The History and Future of Brad McQuaid
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The word sigil was taken from the name of a group of online players, or guild, McQuaid belongs to. It means a "sign or an image considered magical."
Certainly, at the time, McQuaid needed some of that magic to rub off on his new business. Sigil had no funding.
"I didn't think there was a great deal of risk," Butler said. "This was an opportunity to really push the envelope to make a game."
Other friends from Sony also quit to work for McQuaid, agreeing to take no pay at least until they could develop a concept for a game and sell it to a publisher.
They got a taker Microsoft.
"It was like, if Microsoft is behind us, who's going to stop us?" McQuaid said.
He declines to say how much Microsoft is paying. As for "Vanguard, Saga of Heroes," that, too, remains largely under wraps.
So far, a third of Sigil's 47 employees have come from Sony. Cooper and Clover are among them, confident McQuaid and the rest of his team can win the spoils of the online role-playing game wars.