RIP Brad McQuaid

This. The man was a visionary, and was a key part of something that changed gaming (and probably pop culture) in ways that are pretty powerful. We’re all poorer for his passing for sure.

Thank you for this.

Yeah I had posted this in another thread but should have figured it deserved it’s own. Very sad. I got to spend some time chatting with Brad at the final SOE fan fair and he could not have been more approachable and informative.

I tweeted at EQ and Smed that they should name a server Aradune in his memory but I dunno how well that will fly.

John Smedley left a couple years ago and works for Amazon now.

Smed and Brad were a rare mix of business and creative that worked well together, and changed the world.

I only remember playing EQ for a little while but I do have one vivid (if vague) memory of performing class-clown style antics on a bridge. I was playing a stupid giant or troll or something (?) and I kept hollering moronic comments and jumping off the bridge into the water below. I think I was performing very dumb fishing.

Whatever I was doing, it was social and I was being creative and making people laugh and a little audience was gathering around. One thing I wasn’t doing was “playing the game” in any traditional sense of the word as I’d known it up until then. Pretty cool.

So even though Everquest wouldn’t be on my personal list of favorite games, that time on the bridge would definitely make the top ten list of my most memorable moments in gaming.

Necromancers could talk through their pets, and the skeleton pets used the same models as the low-level skeletons in East Commons. I’d park my pet in the middle of a pack of skeletons and when someone n00b would run up and try to hit it, I’d say, “Hey, leave me alone. Go hit that one over there instead.” Really freaked them out.

I also remember a friend in Kunark in the main city just having it up to his ass with a beggar and have him a couple plat in copper juuuuust out of reach of the bank. The game wouldn’t auto make it plat pieces, and he’d get over encumbered and couldn’t move.

Bristlebane 99/00 veteran, damn RIP.

You could get so loaded down with coin but still move very slowly but it would calculate falling damage based on weight so people would walk down one stair and die.

I like to keep my rope-a-dope quick and unpredictable like that man! :brofist:

I wrote about Brad McQuaid in my column

Very nice piece.

Great article, mirrors my own experiences and feelings about the game. Nothing like it before or since, and I’m sure never will be.

I don’t miss The Vision but I miss having a vision beyond spreadsheeting out the gear treadmill and raid release schedules that MMOs have devolved into now. EverQuest wasn’t as much “world” as UO was but I feel like it’s significantly more than anything we have now. I miss the open dungeons, the cool (and dangerous!!) zones, finally kicking a Griffon’s butt, stumbling around in the dark as a newbie Erudite.

There was just something more there that I feel like every game since has been missing. Now they just feel like number treadmills with a thin coat of theme park painted over it.

Thumbs up on a great piece. Lived it like you and EQ has some of my fondest gaming memories.

Great article @Jason_McMaster. Your description of your first time playing in beta matches my feelings pretty much exactly the first night I played in retail. The sense of wonder, that feeling of “holy crap, there has never been anything like this before!” that washed over players in their first few days or weeks, and the sense of community that the game fostered among it’s players, it was all unmatched then or since.

RIP Mike Hutchins one of the original dev team

Sol A was a brilliant zone.

Among the zones he built are Neriak, Paineel, Solusek A and B.

I hated every single one of those zones :P They all made for interesting corpse recoveries though.

Sol A, B and C are great. All wonderfully themed and interlinked and distinct areas.

I never knew his name, but based on that article he designed so many of the most memorable (and my favorite zones) in the classic game. True dungeon crawling experiences that make so much of what came later look pedestrian, to put it mildly.