Sony: WoW is wow because of EverQuest

June 28, 2009

Sony is taking credit for the existence of the hottest MMORPG around, World of Warcraft, saying that had it not been for their Everquest, WoW would not have existed to wow the gaming world as it does this day. Lead designer Ryan Barker shares some choice words on the matter.

“That’s definitely true,” he stated when asked if he agreed with the contention that WoW would not have existed it EverQuest wasn’t released.

And I think most of the guys at Blizzard would state that too. They’d a comment at BlizzCon where somebody mentioned EverQuest and a few people in the crowd booed. I don’t remember who was up there at that time, but they were like, hey you can’t be knocking on the grandfathers there. I think that’s definitely true.

Of course, EverQuest has proven itself to be a game to be reckoned with on its own as well, being the game to have no less than 15 expansions, and a number of spin-offs too since its 1999 release.

Did the team ever thought that it could have been them enjoying the success that the 2004-launched WoW is enjoying?

Yes and no. We definitely had our day. EverQuest was top of the heap for years and years and years. Yest that’s true to an extent, but it’s so easy to look back with hindsight and see what we could have done along the way. We took some gambles with some games. Some of them played out, some of them didn’t, and here we’re.

But I think we’re till looking forward and we’re trying to make the next large game after Warcraft, and hopefully we’ll do tat. But when you see those giant numbers, it’s hard not to be a little bit!