So, it was the week before Christmas, 1999, and my brother and I received our Christmas present early. We got a copy of EverQuest. After installing and waiting for the patching to finish, we were finally playing. Well, after waiting forever at the
loadscreen, we began playing.
Except that I was the younger brother, so I really didn't get to play for a good long while.
Finally, after several days, my brother let me create a character, and he and his friend stood over my shoulder as I did. I had chosen to be a Human Rogue, primarily because I knew nothing about the game at that time. When I got to the part when I was supposed to allocate my points, I didn't really know what I should do. My brother and his friend informed that CHA is the stat that gets you really good deals at vendors in the game, and it also makes vendors pay you a lot for items that you sell to them. For this reason, I allocated every one of my points to CHA on my brand new Human Rogue.
After being lost in East Freeport (because the
map from the booklet wasn't very helpful for me) , I remember seeing several messages from other players in the zone, shouting and ooc'ing messages celebrating the New Year. That's when I realized it was now December 31, 1999. Y2K was upon us, and here I was wandering around the
outskirts of East Freeport on my charismatic Human Rogue.
I was still getting accustomed to playing the game, and I eventually wandered into North Ro. I didn't know much at the time, but I recall accidentally auto-attacking an NPC in North Ro named
"Puntar Sandfisher". So, Puntar Sandfisher killed me pretty quickly since I was only level 1, and I don't know if I even equipped anything. After I respawned in East FP, I asked my brother how to send a private message. I wanted to apologize to Puntar for accidentally attacking him, so I wrote "/tell Puntar Hey, I'm sorry about attacking you. I'm really new", but no matter how many times I wrote this, my message didn't go through.
For you see, Puntar was not online at that time.
EDIT: Oh, if anyone wants to see a scanned copy of any of the original city maps, I can totally hook that up.