My first pay stub had Verant on it, I joined shortly before the SOE transition.
One thing maybe not well known outside of the company was that the MMO subscription revenue enabled a hotbed of experimentation. There was an MMO RTS which never shipped, and several other takes on “can we make genre X an MMO?” that I can’t remember. And then SWG, obviously.
EQ2 had all kinds of interesting people on it as a result - Ken Perlin did the lip sync work (driving facial animations from dialog), Brian Hook worked on the rendered for a while. I’m sure there were others.
Then there’s all the things we didn’t do. I read the complete Harry Potter series specifically because we were in talks with JK Rowling to do a HP MMO, but negotiations failed.
Crazy times.
[addendum]
Several of the people in the article are no longer with us (Brad McQuaid, and Kelly Flock at least)
The office park that SOE was located in on Terman Court was also demolished years ago. I remember standing at the door to my office on my last day, looking out the window at the eucalyptus trees and thinking I was never going to see the place again.
Kelly Flock threw the project I was leading under the bus with Sony Pictures on his way out the door when they fired him. I barely saved it.
Brad McQuaid, as CEO of Sigil famously didn’t even show up for the meeting where the whole Vanguard team was told the company had failed and they had no jobs, and no severance.
The games industry definitely has its heroes, but they ain’t it.
As an aside, this is how I’d like to be toasted (roasted?) at my funeral, to the extent my surviving family would find it to be an appreciation of the whole person. Too bad old coworkers tend not to attend and eulogize!
Do people think McQuaid is a saint? Have they touched anything he's worked on in the past 25 years?? Pantheon isn't just the worst MMO I've ever played, it might just be the worst game I've ever played.
I’m glad you enjoyed it, though I personally really only contributed shared code - SOE ended up using my UI library from Planetside across all their titles at the time.
From where I sat (St Louis, then San Diego), it looked like the SWG team (Austin) worked incredibly hard on the title, and explored ideas that were really groundbreaking for the time.
The Star Wars universe is a hard one to make into an MMO - the way Jedi work in the universe combined with what players want for themselves is very hard to solve for. I recall Raph wrote about it, maybe more than once.
“What we could make tech do” is so true! Working on MMOs definitely pushed the boundaries of what was possible, and continues to inform what I expect from the machine.
Interesting! I didn't realize you all experimented with an MMORTS. I was a lead engineer on a never released MMORTS [1] that was developed after WoW became big. Seems that's a tough genre to convert to MMO.
I was too young to get in on the early (and tbh me exciting) age of MMOs, only opting for RuneScape because it had a free tier.
I just finished Jason Schreier's book that covered 38 Studio's implosion and then his next book that covered Blizzard. It was a nice trip down memory lane where I remember crawling through the latest PC Gamer issue to read about MMO experiences or watching G4's Portal act out skits in these massive games.
While there's private servers out there, I'm not sure you could recreate the hype around that era.
I should read that book, but I was pretty close to it.
Kurt was a huge EQ fan, and ended up trying to staff his company by making offers to a bunch of people at SOE (which included both me and my team).
I was not convinced. He spent time around the office and when I met him in person he always came across as a BS artist. I don’t think he got anyone from any engineering team, he certainly didn’t get any from mine (I was TD on EQ2 at the time)
The best talent he did get was Jason Roberts, who was my design partner on EQ2 at the time.
I remember some of us being very confused that Smed let him do that kind of recruiting. I think he an actually held some interviews literally in the SOE office. It really felt like Kurt was taking advantage of him.
I never played EverQuest but another game by SOE. I was absolutely addicted to Cosmic Rift throughout high school. Then someone decided it was a good idea to make it subscription only. I still remember being able to login and get trial time as some Guest#374950. Really killed the community and the game died not too long after.
I ended up going back to the original Subspace, which Cosmic Rift was a spiritual successor to, which shortly after had its client redeveloped by the community (PriitK of Kazaa, Skype, Joost fame) called Continuum. Ended up playing this for over a decade.
My first pay stub had Verant on it, I joined shortly before the SOE transition.
One thing maybe not well known outside of the company was that the MMO subscription revenue enabled a hotbed of experimentation. There was an MMO RTS which never shipped, and several other takes on “can we make genre X an MMO?” that I can’t remember. And then SWG, obviously.
EQ2 had all kinds of interesting people on it as a result - Ken Perlin did the lip sync work (driving facial animations from dialog), Brian Hook worked on the rendered for a while. I’m sure there were others.
Then there’s all the things we didn’t do. I read the complete Harry Potter series specifically because we were in talks with JK Rowling to do a HP MMO, but negotiations failed.
Crazy times.
[addendum] Several of the people in the article are no longer with us (Brad McQuaid, and Kelly Flock at least)
The office park that SOE was located in on Terman Court was also demolished years ago. I remember standing at the door to my office on my last day, looking out the window at the eucalyptus trees and thinking I was never going to see the place again.
I was right.