Well, the genesis of Neverwinter Nights was pure coincidence of, uh, just working with some friends who had similar interests or access to things. And then all of a sudden you look at something - you’re in the shower one morning - and you go, “Oh, wait a second, I know how we can do that.” So, in ’88, ’89, we were working on very early graphical games and text based games for AOL, which, at that time, was still called Quantum Computer Services - which was a much bigger mouthful. And so, uh, we were trying to do innovative things. This whole idea of, “Okay, not we can be social. “Now we can bring people together not just in their homes to play games, now we can bring them together over telephone lines,” which is the way we thought of it at the time. So, we were also working on Gold Box Dungeons and Dragons role playing games for SSI. And so, one of the Holy Grails of the early days of online was that all adventure games were in text and I had written text adventures for many years. And so, role playing games, RPGs, were in text if you had any kind of multiplayer component because you couldn’t just get the speed on these old, uh, slow connections. So, we were working on - on the AOL games and as we worked on Dungeons and Dragons with SSI I started to think, “Wait, a second, if we made these series of compromises over on the Dungeons and Dragons side as an RPG we could take this system, put it on AOL and we would have a graphical, multiplayer, RPG.” And so, I was just fortunate to be able to have access to all of the people. So, I talked to Chuck Kroegel at SSI and, uh, Chuck really liked the idea. We talked to Jim Ward at TSR who controlled the Dungeons and Dragons license and he liked it. And I called Steve Case at AOL who - at that time, we worked directly with Steve and with a producer named Kathi McHugh. And Steve and Kathi both liked the idea. And the irony is our meeting where we got everybody together and agreed we were going to do this was in the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas in 1989. The Excalibur is a medieval castle format so it just seemed appropriate for D&D that it all started there.
