EverQuest was launched on March 16, 1999 to more than 10,000 subscribers on the first day of the servers going live.
But this was no worry for Verant Interactive (later 989 Studios) as their calculations were ran with almost 10x these numbers and they knew their servers could handle it.
They even went over these calculations with their ISP (Internet Service Provider) and everything looked good on their end for launch day.
One thing nobody thought to take into consideration was, could the Internet handle it?
We were delving into areas truly untested and before then only in the realm of theory
Brad McQuaid
As many excited players flooded the servers to login and play, most of those bandwidth calculations were shown to be absolutely invalid!
A very glaring mistake was overlooked and all these calculations were made using web site traffic which comes in large data packets and in bursts.
EverQuest was no website, and it used a steady stream of small data packets called UDPs which ended up eating all of the bandwidth of Verants ISP and most of the other ISPs in San Diego.
This resulted in an Internet blackout for pretty much every Internet user in the larger San Diego area!
The entire backbone of internet traffic going out of San Diego to L.A. were dispersed, got overloaded! So Qualcomm lost their global positioning satellites, and all the others! Everything running out of San Diego was getting kicked offline because we were filling up the pipe.
Geoffrey Zatkin
Verant’s ISP did everything possible to build up new bandwidth between Los Angeles and San Diego but they ran into another major setback.
The routers the company were using just couldn’t handle the traffic no matter what the engineers did and this had them dumbfounded.
All the hardware the company was using was well within these bandwidth tolerances so why was everything at a crawl?
It wasn’t until they started to look into the packets of this new EverQuest game and they found the issue within these tiny little datagrams.
You see, in order to keep track of everyone’s position, status, items etc. in a game like EverQuest there has to be a constant stream of these UDPs.
The routers the ISP were using were designed to handle large packets of information, not a million different streams of tiny packets.
It was a problem no one had encountered before, the router manufacturer, the ISPs, or the Internet.
Finally, we simply threw hardware at the problem, upgrading our equipment well beyond spec, and finally got the problem under control.
Brad McQuaid
It was the beginning of three months of pain and anguish for the EverQuest team.
Alongside the launch issues, someone had to constantly watch the servers, as at any moment something could go wrong.
“There’d be somebody sitting in the data center at all times, just in case something went down. It would be 15°f in there, and there’d be guy’s with parkas on, sitting there all night.” Bill Trost remembered
Through all of this the players stayed with them those first two weeks and this really showed off the quality of the game and it’s players.
However the players were still upset and frustrated, and the team knew they had to pull it together.
McQuaid took to the login chat and tried to quell the angry Norrathians, let them know what was happening and that they were working tirelessly to fix the issues.
This still wasn’t enough and in the end Verant credited everyone a free month of access and this helped to resolve most of the anger that the fans were expressing.
Meanwhile the servers were up and running, just waiting for the lucky few who could connect and enter Norrath until the bandwidth issues were finally fixed a few months later.
The rest is history and the game we all love and enjoy to this day is still up and running, waiting for us to connect.
This might sound like every other story of a messy game launch, but this one was unique and literally broke the Internet for some users.
Want more? Then be sure check out Episode 20 of The EverQuest Show which features an exclusive interview with Geoffrey Zatkin, the original developer of EQ where he talks about this particular story!
What was your worst game and/or expansion launch experience? Were you there with Verant and the launch of EverQuest?
Let us know in the comments below!
Credits
Quotes and some information sourced from “EverQuest Companion: The Inside Lore of a Gameworld” by Robert B. Marks
The EverQuest Show 