If you had joined us earlier in the year, you would have spotted us celebrating the release of
EverQuest
25 years ago, bringing about the MMO revolution and standardising a lot of what would go on to be replicated in countless other entries into the genre ever since.
But for as impressive as it was – as genre-forming, industry-bending as it was – you simply can’t talk about MMOs without that globally recognised acronym:
WOW.
World Of Warcraft
is also celebrating a significant birthday this November, and with two decades under its belt it won’t be long until it’s legally able to drink in an American bar. There’s some irony to these milestone birthdays, however, since if not for the impact that
EverQuest
had on the team at Blizzard, WOW might never have been made at all. For Kevin Beardslee, one of the original team members on
World Of Warcraft,
the release of
EverQuest
was a turning point for the studio, who were at the time trying to get a completely different project off the ground. “I remember Shane Dabiri
[WOW
producer] telling me, ‘You gotta try this
EverQuest
beta out,’” says Kevin, “and so we hopped in on it and we were like, ‘Oh wow, this is really cool.’ We created two Blizzard guilds, Interloop and Frostwolves.” But for as allconsuming as
EverQuest
was, it got Kevin
thinking that there were improvements that could be made with a little bit of Blizzard magic. It was Kevin who would go on to pitch an MMO project to the management at the studio. “Why don’t we, Blizzard, do something like
EverQuest?
Because the
EverQuest
controls were clunky, the art was meh, we’ve got such better universes.”