World of Warcraft at Ten Ton Hammer

Though many examples of rules and gameplay sets were available in older text-based online games and pen-and-paper products, the earliest crops of MMOs – Ultima Online, EverQuest, Jumpgate, Asheron’s Call, and others – certainly had to create systems that far surpassed what was built before them. In many ways, this again was like early Hollywood, where individuals with intelligence and ambition could basically “make up the rules” as they went along.

“You have to keep in mind that when we started you couldn't do things like, say, look up networking problems on Google,” Hermann explained in his response. ”There was no Google, and internet capabilities were not as powerful. Beyond that there was no such thing as MMOs. Our first games we pitched to publishers were pitched as multiplayer games. They thought we meant things like Quake or something and when we described hundreds or thousands of people in a persistent world, they didn't really understand what that meant. It wasn't until UO and EQ hit it big that suddenly there was a term and a business model and the interest started to grow.”

“We used to have these dinners at GDC (San Jose at the time) where all the MMO people would go - it was maybe like two or three dozen people,” he continued. “That's where the first ideas were kind of kicked around and some of the early groundwork was laid. A lot of those guys are now institutions in the MMO world so it was really a kind of crazy path from there to here. Also keep in mind that this took place over maybe the last 10 or 15 years. Before that most of us were doing MUDs and MOOs and stuff but once it became mainstream it grew really quickly.”

Over at SOE, Waters had a similar experience when EverQuest first broke onto the scene. “EverQuest was our first big MMO, and there was a huge amount of learning, experimentation, and crunch time involved in getting it right,” he said. “From hardware and tech issues like scrambling to get enough internet bandwidth to support the unprecedented demand at launch, to being amazed at the amount of time and energy players were willing to spend online every day… there was a lot that came up that no one predicted or planned on, and we learned a ton those first few years.”
 
Dating even further back than the original Jumpgate or EverQuest, Craig Alexander actually helped forge the path for those two games with Sierra’s The Realm, a game that still runs to this day.

“It felt very ‘Wild West,’” Craig stated. “There was a significant amount of unknowns back then. We had no expectations regarding how long these services would last. I worked on The Realm with Sierra, and it’s been running for twelve or thirteen years now. There’s really no end in sight for these games, and I look forward to when DDO and LOTRO pass their own decade marks as well.”

“You really need that sort of longevity mindset going into it, and back in the day, we had no idea,” he continued. “We were still using that film and/or packaged good mentality. You launch it, you have a big marketing event, and then you have a nice tail at the end of it where you’d get six or seven months out of the product. We never guessed that we’d be talking about the lifespan of these products in terms of decades. Be proud of the design and the artwork that you do, because it will be there for years!”