Part III: A Virtual Meeting of Minds

The Crux of the Argument

We stand at a crossroads for the genre. Will we see a further decline? Will the genre die out before it truly even gets a chance to grow? Or are we just witnessing a stumble on the genre's meteoric journey of success? Likely the answer lies somewhere in-between. But surely someone must have an idea? Surely someone must be qualified to predict the future? The answer is, yes. There are those so qualified and I have sought them out.

Richard Garriott and Brad McQuaid; these two names are arguably the largest names in our genre. And while it would be somewhere between near-fatal naivety and an outright lie to say they did it on their own it is no lie to say that they are founding fathers of the MMP genre.

Personally, they are a striking parallel. Richard Garriott is a veteran of the industry in the truest sense of the word. With well over twenty years of experience Garriott is not just a founder of the MMORPG but also a founder of the RPG genre with the historic Ultima series. With Ultima Online his team would take the Ultima world, make it persistent, and invite the world to come play. And come they did. Now he's left his original company, Origin, behind and is the Executive of the US wing of NCsoft, a company devoted entirely to developing and producing Massively Multiplayer Online games. There he is hard at work on his second entry into the genre: Tabula Rasa.

Brad McQuaid comes from different origins. Brad's sojourn into single-player was short lived but he was also a designer and player in the MUD world that was quietly operating behind the scenes. He and a few others took the ideas of those MUDs and ran with them. They would take the heart of the MUD out of its text based home on university servers, realize it in 3D, and bring it to the masses. The result was a bigger hit than anyone predicted and Everquest was born. Now Brad, too, has left his original company, Verant (now Sony Online Entertainment), behind and has founded Sigil Online. There he's hard at work on his second MMORPG: Vanguard.

The Procedure

The ground rules are simple. Both men were presented with the same eight questions blindly. While both were informed that other industry professionals were participating neither were given names or specifics in an effort to keep their answers absolutely pure. Note that this was done entirely for scientific integrity. I don't believe any of their answers would have changed had they been aware of the entire arrangement. But it's always better to operate with a clean slate as it were.

My role is to play the part of interviewer, translator, and analyst. I will present the questions to both men, list their answers, and then attempt to forge from their responses a coherent divination for the future of the genre. Everything associated with their names below can be directly attributed to them. However, while there will be plenty of direct quotes, I have been forced to paraphrase the two gentlemen frequently for purposes of balance and length. Now, on to the questions:

The Insight of the Founding Fathers