Acquiring The EverQuest Client

As it says on the Project 1999 Guidebook:

In order to play on Project 1999 you must obtain a copy of Everquest: Titanium Edition. Only a clean Titanium install will work. You must acquire this on your own as we cannot distribute it, however there are many places to accomplish this. You do not need a valid CD Key.

Because Project 1999 can't distribute the client, one very common question newcomers ask is "where can I get it?" This question is slightly tricky to answer, but you basically have two options: the expensive one and the ... complicated one.

Option #1: Acquire The Physical Disks

This option is simple: beg, borrow or buy (don't steal) the EverQuest Titanium Installation CDs. If you aren't lucky enough to still have some from playing more than a decade ago, consider whether any of your former EverQuest-playing friends might still have them. Also consider asking gamers of other persuasions: your friends who play Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer 40k might have played EverQuest long ago and still have their copies. Heck, even a Facebook post might turn up an unexpected copy.

If you can't find a copy in your social network you'll have to buy it. I could suggest trying your local garage sales and flea markets, but with an item this specific your best bet is probably going to be EBay. However, be warned that, because of Project 1999's popularity, copies of the discs sell for $100 or more.

Option 2: Acquire a Digital Copy

If you don't own or know someone who owns a copy, and you don't want to spend $100 (for 15+ year obsolete software), you'll have to look for a digital copy. Once again the first place you should check is your friends: if you know anyone who plays they must already have a copy they can give you (and even if they don't still have the installation disks they can simply "zip up" a copy of their own installed EverQuest folder and send it to you).

Otherwise you need to check somewhere that's like EBay for digital downloads ... but unfortunately you won't find the Titanium client on Steam or any other official/legal app store. This means that you'll have to go somewhere ... less official. Somewhere that might even sound a bit like "EBay", but most certainly is not EBay.

Of course, the issue there is that the legal situation isn't straightforward. On the one hand a company called Sony Online Entertainment once owned the copyright on software, but they didn't care about selling that software so much as selling online account subscriptions (and in fact future versions of that software would be given out for free). Then many years passed, the software became obsolete, and the copyright on that obsolete software changed hands. Then the company that owns that copyright made an agreement with Project 1999 (see the news history in the Project 1999 forum) ... but didn't give them the license to distribute the client :(

So is it wrong, morally or legally, for you to download really old software from an unofficial site when you don't explicitly own the copyright for it? This author can't answer that (and if I did the Project 1999 folks would be obligated to remove it anyway). You'll have to decide for yourself. Just keep in mind that there are more than a thousand players enjoying Project 1999 and many of them do not have physical copies ... and that wherever you go on the internet you should use anti-virus software.