November 18, 2019 is a date that will forever be etched into my mind, as I’m sure it will for a lot of people within the gaming community and, more specifically, the MMORPG community.
I will never forget the moment when I opened up Twitter that day and read the tweet from Visionary Realms that Brad “Aradune” McQuaid had unexpectedly passed away. I remember the shock I was in when I read that tweet. I had to read it multiple times just to process the gravity of what was being said. Still, as I read it countless times, I didn’t want to believe it.
It goes without saying that it came as a shock to us all and as we are now here at the one-year anniversary of his passing, I felt that I would take the time to reflect on the kind of impact Brad had on my life.
Growing up, I wanted to be a meteorologist. Weather fascinated me and still does to this day; however, the older I got, the more I began to realize that meteorology was more fun to me as a hobby. Even still, I will often times ramble about how intense the central dense overcast of a tropical cyclone looks through shortwave infrared radar and get looked at as if I’m from another planet.
So, if not meteorology, then what was I to do? There were two things I enjoyed the most in life… creative writing and video games… the latter more than the former (funny how this going to work out. Just stick with me here, folks).
As I got older, my love for gaming grew more and more. It wasn’t until 2000 when I was working a retail job as a stocker at Office Depot that I met someone named Keith. He asked me if I had heard of a game called EverQuest. Of course, only being a console gamer for most of my life and not paying attention to the PC gaming scene, I had not. He said it was an online RPG that you to pay monthly for but it offered everything I could ever want in an RPG and then some.
I remember asking Keith if it had a dark warrior that could cast evil spells. He said yes… they had a class called the Shadow Knight. That’s all it took for me to become convinced. I picked up a copy of the game, installed it, and began my adventure in Norrath. As I played through EverQuest, eventually dinging my way all the way up to level 65, I began to fall in love with a lot of the game’s systems. I loved the exploration, discovery, the challenge, the group-oriented play, etc.
I played on Vallon Zek which was a PvP Teams server and we had a lot of player-made rules. If you lost a battle out in the world, you had to loot your corpse and leave the zone for one hour. Once the hour passed, you could return to challenge for your right to set up a camp there. If your guild lost a battle inside of a raid zone, you were to leave and let the winning guild kill the bosses inside and collect the loot. There was nothing in the game that told you that you couldn’t go back and kill those bosses yourself, mind you. This was the will of the players… the will of the community and we respected those laws that we, the players, had created.
It was special. It was the most fun I ever had PvPing in a game period. I still stand by that statement 20 years later. Of course, Brad wasn’t solely responsible for EverQuest but his name is one of the most recognized by it.
In 2004, my friends who got me into EverQuest moved to World of Warcraft and had me follow suit. It took a while to convince me to leave the game I loved so much but I finally did so in April of 2005. I remember hitting level 60 in Western Plaguelands and killing my first mob at max level.
Nothing happened.
No AA experience was gained… nothing. All I got was a few pieces of silver and some vendor trash loot. I questioned what was the point of killing things at max level if I didn’t get anything for it? How was I supposed to progress my character beyond max level if nothing rewarded me anything? It was at that moment that I realized I had made a mistake but with my friends gone from EQ and Sony merging all of the PvP realms together, thus destroying the friendly community we had back there, I had lost the magic of what kept me going in EverQuest so I decided to stay in World of Warcraft and that’s where I remained for fifteen years.
Still, a lot of the design philosophies that Brad had for EverQuest, I missed. World of Warcraft had its challenge and its community but it didn’t feel the same. The game got easier and easier with each and every expansion. MMO’s began to make things easier and more accessible to a wider range of players. Of course, appealing to as many players as possible is a sound strategy from a business perspective.
Because of that strategy, World of Warcraft had become and still remains the most successful MMORPG of all-time… regardless of how people feel about the way the game handles its systems. Still, I missed EverQuest but at this point in time, I wanted to play something new that was like EverQuest and not go back and play something I already had before.
Before I go further, something else happened to me in 2004. I received a phone call from an old friend from high school and he asked what I was doing with my life. I was reluctant to answer the phone as it was 3 PM in the afternoon and I was sound asleep because I had been working overnight shifts at Office Depot. Still, I answered it and was surprised to hear Brian’s voice on the other side. He talked about how he went into the army, was getting married, and all of that, and here I was stuck in a dead-end retail job with no future plan.
That phone call wasn’t meant to make me feel bad about the way my life had been going but that’s the way I took it. I dug deep and did some soul searching to figure out just what I wanted to do for a career. I loved video games… probably a little too much. At the time, I was just starting to get into doing some graphic design and with my creative writing abilities, I knew that if I could combine my talents with my love for gaming, I could possibly get into Game Design.
So, that’s what I did.
I enrolled in a 4-year course to obtain a Bachelor’s Degree in Game Design. Four years later, and I had a $73,000 piece of paper in my hands. All throughout college, the only thing I could think of was doing the one thing every game designer will tell you not to do… and that was make an RPG as my first game. A lot of the things I wanted to put into my RPG were based on Brad’s design philosophies.
Of course, I never made an RPG for my first game. I made an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod called Grav War, I made a text-based RPG called Four Rooms, and I worked on an Xbox Live Arcade title called 7Seas (which never made it to completion) that was supposed to be a 1942-style game only with Pirate Ships using the Chinese trade routes as the lore and story for the game.
Each time I worked on or finished a college project, I kept thinking about EverQuest and how it still remained one of the most impactful and meaningful gaming experiences I ever had. I always knew that if I ever had the chance to make my game that I would like to try and make something unique while creating something more than a game. Like Brad, I wanted to create a world.
