EverQuest – Brandon McDonald Interview

EverQuest was originally released twenty years ago, on March 16, 1999. In order to celebrate the landmark MMORPG’s birthday, the folks over at Shacknews are preparing an extensive “making of” feature, and right now you can check out an excerpt from that upcoming mega-article where Brandon McDonald, a designer responsible for a lot of EverQuest’s items and dungeons, talks us through the early days of EverQuest.

A few sample paragraphs:

In 1997, BlueSky completed its contractual obligations to Sega and, for a litany of reasons, began to fall apart. Several friends of McDonald’s landed on their feet at Verant and talked to higher-ups there about bringing him on board. McDonald’s interview was straightforward. “They talked to me: ‘Hey, do you ever play Dungeons & Dragons or MMOs?’ I said, ‘I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons, but I’ve never played MMOs. I don’t even know what that is.’ They were talking about a MUD. I didn’t know what that was.”

His technical acumen won over lead developer Brad McQuaid. So did one of his hobbies: Collecting swords and knives. He’d been to Germany, where he had snapped pictures of castles and brought back various types of blades as souvenirs. “I interviewed with Brad McQuaid. I talked with him for half an hour and he said, ‘Yeah, you’re in. Can you start next week?’ I said, ‘Can I start tomorrow? Let’s do this.’ I was only out of a job for two days before I started working on EverQuest.”

Verant’s team was plucky when McDonald joined. Their recruiting practices consisted of canvassing nearby college bulletin boards with Post-It notes advertising jobs. Most of the dozen or so developers on the team had never made a game. They bonded quickly over their excitement for EverQuest and over extracurricular activities that took some of the sting out of long nights and weekends spent at the office. Out of the blue, someone would show up with a kegger. Sometime later, catering would show up with food.

“We’d just have parties for whatever reason at all,” said McDonald. “It was fun. We were just having a good time. The culture wasn’t… very corporate. That’s how I’ll describe it. It was very relaxed,” McDonald remembered, laughing.