The Designer's Notebook: Ten Years of Great Games
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1999 also saw the arrival of EverQuest. EQ was in its day what World of Warcraft is today: the dominant MMORPG bar none. It beat the well-established Ultima Online and saw off Asheron's Call as a competitor. Despite Sony's disapproval, EQ also changed the nature of cyberspace in a profound way, because its virtual artifacts became worth real-world money. In 2001 Dr. Edward Castronova published a paper demonstrating that EverQuest was the 77th richest country in the world in real terms, in spite of the fact that it had no physical existence. I think EverQuest contained the most important innovations and had the greatest legacy from 1999.
Like Grim Fandango, Planescape: Torment was a commercial disappointment, and for many of the same reasons: its world was unfamiliar to most players and demanded attention and commitment. The game's art, story, characters, challenges, and even language (based on 19th-century British working-class slang) are all unlike anything seen before in the role-playing genre, or any other genre, for that matter. Planescape now has a cult following, and I consider it one of the greatest games of all time. Among other innovations it managed to create a reasonable in-game explanation for why your avatar is resurrected every time he dies.
