Steve Fuller: Not many people are aware of your originating influence on EverQuest. Can you give us some background on how EverQuest got started and the role you played in its creation?

Bill Trost: While I was an art student I met a couple guys who needed help making a little shareware PC game demo. This demo got noticed by John Smedley, now the president of SOE, and eventually all the folks who worked on it were hired to develop EverQuest. John Smedley, who was at that time the director of a Playstation development house, had the idea to take the text MUD experience and update it with the latest 3D graphics, and he was able to actually convince Sony to fund it. This was the beginning of EverQuest. I was the Lead Game Designer for the original release of EverQuest as well as the first two expansions. But, it would be dishonest for any one person to try to take credit for the design of EQ. EQ's original game design was truly a team effort, with the largest and most notable basic gameplay contributions coming from our resident game design and code wizard, Roger Uzun, whom I am now fortunate enough to be working with again on EQ2. Ryan Palacio (SWG) and Geoff Zatkin (EQ2) also had a lot of influence, especially within their specific specialties, database design and spell design respectively. In addition to leading and training the design team, establishing the framework for the fiction of Norrath, the faction system, interface and content design were my personal responsibilities. But my good friends Kevin Burns (EQoA) and Tony Garcia (EQ2), along with all the other designers and artists contributed incredibly to the content design and quest creation. A great many of the now familiar characters and places of Norrath actually came from an old pen and paper RPG campaign world I created as a teenager. Tony was a player in that campaign so he and I worked well together and had similar goals for what we wanted the world of Norrath to be. It is incredible and very surreal to hear people talk about all the names of our old characters and such. "Firiona Vie," for example, was actually in my original campaign an ancient Elven city, not a hot Elf babe. Here is a bit of previously unrevealed trivia: the name, "Firiona Vie," in that campaign, translated from Elvish meant "The Flowering Place." It seemed to be a fitting name for EQ's beautiful Elven spokesmodel.