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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: etc.

A group of "nobody" gathered together to create an epoch-making game.

If you've never shut down a city's network for a week, you'll never know what it's like to be successful. Many online games will have online problems at the beginning of their launch, but in 1999, the problem encountered by "endless Mission" is not just some innocuous error codes. At the time, the groundbreaking 3D online game was so popular that server custodians had to lay more cables to Los Angeles to satisfy tens of thousands of players eager to pour into the game and explore the 3D world.

"We used up all their resources." John Smedley, one of the creators of endless Mission, recalled with a smile, "it was the main Internet line into San Diego at that time, so the server went down frequently." for a whole week, our game messed up the local network. "

In the five years before World of Warcraft, the endless Mission development team spent about $4.5 million on a budget to create an extraordinary game.

By the standards of the time, "endless Mission" was undoubtedly a revolutionary last effort. One Saturday morning in February 1996, Brad McQuaid received a phone call. The other end of the phone said his name was John Smedley, an executive at Sony computer Entertainment USA (Sony Interactive Studios America,SCEA). McQuaid, 27, didn't understand what was going on. Smedley told him bluntly: "I have good news and bad news."

A few months ago, McQuaid and his friend Steve Crawford made a desperate attempt to realize their childhood dreams. McQuaid grew up playing Genesis 2 on Apple's Apple IIe at school. The Genesis series, produced by well-known game designer and millionaire Richard Garrett, was one of the best role-playing games in Europe and the United States at that time. McQuaid is eager to one day make large-scale and creative games like Garrett. Later, McQuaid and Clive worked in the IT department of a nursery wholesale company, swapping floppy disks at the end of their shifts and staying in the office overnight to write their own RPG game, WarWizard 2.

Battle Wizards 2 is a sequel to Battle Wizards, a game released by Amiga, but McQuaid and Crawford had no money to develop and no publishers were willing to provide money, and it seemed destined to be stillborn. In desperation, they posted a semi-finished prototype of Battle Wizards 2 on an online bulletin board, hoping someone would be interested.

Although Battle Wizards 2 is not finished, the demo version is still saved. "We're going to throw it there with an introduction to the game, and if anyone is interested in it, you can call me. Steve thinks there's nothing to lose anyway, so let's do it." McQuaid recalled.

Weeks and months passed and no one called, so McQuaid was a little confused when Smedley mentioned the game on the other end of the phone. Smedley said that while he was impressed by Battle Wizards 2, he had no plans to support the continued development of the game-which is bad news. He also has good news: Smedley wants to invite them to develop a more ambitious game.

Take the first step in 1993, the Internet is far from universal, people pay by the hour to access the Internet, the cost is very expensive. Although online services are not yet mature, Smedley knows that the development of the Internet is the trend of the times. In that year, he started playing CyberStrike, a multiplayer mecha game that supports up to 16 players online. "it made me obsessed with online games."

In CyberStrike, players have to spend $6 an hour, but the good thing about the game is that it allows 16 players from around the world to compete together, a revolutionary idea that won the first "online Game of the year" award from computer Game World magazine. Three years later, Smedley developed sports games for PlayStation at SCEA, but deep down, he preferred to make an online game like "CyberStrike".

CyberStrike was, of course, revolutionary by the standards of the time. Incredibly, SCEA executives believed Smedley's dream and gave him millions of dollars to build a PC game development team within the company. "so I dived into the shareware world, looking for like-minded developers." "the whole industry was small, so I had to find the right person," Smedley recalls. "

In Smedley's opinion, Brad McQuaid and Steve Crawford are the best candidates. "after I found out Brad and Steve's Battle Wizards 2 Demo online, I called them and hit it off.

McQuaid says he doesn't have the money to play the kind of graphical online games that Smedley likes, but he and Clive are optimistic about the future of MUD. Although this text-based multiplayer role-playing game lacks gorgeous images, it often has rich content and depth. Similar to traditional paper-and-pencil role-playing games, MUD players can communicate with each other and explore virtual fantasy worlds together-except that everything they do is presented through a written description.

"most MUD players are college students and can play on school computers. I don't know why they haven't been expelled from school, because once the game starts, it won't stop." McQuaid said.

After a phone call, McQuaid felt that if he accepted the invitation, he and Clive would have the opportunity to make history by making the first MUD with 3D graphics. So two days later, they quit their jobs and joined the SCEA. "this is an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we can't miss. There is no doubt that that call changed my life."

