to his business acumen, John Smedley did not replace Brad McQuaid with dreamers, but those whose gaming had been defined by experiencing the Vision, parsed for specialists with degrees and impressive resumes.  These changes in structure were immediately obvious to the players as the last expansion made under the umbrella of the Vision was released, the Planes of Power.  Sweeping worlds, rich in exploration were condensed into a railroaded experience of progression.  Customer service was becoming deeply stream lined and professional.  Even as increasingly complicated mechanics in encounters and bosses were lauded it was felt in the air that something had changed.

As Brad McQuaid wrestled with the expectations of his handlers at Microsoft John Smedley was turning his own powers of foresight into new ventures, but trouble was forming on the horizon.  A title that had once stood alone and weathered the storm of competitors was suddenly being threatened by a new, emerging titan: World of Warcraft.

The final days of Planes of Power were a restless one, as players with enormous reputations in the community were lured by the siren’s call of Blizzard’s coming game.  Fan websites that had doubled as important vectors as news blogs and discussion were suddenly scrubbing the name EverQuest from their front pages and replacing them with the banners of Warcraft.

If there was a time to secure a permanent place in the future for the game that had started it all it was now, before the dominant force of Warcraft 3 made that leap into the MMORPG genre.  Additionally, to John Smedley’s pleasure, it would serve the dual function of pulling away from Brad McQuaid, replacing the creation of his upstart friend with one of his own, and no longer would he be forced to dole out those shameful royalties.

EverQuest 2, John Smedley decided, would firmly entrench Sony Online Entertainment as the industry leaders, a shield against the coming World of Warcraft, and something that he could rightly call his own.  It may have carried the name of a project that had once been made in partnership with Brad McQuaid, but everyone knew that this was John’s project.

The mistakes of Shadows of Luclin would not be repeated.  Equipped with experience, professionalism, and exciting new tools EverQuest 2 would be built from the ground up to give players what they wanted moving into the next age of gaming, a true successor and a true innovation, merging the concepts that had stunned the market in 1999 without the kinds of mistakes that made the old game impossible to bring into modern times.

There was no stone that John Smedley would leave unturned in his increasingly manic project.  To fill his game with life and to bring it to the next level of immersion he cut an expensive deal with the Screen Actors’ Guild, allowing him to harness the entire power of that union to serve as voice actors to fill the role of every NPC in the game - and most important it allowed him to court the celebrity status of Christopher Lee and Heather Graham, to voice the games’ villain and hero respectively.

For all of his vision, for all of his ability to read the signs that no one else could, John Smedley was never entirely confident in his oracle like powers.  Even as EverQuest 2 continued along on, satisfying every road map and schedule, he continued to hear the pounding of Warcraft’s drums as it drew ever nearer.  In this game of chicken with Blizzard Entertainment he blinked.

Rather than lead through innovation or entrust the talent that he had hired Smedley began to increasingly look over his shoulder at what Blizzard was doing, then intrude on development to inform his designers of exciting new features he expected to see appear in his game, whether or not its architecture supported these decisions.

“World of Warcraft is splitting into two factions, the Alliance and the Horde,” he told his developers once during one of his impromptu meetings that they were growing to dread.  “We should do that.  We should have players from Qeynos and Freeport be able to PvP each other.”

He would try to conceal his intentions through extreme gestures of cordiality and inquisitiveness, but the developers would brace themselves, knowing that the game was about to be endure more content creep.  Worst of all none of it was guided by anything as robust as the Vision, but instead a constant race of keep up as John worried that his baby was being left behind by the coming Warcraft.

No area of EverQuest 2 bears the scars of John Smedley’s intrusion quite as distinctly as the Feerrott, a throwback to one of the starting zones in the original EverQuest.  Featuring a lost, Aztec inspired temple, and lizardmen that worship an eldritch god of fear, it was shaping up to be one of the strongest zones in the game, a deftly woven display of innovation and nostalgia, one of the few advantages they truly had over Warcraft.

Sipping his mug of coffee, John Smedley arrived as he often did, insisting to his producer that he wanted only to check up on the progress of the title.

“How is it looking?” he asked as the creatures that would come to populate the Feerroot ran around the zone geography without models in that early stage of development.  His producer insisted that it was looking good and assured the president that development showed every sign of hitting its schedule.  Release was due in one year, he insisted, there was no reason to doubt that timeline.  “Good, good,” Smedley said, burying the lede.  “So we got the release date on World of Warcraft.  November 2004.  We need to shoot for that.”

