Online Role-playing Games were nothing new when EverQuest debuted in 1999. Some of the first computer games in the 1970s—such as Colossal Cave Adventure—were single-player, text-only riffs on the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. As the early denizens of the Internet took roost that decade, they created multiuser Dungeons and Dragons-style text games for communities of players. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Ultima computer games took the role-playing experience into graphical form, culminating in 1997 with one of the first so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing games, Ultima Online.

EverQuest, which unlike Ultima is rendered from the player's point of view, aimed to one-up its predecessor and bring the nascent genre into the mainstream. It did that and more. On the day of EverQuest's release in March 1999, gamers flooded the 45-megabit-per-second cables connecting to Sony's server farm. Along Interstate 5, in the heart of San Diego, you can still see the scars of that deluge; they're the remains of long trenches in the pavement dug as part of a frantic push to add more lines to the Sony facility.

"Internet service providers were in the habit of oversupplying bandwidth," recalls Michael Bowen, executive director of technical operations for Sony Online Entertainment. "They didn't believe if you buy a pipeline this size, you fill it. But we filled it so much that other people in San Diego lost Internet access because pipes were so full. They scrambled to increase capacity because of us." Sony's ISP—the company declines to name it—raced to boost the bandwidth, ripping up Interstate 5 in the process.

Sony runs two other online games, PlanetSide and Star Wars Galaxies, out of its worldwide network of server facilities. At any given time, Sony is hosting more than 150 000 sword-wielding, laser-shooting, dragon-slaying gamers from all over the world.

"We're looking at transaction rates that rival the Visas and Wall Street brokerage houses," says Adam Joffe, chief technology officer for Sony Online Entertainment [see photo-illustration, "En Garde"]. "Thousands and thousands of transactions per second." And it takes epic levels of processing power to keep it all going