Although McQuaid lacks professional experience in developing games, he is good at project management, skilled programming skills and unique creative vision, which largely make up for his own lack of experience. At Sony, McQuaid and Clive wrote an outline for a graphical MUD and created a 20-page design document that lays the foundation for many systems in the game, such as career-based combat, an emphasis on players' exploration of the environment, and the basic layout of a high-fantasy world called Norrath. Crawford also gave the game a name-"endless missions".

The landmark design document was forever sealed in a photo frame and the losers club McQuaid and Clive began to form a team for the production of "endless tasks," but found it difficult to recruit the right developers. because few people have confidence in the project. " We contacted the developers who were making these hourly games to recruit people with experience in making commercial online games, but they laughed at us and said we were crazy. "

According to McQuaid's vision, endless Mission is not just a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, but will also have state-of-the-art graphics that allow thousands of players to live in a vast open world for a monthly fee. " John believes that the hourly games known at the time were limited and expensive, but we couldn't make a pure free game like MUD, so we came up with a subscription model. " "people think it's a crazy idea," McQuaid said. "

Because many developers didn't take McQuaid's idea seriously, he began to post job advertisements at universities near the company, recruiting some newcomers. For example, a level designer of endless Mission, a former pizza takeout, joined the team entirely out of enthusiasm for the game.

McQuaid also invited amateur artists Bill Trost and Kevin Burns, who helped him develop Battle Wizards 2-who had no real professional art background and could only work as testers when they first joined Sony. But they often design models and art materials after work. Meanwhile, art Rosie Rapaport, who works in the same office as McQuaid's team, volunteered to join.

Like the industry veterans Smedley is trying to recruit, most of Smedley's colleagues are skeptical about the project. Lapaport revealed that within the company, other developers jokingly called the game a "permanent mission." Smedley added that when endless Mission developers gathered in the restaurant to play Magic, their colleagues would jokingly call them "ghouls and goblins."at that time, many of our colleagues were sports enthusiasts, but our small group liked Dungeons and Dragons." He explained.

"endless Mission" is so avant-garde that even Smedley's superiors feel a little embarrassed. Like many Japanese technology companies with branches in the United States, there will be factional struggles within Sony, and Smedley needs to find ways to protect "endless tasks" from high-level differences of opinion, which is his biggest challenge. " My boss at the time was Kelly Vlok, and he didn't even want to admit that we were making the game, so the Sony Japan management team didn't even know. We keep a low profile. "

"I have to protect the development of endless tasks, which is quite difficult." "other people ridicule us unscrupulously and think it's a complete waste of money," Smedley said. I always have to try to explain why we play such a game at company meetings. "

The Origin Story of course, frankly, the endless Mission development team has no idea how to create a massively multiplayer online game, but that's not a bad thing. "within the team, no seniors will tell us what to do and what not to do. our idea was simple: we had to keep trying until we realized all the ideas in the plan." McQuaid said.

Over time, the development team continued to grow in size, and several core members were promoted. McQuaid was promoted to producer, Crawford served as the main program, Rapaport and Trost became the game's art director and chief designer respectively. Their first task is to build a multiplayer dungeon prototype that allows players to explore freely. Next, Trost began to present the vitality of the game in a very different way.

Like most members of the team, Trost loved to play Dungeons and Dragons from an early age. He was also a born dungeon owner who was keen to create stories-in the 20-page game design document, the rough narrative outline was far from meeting his requirements. "No one would have thought that endless missions would require a lot of legends." Trost said with a smile, "but I think if we want people to play this game, we have to provide a rich plot."

McQuaid and the whole team have, in a sense, made a rough sketch of the fantasy world in the game and the various races that live there, and Trost has used them as seeds to build a garden. Trost envisioned Norrath's shrines in his mind, wrote history in the game, and designed a large number of NPC characters. In the process, he also learned a lot from Dungeons and Dragons.

"I used to play Dungeons and Dragons when I was a kid, so I used a lot of content I used before." For example, the Elf Spy Master Mahone Mister Moore was a famous character in the game and later became the first vampire in Norras. The prototype was a character card designed by Trost while playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Rapaport also makes the game picture lively and interesting in a unique way. " In those days, creative inspiration often came from a variety of book covers, or from fantasy illustrator Frank Faradit, who was everyone's idol, but I wanted to create something more whimsical and easier. We talked about adding comedy to some ugly characters, such as making Goblin have an obvious seam in his ass that itches and scratches when running. "

"I don't want everything that players see to be gray, because at that time, role-playing games were usually brown and gray, and everything looked like wood and stone. I tried to give them more color and personality, because color is another sound for creating stories."

