A long time ago in a galaxy far away…I was addicted to EverQuest (aka EQ or EverCrack). I’m not kidding. I played EQ at least 30 hours a week starting around mid 1999 (on dialup) and continuing until 2005. Genia played. The best man at our first wedding was my best friend in EQ. Scott and his wife drove down to Hot Springs to meet us for our wedding.
Now here is the cool thing. A lot of people play MMORPG games just to play, but for me EQ was different. It actually inspired me. I can honestly trace the vast majority of my web coding skills and graphics abilities back to the days when my guild needed a website. Ok – I learned to code. We needed a way to show off our characters outside the game. Ok – I learned Fireworks and Adobe Photoshop. We need a way to communicate in the game. Ok – I learned about early VOIP programs such as Ventrilo, and that spawned a further interest in routers, port forwarding, and much much more including Flash and video technologies.
At some point, I became interested in a program called ShowEQ or SEQ for short. It allowed you to have an in-game radar. Some of the developers spun-off and needed a home for development. I volunteered the web hosting and site, and Scott and I launched the MySEQ forums February 4, 2004. It grew to 4000 members within 24 hours. That’s nothing these days, but then it was awesome for a bunch of EQ’ers who were running an outlaw program at the risk of Sony banning us.
Of course, I haven’t played EQ in a long time. I just honestly don’t have the time with my business and family. However, I do owe a lot to my days in EverQuest. They were inspirational to say the least.