EverQuest Legends is a powerful nostalgia machine

I wasn’t surprised when I got the call that my dad was dying, even though we’d been estranged for many years. He’d suffered addiction for decades and eventually ran out of time, which also meant he ran out of time to reconcile with me. About 15 years after we stopped talking, my aunt and uncle held the phone up to his ear — 1,400 miles away, between me in Connecticut and him in Nebraska — to help me say goodbye. I’ll never be sure if he understood my words, but, as I watched waves crash on the shore from the Long Island Sound, I cried and told him I loved him. I forgave him for things he probably never forgave himself for. I hung up, and, soon after, he died. Then I thought about EverQuest . Dad bought me EQ for my birthday in 2000 when I had just entered high school. He brought it home with a grin on his face. EverQuest was one of the first massive multiplayer online roleplaying games, but at the time, the box just read “fantasy.” Years earlier, we’d explored Sierra Online adventures for MS-DOS. Compared to that, EverQuest was a revelation. We got hooked on EverQuest immediately. My brother played a Wood-Elf Ranger, my dad played a High-Elf Wizard, and I played a Human Magician. Back in my dad’s small one-bedroom apartment, powered by CompuServe dial-up internet, we had to share EQ . If you know anything about MMOs, you’ll know that sharing one computer is a prickly situation. …