Shack: Did anyone at CCP see EVE getting this big when it was just starting out?

Mike Read: That's hard to say, at least for me. I first played this game back in January of 2001, and at that time, it was a very bare bones game. There was no documentation, there was really no discussion. I didn't really pick it up again until 2005, and I thought "you know what, this game will last about a month with me." I ended up falling into it, and three years later, I'm now working with the company itself.

It is bit of a misconception with a lot of people that EVE is nothing but a mining simulator, there's a lot more to it than that. We have the 14-day trial, which at times I don't feel is enough to show what the game is all about. There's just so much to it that people need to explore and see to really understand why it's been so successful and why it's taken such time to build up.

Valerie Massey: One of the things I thought was interesting is our company's chef is actually the mother of our CEO. Our CEO and EVE's creator have been friends since they were little boys. One day she came in and I was like, did people think they had lost their minds? Here's two guys in Iceland saying "yea, we're gonna make this game."

She didn't understand what it was, she said she thought it was something just the two of them could do in the garage or in the basement. So they're "no, we have to hire this person and that person" but they told her, "it'll never be more than 20 people."

Of course, now we're at 250 and growing, especially with the merger. We've got the office in Reykjavik, a tiny little three-story building that's gone through this history. It had been a home for artists at one time, used to be a recording studio where Bjork recorded--

Mike Read: Next to one of the most popular clubs in Iceland.

Valerie Massey: Then we outgrew that little building and now we've got this huge [office], it used to be a fish processing plant, the oldest fish processing plant in Reykjavik, and they're renovating it for our office. The cool thing about that is there are people that work at CCP who had relatives that worked there when it was a fish processing plant. We've just grown and grown and grown.

She said it was really funny when they got past 20 people, "it'll never be more than 30 people," and then they would hire another 10 or 15. The guys had vision, but I don't think even they knew it would do as well as it did.

Now we're the leading exporter of software in Iceland, 55% of the software exported from Iceland is EVE. It's really awesome. The old taxi drivers that have probably never touched a computer know where CCP is.

Mike Read: You get in a cab and say "take me to CCP" and they know where they're going.

Valerie Massey: The population of Iceland is 300,000. The entire island, 300,000. We have about 200,000 EVE players. So our goal is to get [beyond that].

Peter Gollan: One of the best things about EVE, I think, is the social aspects of the game. Yes, there's PvP, yes, you can make a ton of ISK in the game, you can make an economic powerhouse. But it's this political intrigue, whether it's backstabbing someone or the council we're trying to develop. The social dynamics of this game truly set it apart from anything.

Mike Read: A lot of games out there, especially MMOs these days, are charging servers. You have 10,000 people here and 6,000 people here. When you start throwing 200,000 people into the same universe, it creates social infrastructures that are completely daunting.

Peter Gollan: We had 35,000 people logged in at the exact same time. Think about it from any type of game, a table-top game or an MMO, to be in a living universe with 35,000 people at the exact same time. Everyone's making different decisions, within real life, that are affecting the game for everyone else.

Shack: How will the development and eventual release of the White Wolf MMO affect EVE?

Peter Gollan: We're so far off with that, it's really hard to gauge. As we kinda touched on, there's still a lot of growth that can go on with EVE and we continue to push that forward. We're really excited to reach 300,001.

Shack: What's the current status of the White Wolf MMO?

Valerie Massey: Yes.

Shack: [laughter] Yes?

Valerie Massey: That's all I can tell you.

Shack: It's in the works?

Valerie Massey: It's in the works. We talked about it at Fan Fest. It's a big secret everybody knows and we can't talk about. It's going to happen.

Shack: 2012?

Valerie Massey: Oh god, I hope not [laughter].