Sony Online Entertainment

History

The house that built Norrath has had three names. It began inside Sony's American game studio, Sony Interactive Studios America, later 989 Studios, where John Smedley started an online role-playing project in the mid-1990s and hired Brad McQuaid and Steve Clover to program it. Sony Online Entertainment was formally established in December 1997 to run Sony's online games. When 989 Studios refocused on PlayStation titles in 1998, Smedley, McQuaid and Russell Shanks took the online team, with 55 other former 989 employees, into a new studio, RedEye Interactive, soon renamed Verant Interactive, in San Diego.

Verant's game was EverQuest, released on March 16, 1999. Its designers, McQuaid, Clover and Bill Trost, had played text MUDs such as Sojourn and TorilMUD, both built on the DikuMUD codebase, and EverQuest rendered that tradition, with its classes, levels, camps and corpse runs, in full 3D. It became the dominant subscription fantasy world in North America, peaking at around 550,000 active subscribers at the end of 2004. In June 2000 SOE acquired Verant outright, and the Verant name faded into Sony Online Entertainment.

Notable work

EverQuest was the Dungeon crawl made social and endless. Its world was deliberately harsh: death cost experience, corpses had to be recovered, and the best Loot & loot tables demanded large groups willing to wait at contested spawns. That design created the vocabulary of the genre, including the holy trinity of tank, healer and damage, Aggro management, Grinding and the high-end Raid. Players called it "EverCrack," and in 2001 the economist Edward Castronova calculated a per-capita gross national product for Norrath that rivaled real nations, the founding text of research into Virtual Economies, Gold Farming & the GDP of Norrath.

SOE built outward from Norrath. It released PlanetSide and Star Wars Galaxies in 2003, EverQuest II in November 2004, and later DC Universe Online, while continuing to add expansions to the original game. McQuaid left SOE in 2002 to found Sigil Games, whose Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (2007) SOE published and later absorbed.

Legacy

On February 2, 2015, Sony sold the studio to the investment firm Columbus Nova, and it became Daybreak Game Company, free for the first time to publish beyond PlayStation. In December 2016 Daybreak also became the publisher of Turbine's The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online, developed by the new studio Standing Stone Games. Enad Global 7, a Swedish group, bought Daybreak for $300 million in a deal completed on December 22, 2020; it now runs EverQuest through its Darkpaw Games studio and DC Universe Online through Dimensional Ink.

More than 25 years after launch, EverQuest is still receiving new expansions, over thirty of them in all. Its designers' influence runs straight into World of Warcraft, whose designers included veteran EverQuest raiders such as Rob Pardo, and through it into every MMORPGs since. Few fantasy worlds have been lived in so long, or by so many people who first learned there what a raid, a pull or a wipe meant.