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Will Wright’s City in a Box

Will Wright, 1990

In “The Seventh Sally,” a story by the great Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, a god-like “constructor” named Trurl comes upon a former tyrant named Excelsius, now exiled to a lonely asteroid by the peoples of the planets he used to terrorize. Upon learning of Trurl’s powers, Excelsius demands that he restore him to his throne. Trurl, however, is wise enough to consider what suffering Excelsius’s reinstatement would bring to his subjects. So, he instead fashions an intricate simulacrum of a kingdom for Excelsius to rule over.

And all of this, connected, mounted, and ground to precision, fit into a box, and not a very large box, but just the size that could be carried about with ease. This Trurl presented to Excelsius, to rule and have dominion over forever; but first he showed him where the input and output of his brand-new kingdom were, and how to program wars, quell rebellions, exact tribute, collect taxes, and also instructed him in the critical points and transition states of that microminiaturized society — in other words the maxima and minima of palace coups and revolutions — and explained everything so well that the king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions and, without hesitation, while the constructor watched, issued a few trial proclamations, correctly manipulating the control knobs, which were carved with imperial eagles and regal lions. These proclamations declared a state of emergency, martial law, a curfew, and a special levy. After a year had passed in the kingdom, which amounted to hardly a minute for Trurl and the king, by an act of the greatest magnanimity — that is, by a flick of the finger at the controls — the king abolished one death penalty, lightened the levy, and deigned to annul the state of emergency, whereupon a tumultuous cry of gratitude, like the squeaking of tiny mice lifted by their tails, rose up from the box, and through its curved glass cover one could see, on the dusty highways and along the banks of lazy rivers that reflected the fluffy clouds, the people rejoicing and praising the great and unsurpassed benevolence of their sovereign lord.

And so, though at first he had felt insulted by Trurl’s gift, in that the kingdom was too small and very like a child’s toy, the monarch saw that the thick glass lid made everything inside seem large; perhaps too he duly understood that size was not what mattered here, for government is not measured in meters and kilograms, and emotions are somehow the same, whether experienced by giants or dwarfs — and so he thanked the constructor, if somewhat stiffly. Who knows, he might even have liked to order him thrown in chains and tortured to death, just to be safe — that would have been a sure way of nipping in the bud any gossip about how some common vagabond tinkerer presented a mighty monarch with a kingdom. Excelsius was sensible enough, however, to see that this was out of the question, owing to a very fundamental disproportion, for fleas could sooner take their host into captivity than the king’s army seize Trurl. So with another cold nod, he stuck his orb and scepter under his arm, lifted the box kingdom with a grunt, and took it to his humble hut of exile. And as blazing day alternated with murky night outside, according to the rhythm of the asteroid’s rotation, the king, who was acknowledged by his subjects as the greatest in the world, diligently reigned, bidding this, forbidding that, beheading, rewarding — in all these ways incessantly spurring his little ones on to perfect fealty and worship of the throne.

When first published in 1965, Lem’s tale was the most purely speculative of speculative fictions, set as it was thousands if not millions of years in the future. Yet it would take just another quarter of a century before real-world Excelsiuses got the chance to play with little boxed kingdoms of their own, nurturing their subjects and tormenting them as the mood struck. The new strain of living, dynamic worlds filled with apparently living, dynamic beings was soon given the name of “god game” to distinguish it from the more static games of war and grand strategy that had preceded it.

The first of the great god-game constructors, the one whose name would always be most associated with the genre, was a hyperactive chain-smoking, chain-talking Southerner named Will Wright. This is the story of him and his first living world — or, actually, living city — in a box.

