I was too young to get in on the early (and tbh me exciting) age of MMOs, only opting for RuneScape because it had a free tier.
I just finished Jason Schreier's book that covered 38 Studio's implosion and then his next book that covered Blizzard. It was a nice trip down memory lane where I remember crawling through the latest PC Gamer issue to read about MMO experiences or watching G4's Portal act out skits in these massive games.
While there's private servers out there, I'm not sure you could recreate the hype around that era.
I should read that book, but I was pretty close to it.
Kurt was a huge EQ fan, and ended up trying to staff his company by making offers to a bunch of people at SOE (which included both me and my team).
I was not convinced. He spent time around the office and when I met him in person he always came across as a BS artist. I don’t think he got anyone from any engineering team, he certainly didn’t get any from mine (I was TD on EQ2 at the time)
The best talent he did get was Jason Roberts, who was my design partner on EQ2 at the time.
I remember some of us being very confused that Smed let him do that kind of recruiting. I think he an actually held some interviews literally in the SOE office. It really felt like Kurt was taking advantage of him.
I just finished Jason Schreier's book that covered 38 Studio's implosion and then his next book that covered Blizzard. It was a nice trip down memory lane where I remember crawling through the latest PC Gamer issue to read about MMO experiences or watching G4's Portal act out skits in these massive games.
While there's private servers out there, I'm not sure you could recreate the hype around that era.