This page mirrors my original Substack article inside EricRhea.com. The original remains available at advisoryhour.substack.com.
I’ve posted a few… what does Substack call them, Notes? about this EverQuest port. If you knew, you knew.
EverQuest occupies a special place in my mind.
Nearly three decades ago, I stumbled into two things that would quietly rearrange my brain: virtual worlds and philosophy. This piece is the start of a new series, because now that this actually works, I have some wonderfully irresponsible ideas to explore. And, as it turns out, an MMO that’s friendly to LLMs is an extremely useful toy to leave lying around the workshop.
1999: a profoundly strange year
EverQuest launched in 1999, which to modern eyes may not sound like much. Another game. Old graphics. Ancient internet. Easy to underestimate. That would be a mistake. EverQuest was a game, yes, but it was also a social network, an economy, a theatre of human ambition, and occasionally a full-contact lesson in trust, greed, cooperation, and low-grade medieval treachery.
Oh, and the treachery? Delicious, my friends.
It was one of the first places I experienced the peculiar magic of playing a game and getting paid for it. These days that barely earns a shrug: Twitch exists, gold farming exists, half the modern internet is some variation on monetized attention or virtual labor-somehow you’re a modern failure if one isn’t making a buck online, but back then it felt like a crack opening in reality.
There were other online games, of course. But EverQuest was the one that hit me like a brick wrapped in metaphysics. Guilds, rivalries, reputation, intrigue—whole little civilizations flickering to life inside dial-up and bad decisions. I have a lot of fond memories from that world, and probably a few emotional scars with excellent pathing.
The TypeScript Experiment
Lately I’ve found Codex unusually good at digital archaeology.
I’ve gotten pretty good at it myself-it’s Batman and Robin. There’s a knack to prying apart the inside of a binary and persuading old software to explain what on earth it thought it was doing. A sort of technical necromancy, but with fewer candles and more hex dumps. And somewhere along the way I realized I wanted a bigger challenge. Something that felt impossible.
Or at least mildly heretical. A little heretical makes the late nights more interesting, of course.
That led to a simple question: what is the craziest thing I could shove into a web browser? Why not EverQuest? Not the whole sprawling apparatus, obviously. Strip away the servers, the accounts, the logins, the databases, all the usual cathedral machinery. Keep the world. Keep the feel. Keep the strange old magic. Would that even be possible in this new gilded age of AI can do anything? That was the experiment.
Turns out, yes, it’s possible.
Unbelievably so.
I’ll be sharing more details-I’m still working on some particulars, but this post is just a note that “Yes, it’s possible.” And no, I’m not sharing it beyond these substack articles. I might do an “insiders” only build. I really don’t need that kind of user base-and you’d be better served going to join the official paths. See, I went looking to see if there’s still an EverQuest community and there’s plenty of options for people to play the game. If you’re interested in an authentic EQ experience, please go seek them out.
The posts I’ll cover on this will be more my experiments in porting a game from 1999 into the browser. It’s not webassembly, it’s full on typescript. The entire engine, every component. I didn’t think typescript could handle it.
That’s underselling my intuition. It’s like thinking my dog could launch a SpaceX rocket.
I just genuinely didn’t think TypeScript had that kind of weight-bearing capacity. It always felt, to me, like a language for interfaces and dashboards and polite modern software. It’s where we vibecode… not for dragging an old MMO’s bones into a browser and asking them to stand up again. Necromancer’s, am I right?
So despite my disbelief with the possibility of typescript… I let Codex chase an impossible goal, and 3 days later?
I walked around the map. 60fp+. It’s quite something. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start-enough so I have a lot more to talk about regarding it. And oh, I can’t wait to show you some of this. It’s stunning.
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