Project 1999: Bringing Evercrack Back!

One fateful summer morning, when I was 16 years old, my friend came over to hang out. He brought with him the new game he had been telling me about: Everquest.

A game where you can play as a fantasy race, such as a troll or dwarf, and inhabit a persistent world that would host thousands of adventurers (fellow players) at all hours of day or night, 24/7. Other than on some Tuesdays, which were patch days.

I was familiar with the emerging MMORPG genre thanks to other friends who had long played The Realm and later Ultima Online, but for a long while we lacked a family computer and thus I was forced to snatch tidbits of play whenever I visited Timmy. Which was a lot, actually, because I was fairly addicted to the concept from the get go.

Well, now I had a family PC and the game disks to install Everquest, thanks to my friend. Kind of like a drug dealer who's offering you a free sample of Heroine. Seriously, the game was nicknamed "Evercrack" because it was so fun and "addicting", though anyone unfamiliar with video games will jump on the idea of it being addicting to the point of ignorant scapegoating.

Regardless, the next seven or eight years of my life would be spent in the brutal grip of this unforgiving game. These days, with games like World of Hug-craft, you don't really get a feel for how painful it can be to lose hours of your life poured into a character, only to have the time and effort ripped away.

I'm talking early Rallos Zek, when you could full-loot whoever you killed. (UO fans will start to bridle right about now, but bare in mind that UO was a skill-based game and EQ was most definitely not. Gear meant everything!)

I'm also talking about experience loss upon death. I remember in particular one school-evening when I had stayed up until three in the morning, trying to get just enough experience to get my next level. I had eventually found a pretty good group and was grinding it out, finally hearing that infamous "DING!", and then began running back to a city for training (it was a new spell level) but ran into a very powerful NPC that instakilled me. My level was long gone, and I ended up rejoining the group and grinding well past 4:30AM before finally regaining it.

Not only that, but there was no relaxing ghost-run to your corpse... you would restart naked, sometimes literally an hour's journey from your body, and have to make your way back to the corpse all the while avoiding (or dying repeatedly to) the foes that killed you in the first place.

Also, there was a seven day time limit on looting said corpse, or else it would "rot" and the items would disappear forever. That isn't seven days played, but a literal seven days. People tended to avoid going anywhere dangerous shortly before a real-life vacation, that's for sure!

We always complained about how brutal the game was, but never suspected that its ruthlessness was a large part of its charm. By the time I lost interest in EQ, the game was very dumbed down but still relatively hardcore compared to its emerging competition. As my friends and I began to explore the second generation MMORPGs, we realized that something was missing.

We often would spend hours reminiscing about our favorite EQ memories, and going through what-if scenarios of how we would play it all over again if we could start from the beginning with what we now knew about EQ in particular and MMORPGs in general.

A long time ago, I heard about Project 1999. Their goal was to recreate and rerelease Everquest on an emulated server, and make it as identical to the original release as possible. I was really excited for a brief moment, until I saw how far from the execution stage the project was. As a longtime fan of impossible mod projects, I suspected a similar early-ending for this group of unpaid developers.

Turns out, however, that I was totally wrong! A few months ago I heard about Project 1999 going live! It is a bit technical and generally requires the purchase of Everquest: Titanium Edition, but is a dream come true for a lot of us who are recovered EQ addicts shamelessly seeking the digital "high" of our youth.