I've mentioned EverQuest a great deal on this blog, and one of the most recent times that I mentioned it was when I got to talking, in an article about the differences between America and Europe, about the manner in which, in recent years, many older players in the EverQuest fanbase have actually experienced a renewed interest in heading back to the "old world" of the game,and one thing I failed to mention is that the manner in which they have done this is that they have created an entirely new server, called "Project 1999".
At first this might seem completely uninteresting to many a reader, but one reason I was, as a fiction writer, so intrigued by this idea, was because it had never previously occurred to me that two completely distinct and very different versions of the EverQuest world could exist in this manner. One could perhaps say that, when I first discovered Project 1999 (my younger brother found it for me, in fact) it was almost as though I had heard about a portal that had opened up, which could lead me into an alternative universe of sorts, that had been closed off to me for many years. It was literally almost as though the option to time travel had in fact been presented to me, and the other thing that was very intriguing about it was that, unlike the commercial EverQuest servers now, which are available through Steam and quite easy to access, Project 1999 was not at all easy to access. In fact, I'll admit, it took me something like 2 years of occasionally trying every few months, and then finally finding an explanatory video someone had uploaded on YouTube just a few months ago , until I was able to get the files successfully arranged and log on. This challenge of getting onto it successfully made it seem all the more "portal like". And of course when I did get on, I could not believe what I had found. I became more deeply immersed than I had been in years.
I also finally got a chance to see the game as it had originally been, which I had, in fact, never previously had that chance, since I only logged onto EverQuest for the first time in 2002, which was actually after the world had already experienced its seismic changes. Project 1999, you see, only has, it seems, the model of the game that existed between '99 to sometime in the middle of 2001, I believe. So I actually wound up playing a version of the game that I had never played before, and one reason I found this so intriguing, I think, as a fiction writer, was because I was presented with this strange idea of this alternative reality and this idea of, I guess you could say, "parallel universes". There was something very striking to me, I think, about seeing the world of Norrath basically untouched, and kept locked - literally - in its original state, before the "Gods" of the game (i.e. the programmers) had decided to continue to meddle with it, and bring it forward to other incarnations. You have to remember, you see, that for me, as a boy, the original version of EverQuest had always existed solely as a sort of mythology I would hear about in conversations I had with groups as I played the newer version, or of course from my cousin. I had never myself had the chance to experience the original Norrath as it was in 1999. I had only ever heard about it, secondhand. So this made the time traveling feeling that much more serious to me. It was like I was getting a chance to venture back into a history I was never meant to see...
This odd experience of going somewhere that was not meant for me, in turn, made me sort of wonder about our own world: Who is to really say that it is not like EverQuest, and somewhere out there, there perhaps exists a version of it - of this world - that lies locked, just like Project 1999 has been locked, in some version where the world never gets the chance to develop electricity, or more advanced weapons, et cetera? What if there are multilpe versions of this world? One that the Gods have locked in the pre-history Ice Age forever, another that they have locked in medieval times, ancient times, so on and so forth? And then who is to say that there is not yet another version of the world where, say, the "Gods" have decided to insert slight bits of magic for everyone at varying levels? In one version everyone is born with magic. In another only people from a particular country. In yet another only men. On and on it goes...
For example, one thing that I thought was so "profound" when I looked further into the Project 1999 story and this idea of alternative servers being offered by hobbyists instead of the company itself, was that many of them actually feature not just versions of EverQuest that are locked in its original state, but they also feature versions of it that are dramatically different, like I am describing, as well as easier. On some of them, for example, you can go out and hunt for six hours and hope to have enough experience to hit level 60. On another, you might have to hunt for 2 years to hit 60. On yet another, you can use spells that in the "real version" are only for a certain class, or race.
As someone who really was just a player of the game, it never occurred to me that anything about it could be altered or switched even slightly. I never really pondered the programmers of the game. It never occurred to me that everything I was doing in the game, I guess, all depended on just a flew slight variables typed into some engine somewhere that could be switched. I was very much a mortal just like I am in this world: the creation of Norrath was a mystery to me. To me, there was only one Norrath, and it was immutable and unchangeable. Nothing about it could ever be altered or re-defined. Nothing about it could be removed, or suddenly added in, etc. Therefore, when I came to discover that many hobbyists have set up smaller servers (that hardly anyone is on) but which are meant for just soloing, and where you get XP super fast, I was even more bewildered.
Suddenly here I was seeing the cogs of the game, and beyond that, I was also seeing the actual Gods of the game change hands. This was the part that I found the most fascinating from a philosophical angle, I think: Not only were the rules of the game being changed, and different things being inserted, but I was actually also being made aware of the fact that the hand controlling these rules was changing, too. As you can imagine, for all of my Everquesting life, I had always imagined the "Gods" to be some professional developers behind a desk in California, running the game on some massive servers somewhere mysterious. They were people who knew what they were doing and cared about the game.
Now, however, I was getting a wildly different image of the Gods: the hand controlling it all was just some random dude in a living room somewhere, running the server on a spare laptop. A random dude who, I might add, I know for sure had absolutely nothing to do with the original design of the game. This was the part that really got me about it all I think: somebody totally unrelated to the development of the game was now at the front wheel. The executive file, or whatever you want to call it, was suddenly just floating around out there for anyone to grab. It was no longer, as it had been when I was a kid, locked and barred and "protected" from the hands of random outsiders. Now suddenly anyone who wants to can set up an EverQuest server , and in fact i myself was even trying one day a few months ago on a spare laptop I have which runs Linux, and sits on my bed. As you might guess, I was eager to feel this Godlike nature over this world I had not created. I was eager to be able to have the ability to do whatever I wanted in it. I could not wait to see it all shoot to life inside my laptop, as though I owned it. I could set the biggest beasts in the game to be slain by one mere strike of my sword! The idea was almost literally mind blowing, since like I said, as a kid, EverQuest was just so utterly real. It was also brutally hard and challenging. Therefore the idea that now I myself could have this power over it -- to make it a joke-- was very strange.
It also set me to wondering about fictional plot lines that one could pull out from something like this. I started to imagine a story of sorts unfolding in the EverQuest world where one of the high elf wizards or other would suddenly, who knows, realize that he was living in a game, and maybe he would somehow figure out a way to escape it, and then from there, he would end up meeting his own self in another copy of the game that someone else was running, where he had been used as something different, or put somewhere different, etc. In fact, when I was a boy, I vividly remember frequently running around in certain very empty zones of the Norrath world and actually feeling "pity" for the bot characters who would walk around in endless loops. I can remember thinking how dreadfully alone they would feel, if they were actually real, stuck in this random and rather dark corner of the game as they were, where no one ever traveled, and where they seemingly could never escape. It might sound ridiculous to someone who never played it; but there are certain zones in EverQuest that are so horrifically lonely that, even to this day, I enter into them and I just feel a literal sinking sense of doom and despair. You will one minute be in a zone filled with 100 players all running around, as well as 50 bots, and then the next thing you know you will be in some small little country town where there is only 1 bot and no real characters at all -- and the feeling of isolation does become shockingly real when that happens. Going back into some of these zones all these years later as an adult, in fact, the isolation of the old bots almost feels even worse. For, out here in my life, so much has changed, and I have seen so many things, and yet there they are, still walking the exact same old beat as they were almost 20 years ago when I was 10 years old. It is really weird.
I don't know. Just some food for thought as I always say... .
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