Trost also doesn't like fantasy works that are too serious. Working closely with Rapaport, he dabbled extensively on fantasy themes, looking for inspiration and adding some unexpected ingenious innovations. For example, as native Californians, they are both loyal fans of the rock band Blind Melon, and they have a whim under the influence of the band No Rain to create one of the most iconic characters, Bixie. Like the little girl in "No Rain" MV dancing in a honeybee suit, Bixie's body is half of bees and the other half of naughty elves. "it was my idea and Bill's idea that we wanted to create colorful creatures to make the game world more interesting." Rapaport said.

The poster of "endless Mission" is very eye-catching, while McQuaid, Crawford and other programmers are facing completely different problems. Endless Mission is regarded by many players as an epoch-making game, not only because of its innovative 3D technology, but also because of the sheer size of the game world. McQuaid has designed 14 classes and 12 races, and players can combine different classes and races at will to create their own virtual characters, such as half-elf druids or ogre shadow knights.

A more serious challenge for the development team is to get all the data in the game transmitted through the extremely slow 28.8Kbps modems that most people were using at the time. "without the underlying technical support, the endless task would be over." McQuaid admitted. Fortunately, a newcomer named Vince Harlan helped the team solve network problems. "Vince is a very good programmer and he took a key step for us after joining the team."

In endless tasks, Harlan wrote a custom UDP protocol that allows games to decide when to send reliable or unreliable data. "when you run around, the location of the characters on the server is also updated." "the transmission of this information is usually unreliable, but even if a packet is lost, it's not a big deal because everyone is running around, and inaccuracy is not important and can be updated and corrected," McQuaid explained. but in other situations, such as when a player trades an item, we send reliable data. "

"this is a key technology that most people have not even heard of. Vince is an unsung hero because he has been quietly working on web code."

Smedley's development experience in the Dungeons and Dragons board game has given "endless tasks" a great deal of creative inspiration and trust crisis. Smedley has always kept the project secret and is reluctant to make the project public. " This is the atmosphere we need to incubate the project. People pay little attention to us, but this just gives us the space to create, so that we can inject vitality into it. The company's management had no interest in the game and no one even looked at it. "

In order to realize their dream, about 20 members of the endless Mission development team work day and night. "We keep working overtime, almost never leave the office, often work until 2 o'clock in the morning, and then lie under the table to sleep." Lapaport admitted, "I remember having a Saturday off, and I thought, it's already a weekend, and I almost forgot."

"at that time, our idea was to finish the game or die. No one in the team gave up halfway, and everyone wanted to do their best."

McQuaid revealed that after nearly two years of development of endless Mission, he began to think that the game might really be successful. "We know that MUD is very attractive, but we are also wondering if only a small number of players will like this type of game. From a commercial point of view, is this project feasible?"

The endless Mission team first showed off the Demo of the work at the Game developers Conference in long Beach, California, in the spring of 1998, hoping to get some valuable feedback. "We put two rows of computers in the GDC venue, with 8 to 10 computers in each row, allowing players to create their own characters, run around the game, kill monsters, or communicate with others." McQuaid said.

In order to give more people a chance to experience, the development team set a 20-minute trial time limit for each player, but McQuaid found that "many people will secretly line up after leaving the game and then log in to their account to continue playing."We have to supervise, maintain order and force some players to leave. This is obviously a good sign."

In addition, there are some other news to give them confidence. Richard Garrett's groundbreaking online game online Genesis, which was launched a year ago, has proved that RPG online games with monthly cards can also make money. As the "endless Mission" gets closer and closer to the release date, players' interest in online games is also growing.

But just then, Sony executives heard about Smedley's "little secret."

In the late 1990s, as Sony's divisions continued to merge and restructure, SCEA set up Studio 989 and shifted its focus to developing games for the upcoming PS2. For more than two years, Smedley had been trying to keep it a secret from senior executives that they were working on an "endless mission." However, during that company restructuring, the project was discovered by Sony's Japanese executives.

As Smedley's superior, Kelly Vlok gave him good news and bad news. "Sony's Tokyo headquarters no longer supports Kelly's PC gaming business." Smedley explained, "however, senior management supports us in finding the right management and issuer for the 'endless mission'."

McQuaid (second from left) showed his idol Garrett (first from left) that their game was a bittersweet moment for the development team. Vlok still believed in the potential of "endless tasks", so he made such an arrangement: as a partially independent studio, Smedley and his team could continue to develop "endless tasks." but they need to find another investor to share the costs.

