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EverQuest, or 'EverCrack'?

Broadcast Date: Oct. 15, 2002

"It's a game that never ends. EverQuest never ends," says addictions counsellor Jay Parker. "It just keeps going." Parker says this lack of ending is part of the reason EverQuest, a wildly popular online video game, is so addictive that its players call it "EverCrack." In this 2002 clip from CBC-TV's Marketplace, Wendy Mesley investigates the controversy surrounding the highly addictive game and the damage it can do to some players' lives.

EverQuest, or 'EverCrack'?

(Note: The first two minutes of this report is not available for copyright reasons. It focused on the life of EverQuest fan Tracy Montague, a single mom from Abbotsford, B.C. who said she typically spends four hours a night playing the game after her children go to bed.)

• EverQuest was released in 1999. By July 2002, Sony announced that the game had more than 430,000 subscribers. Although there are still numerous EverQuest players around the world today, the game reached its peak in popularity around 2002.

• EverQuest is now known as a MMORPG, or "massively multiplayer online role-playing game." While MMORPGs existed before 1999, EverQuest is generally considered to be the game that brought the MMORPG genre into the Western mainstream.

EverQuest, or 'EverCrack'?

Medium: Television

Program: Marketplace

Broadcast Date: Oct. 15, 2002

Guest(s): Tracy Montague, Jay Parker, Liz Woolly

Reporter: Wendy Mesley

Duration: 10:54

Last updated:
Nov. 19, 2009