Rather than suffer any arguments, he encouraged his developers and retreated, back to his office, back to more word of creative leads that were coming from his growing nemesis, in June of 2004.

The grand plans for the open jungles of the Feerrott had to be hastily scrapped, along with hundreds, possibly thousands of other ideas, as EverQuest 2 suddenly became a matter of all hands on deck.  It was believed by John Smedley that the only way to compete with World of Warcraft was to try to leverage the name of EverQuest and steal some of its thunder in a parallel launch.

The dense jungles were resigned to long, narrow, featureless tunnels that spat players from geographic area to geographic area.  Quests and encounters featuring the expensive talent of Christopher Lee and Heather Graham had to be trimmed down and in some cases cut altogether.

John Smedley may have been able to predict any trend on the market ahead of his competition, but he was incapable of staying on a single path for long.  He was a man who blinked in the list and inevitably lost the joust.

EverQuest 2 was not poorly received.  Those who played it were fond of its novel systems, its interesting world, its dense voice acting.  The character creation was new and exciting, though complaints were leveled at the extreme performance requirements imposed at Smedley’s insistence.  Not wanting to find himself in the need to update the graphics again after Shadows of Luclin, Smedley had insisted on swinging for the fences with his visuals.  The consequence was sluggish performance on even the most top end machines, hoping to avoid obsolescence, and only serving to baffle industry insiders.  In many ways EverQuest 2 was spoken synonymously with Crysis for the sheer abuse that it could lay onto a machine.

No matter those early reviews, however, the compromises on EverQuest’s 2 design could not have competed with the juggernaut that was World of Warcraft.  Smedley watched on as Blizzard Entertainment counted its customers not in the thousands, but the millions.

While Brad McQuaid was burning through the last of his runway with Microsoft, John Smedley was tasting a bitter defeat.

***

The crowd of confused employees that had been severed over a phone call by Brad McQuaid, terminating the lion’s share of the promised “all star team” that were constructing “the next big thing”, were not alone in their feelings of dread and uncertainty.  McQuaid had not been lying when he said that the acquisition had not gone well and even as rumors washed through the industry that he had leaped from a dying project in a golden parachute, he had been humbled in his return to Sony Online Entertainment.

Vanguard: Saga of Heroes would be released, John Smedley would make certain of that, but the captain of the grand expedition found a cold reception on his return.  Even as he handed the reins of his creation over, as though turning over the keys to his mansion, he was demoted to the role of Creative Consultant.  Whatever he might have had in mind for the Vision was no longer an enterprise of his own eccentric spirit, instead he was an adviser, a man who had once been a dictator, who could now rest assured that his opinions were being considered.

For a man who had once been the god Aradune, this was a listless and troubling environment.  Nothing was expected of him and he could do nothing.  For a man who was addicted to the sense of frontier adventure in gaming, this was a maddening turn of events.  But in some ways the fight had gone out of him.

Despite his insistence in interviews with IGN that the rigid and inflexible schedule imposed upon him by Microsoft had been the driving source of his departure he put up little more than token complaints as Sony Online Entertainment steered Vanguard inexorably toward release.  The game that had once been a shell of T-posing figures that horrified investors in colorless white squares in lieu of buildings was slapped with fresh coats of paints, the veneer of the Vision was peeled back like wallpaper and replaced with connections that made it work, even if it never felt as though it had been done.  And all the while Brad McQuaid remained silent, humbled by his surrender to John Smedley, his career, in this point, coming full circle.

Ever since that time in 1999, when a visionary and his innovator released EverQuest, the world had been different.  Yet they could never again find the footing that had turned the gaming world on its head, not again.

John Smedley went on to try to find his own next big thing, accurately predicting the rise of Fortnite with his cluttered attempts at transforming H1Z1 into the first, premiere, but short lived Battle Royale.  Once again his foresight had been accurate, but only years later he found himself ousted, the legacy of his work rebranded from Sony Online Entertainment to Daybreak Studios, and an era at last at an end, watching from the sidelines as his vision was vindicated by Blizzard Entertainment and Epic Games.

Across the way Brad McQuaid followed his calling to create, to try to find that next big thing.  Ever the charmer, ever the dreamer, he commanded the world’s attention with Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen as he tried once more to find a place for Aradune.

But neither of them were able to find that fertile ground that was rooted in the madness that was EverQuest.