At the time, Microsoft was interested in signing "endless tasks", but Smedley decided to join Sony online Entertainment (Sony Online Entertainment), another company owned by Sony. The endless Mission team set up its own company, Verant Interactive, and then moved to another office building not far away. Even the members of the development team didn't know that the project was almost canceled. John didn't tell me that five or six projects had been nearly cut until endless Mission was released. " McQuaid revealed.

Lapaport added: "I know something is happening. We changed our business cards once, and the names of the company and the team changed, but I didn't take it seriously. I thought it was not our turn to worry about these things."

In March 1999, endless Mission was officially released, and with the exception of a few cuts, it presented McQuaid and Clive's original ideas almost perfectly. "almost everything in the original design document was implemented in the game." "it's incredible," Smedley said. I've been in the gaming industry for nearly 30 years, and I've only seen this once. "

Happy troubles fought side by side for three years, everyone on the development team believed it was a good game, but did not expect such an unprecedented success. By the time endless Mission was released, online Genesis had sold more than 120,000 copies. Considering that the design of "endless tasks" is too cutting-edge and requires a high level of computer configuration, the team believes that it would be nice if sales could reach 1/4 of online Genesis.

But endless Mission sold 10, 000 copies on its first day of sale, far exceeding anyone's expectations.

Andrew Seitz, an assistant producer of endless Mission, recalled that a friend called to tell him that a large group of players were lining up outside the retail store to buy the game. This gave him a hunch that the server would be destroyed by an influx of players. "We had a data center and all the servers were on the shelf like desktop computers, and we had to find ways to stuff as many machines as possible in limited space, such as pulling a rubber gasket out of the bottom of the cabinet." Seitz said.

The game server of "Kunak ruins", the first expansion of "endless Mission", crashed soon after its launch, and no one was able to play "endless tasks" smoothly on the day of its launch. Later, Smedley, Seitz and the online team finally discovered the root of the problem. "our programmers miscalculated that the game used eight times as much bandwidth as we expected."

At the time, the Internet provider of endless Mission was managed by UUnet, which was also used by several big companies in San Diego. The networks of those companies were also affected because the lines were clogged because the number of players far exceeded estimates. "once the limit is exceeded, almost everyone will be forced to go offline." Seitz explained.

The development team had to reassure players while negotiating with UUnet to provide more stable web services. But it will take UUnet several weeks to lay more cables between San Diego and Los Angeles. During this period, the development team also arranged for three employees to work shifts every eight hours, sitting in the cold computer room in overcoats and manually rebooting the crashed server.

Fortunately, while laying more cables, UUnet redistributes traffic and frees up bandwidth, allowing many players to finally explore Norras for the first time. As the online problem was solved, people soon forgot the painful experience in the first week of the launch of "endless tasks". In April 1999, the cumulative sales of games reached 60,000 copies, and soared to 225,000 six months after its release, nearly twice the historical sales of online Genesis in only half the time.

Endless Mission, which is still in operation today, will release its 29th expansion in December, although the play of endless Mission is complex, but it combines whimsical fantasies, harsh adventures and gorgeous images. and encourage players to connect-for many players, this is more attractive than monotonous tasks. "We created this tool to bring people together." "in fact, the players are the real creators of the game, and they have made everything that they are today," Rapaport said. "

Smedley added: "part of the reason that endless Mission is so popular is that it came at the right time, but at the same time, I think Brad realized the Dungeons and Dragons-style experience in the game." it really resonates with people. "

Shortly after endless Mission 2 began operating in North America in November 2004, Sony re-acquired Verant Interactive and merged it with Sony online Entertainment to form a new PC division led by Smedley. The endless Mission development team is not upset that the project was despised by Sony executives. "I must praise Sony." "they never abandoned us and borne half the cost of game development," McQuaid said. in retrospect, had it not been for a few Sony executives and John to insist on protecting the game, the "endless mission" would have been gone. "

Almost overnight, McQuaid and his team became celebrities in the game industry. At its peak in 2004, endless Mission sold more than 3 million copies, when eight expansion films were released. Alan Black, the former president of Blizzard Entertainment, admits that World of Warcraft draws on many good ideas from "endless missions". Today, contemporary online games still follow the "endless task" in the career, world design and other aspects to create the blueprint.

This article is compiled from: https://www.pcgamer.com/ breaking-the-internet-the-story-of-everquest-the-mmo-that-changed-everything/

Original title: "Breaking the internet: The story of EverQuest, the MMO that changed everything"

Original author: Steven Messner

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