Games never die. We bought an Xbox 360 over the weekend and I had a little WTF moment when I saw they wanted to sell me Pacman.

Pacman! That game is twenty five years old!

I’m sure they’ve got Asteroids and Defender in there somewhere if I look for them. Maybe Tetris!

I could be just that lucky.

You know what I would love to see on the thing. EverQuest, the original, as a single player game. The art exists, the code’s all there, all the quests have been written, the moss snakes taught to kick, wood elves smoothed and halflings filled with pie. Yes, Everquest Online Adventures was available for the PS2, but that was the same game – online play, join groups and raids and stuff – and that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about taking all the assets you already have, crude though they may be to 2007 eyes, and setting that in a massively SINGLE PLAYER world. You’re a warrior? Cool, now you go to the newbie fields and chop fire beetles while chatting up a NPC cleric and a rogue, and you head off to the Commonlands to level. Meet up with more people, form a guild, and while you are leveling, so are they, and eventually, you and the guild you’ve made, raid.

Sure, writing code to make the zones alive with recruitable NPCs wouldn’t be trivial, but you’re not starting from scratch – you have the vast majority of your assets already.

This works for other older games. Dark Age of Camelot? Let’s take our group into enemy frontier and see what we find. Build the engine and then port the assets of older MMOs to it, sell them one expansion at a time. All those people who played EQ2 but not EQ1? Now’s their chance to get an experience they cannot get actually playing EQ Live.

Sync up with your friends and then start racing mobs with your friend’s guild as NPCs.

This is the kind of gameplay that would be impossible online – too many people, too many connections, too much traffic to coordinate. But it’s well within the power of a single player game.

Best thing is, you get to sell each expansion to a whole new group of people, again :)

I would SO play this game. SOE probably wouldn’t do this for the Xbox, but if they announced it for the PS3, that Xbox would be going back to the store and a PS3 coming home.