Then, in 2008, I lost my job in retail thanks to the recession we were going through. I took the time to focus on and finish college and then it was off to hunt for a new place to work. The problem was… I wouldn’t find a new job until 2011. I tried applying to many local places as well as game companies to see if I could land anything. I didn’t care if I had to work QA… if it meant getting my foot in the door, I was willing to do it.
I remember applying to Electronic Arts Tiburon. I placed 23 applications over the course of 2 years before I finally got a phone call. They only offered a 90-day, non-renewable QA contract for $8.50 an hour and no moving expenses covered. If I had the funds to take the hit, I would have jumped on that opportunity but, at the time, I wasn’t in a position where I could afford to take such a big risk. I did apply to Blizzard as they were looking for a Quest Writer for World of Warcraft as well as a card designer for Hearthstone. Having great creative writing skills and some knowledge of the industry (as well as being a big Magic: The Gathering player. I felt that I would have been a perfect fit for either of those roles.
Nope.
Rejected.
Eventually, I would find my current job as a graphic designer and content manager for a company that makes ultra-high-pressure water blasting equipment. Not exactly what I had in mind but it was a job and it paid the bills.
It was during this time; I also accepted a voluntary position at a website called The Outerhaven. A few years into my tenure there and my boss, Keith, asked me “Hey, have you heard of this MMO called Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen?”
I looked into it and saw that it was by a small studio called Visionary Realms and that Brad McQuaid was attached to the project. Isn’t it funny how two completely different people named Keith asked me if I heard of a game that Brad McQuaid was, in part, responsible for? Life sure does have its whimsical moments, doesn’t it?
Just seeing his name alone was enough to sell me. This was what I wanted in an MMORPG. Something like EverQuest in the sense of scale, exploration, discovery, challenge, and community but also something new. Something modern. I knew that Pantheon was the answer. I immediately pledged to support the game and kept adding to it over the past two years as I wanted to do whatever I could to help see this project through.
I felt like I had found my new home and said goodbye to World of Warcraft for good.
Now to backtrack a little once again.
Back in 2007, my friend Mike asked me if I like anime. I’ve heard of it but never really watched it. He introduced me to the world of anime through Naruto. I branched out and started watching shows on my own and to make a long story short, I became really hooked. Fast-forward ten years and my love for anime had grown so much that I wanted to try my hand at something I had never done before… I wanted to make a manga.
I had a story in mind but there was one little tiny problem. I could draw but not at the level where I would be happy with the result. That’s when I looked into some other way to tell my story: light novels. Since I was a creative writer and had been for over 20 years, I figured that this might be a fun little project. So, in November of 2017, I wrote and completed my first light novel, Final Hope.
After using that 2-volume series to test the waters, I poured all of the things I loved in life into my second series A.R. Dragonfly. It’s a light novel about an eSports-level pro-gamer named Amber Ryann who suffers from severe social anxiety and how she meets her rival online in real life and falls in love with him over time. Through her newfound relationship, she begins to overcome her anxiety.
Since Amber was a gamer, she needed a game to play. The game she played literally came to me in a dream one night. It was a third-person action combat game where you had different limited action sets based on which color aura you were in. Some skills had cooldowns, others did not. The game was about rapidly switching between auras and stringing together combos to damage and defeat your opponents. I had eight classes in the beginning with two new ones coming over time.
When I thought about the game’s systems, I immediately thought of EverQuest. Loss of experience on death, a focus on skill, a focus on community. That was my vision for the game which would come to be known as Blaze Auras.
I know this story is getting a bit long here but I hope that you can see the impacts that Brad has had on my life…
Pursuing a degree in game design
Using some of his philosophies for the game in my story
Wanting to make an RPG based on his game tenants
The desire to create worlds either through games or my books
A lot of aspects of my life involved remembering EverQuest and the time I had spent there. So, when I found Pantheon, I knew that this was going to probably be the final MMO I would play.
Then, to circle back to how this article started, on November 18, 2019… Brad passed away. Brad was one of my three inspirations that I looked up to when I wanted to get into gaming. The other two were Keiji Inafune and Shigeru Miyamoto.
Brad taught me that games should only be limited by your imagination. That they are worlds for people to play in. Keiji taught me that simplicity can also lead to complexity, and Shigeru taught me that it’s possible to have all of that and still make people smile and have fun.
So, needless to say… I was heartbroken when one of the men I looked up to was no longer here; however, maybe it was a weird omen or just coincidence but November 18, 2019, was also the day where I wrote the death of one of my characters in A.R. Dragonfly. In fact, it was after completing that chapter that I took to Twitter, already a bit distraught, and read the news.
Talk about taking one to the gut twice in a row.
Once everything had settled in, I realized that the seventh volume of A.R. Dragonfly wasn’t released just yet. Since my series contains a ton of parodies, I decided to add a parody of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen as a new game that my characters played. I called it Sanctuary: Rise of Heroes. That game had been introduced in the seventh volume so I decided to expand one of the chapters to include a quest that Amber and Sebastian embarked on to find a person called The Creator of Worlds. I wrote that quest in the book as a tribute to Brad McQuaid as a way of thanking him for the impact he had on my life.
With all of that being said, I wanted to share all of this as a way to remember him on the anniversary of his passing.
Everybody who has known Brad either personally or vicariously through his games will have a different story about how he impacted them.
This one is mine.
One year later, my heart still aches knowing that you’re no longer with us but take solace in knowing that your legacy still lives. It is alive in the people who continue to work on Pantheon each and every day. It is alive in all of the players you have touched over the decades. You have laid down your brush not because you were finished. You laid it down so we could pick it up and take over where you left off.
The world you envisioned isn’t finished yet but with each passing day, it gets closer and closer.
Your vision lives on and we will see it through to its completion so rest well in peace without worry.
Thank you for everything, Brad. You will never be forgotten. Not by us and, most certainly, not by me.