Will Wright has always been a constructor. As a boy in the 1960s and 1970s, he built hundreds of models of ships, cars, and planes. At age 10, he made a replica of the bridge of the Enterprise out of balsa wood and lugged it to a Star Trek convention; it won a prize there, the first of many Wright would get to enjoy during his life. When developments in electronics miniaturization made it possible, he started making his creations move, constructing primitive robots out of Lego bricks, model kits, and the contents of his local Radio Shack’s wall of hobbyist doodads. In 1980, the 20-year-old Wright and his partner Rick Doherty won the U.S. Express, an illegal coast-to-coast automobile race created by the organizer of the earlier Cannonball Run. A fighter jet’s worth of electronics allowed them to drive from New York City to Santa Monica in 33 hours and 39 minutes in a Mazda RX-7, cruising for long stretches of time at 120 miles per hour.

Wright was able to indulge these passions and others thanks to his late father, a materials engineer who invented a lucrative new process for manufacturing plastic packaging before dying of leukemia when his son was just 9 years old. His widow was very patient with her eccentric tinkerer of a son, similar in some ways to his practical-minded father but in others very different. Wright spent five years at various universities in and out of his home state of Louisiana, excelling in the subjects that caught his fancy — like architecture, economics, mechanical engineering, and military history — while ignoring entirely all the others. Through it all, his mother never put any undue pressure on him to settle on something, buckle down, and get an actual degree. When he told her in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be taking over the family business his father had left in trust for him, she accepted that as well. Yet even she must have struggled to accept the notion of her 22-year-old son running off to California with Joell Jones, a painter 11 years his senior; the two had bonded when Jones severed a nerve in her wrist and Wright built a gadget out of metal and rubber bands to allow her to continue to paint. The two would marry in 1984.

Given his love for electronic gadgetry, it will likely come as no surprise that Wright was snared quickly by the nascent PC revolution. Already by 1980 he had added an Apple II to his collection of toys, and with it computer programming and computer gaming to his long list of hobbies; his first computerized love was Bruce Artwick’s primitive original Flight Simulator. But it was only after moving to Oakland with Jones that he started thinking seriously about writing a game of his own. This first and arguably last entirely practical, commercial project of his life was apparently prompted by his now living permanently away from home, an adult at last. At some point even a dreamer has to do something with his life, and making computer games seemed as good a choice as any.

His first game was in some ways the antithesis of everything he would do later: a conventional experience in a proven genre, a game designed to suit the existing market rather than a game designed to create its own new market, and the only Will Wright game that can actually be won in the conventional sense. Like many games of its era, its design was inspired by a technical trick. Wright, who had moved on from his Apple II to a Commodore 64 by this time, had figured out a way to scroll smoothly over what appeared to be a single huge background image. “I knew the Apple couldn’t begin to move that much in the way of graphics around the screen that quickly,” he says. “So I designed the game around that feature.”

Raid on Bungeling Bay on the Commodore 64

Raid on Bungeling Bay owed a lot to Choplifter and a little to Beach-Head, sending you off in a futuristic helicopter to strike at the heart of the evil Bungeling Empire, returning when necessary to your home base for repairs and more ammunition. The most impressive aspect of the game, even more so than its graphical tricks, was the sophisticated modeling of the enemy forces. The Bungeling factories would turn out more advanced hardware as time went on, while your ability and need to disrupt supply lines and to monitor and attack the enemy on multiple fronts created a craving for at least a modicum of strategy as well as reflexes.

Wright sold Raid on Bungeling Bay to Brøderbund Software, who published it in 1984, whereupon it sold a reasonable if hardly overwhelming 30,000 copies on the Commodore 64. But, in contrast to so many of its peers, that wasn’t the end of the story. Hudson Soft in Japan took note of the game, paying Brøderbund and Wright for the right to make it into a cartridge for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Wright claims it sold an astonishing 750,000 copies on the NES in Japan and later the United States, giving him a steady income while he played around with the ideas that would become his next project, the one that would really make his name.

As it happened, the first project merged into the second almost seamlessly. Wright had written a tool for his own use in creating the Bungeling Empire’s cities, a little world editor that would let him scroll around a virtual space, laying down tiles to represent land and sea, factories and gun turrets. He realized at some point — perhaps after his game had shipped and yet he was still tinkering with his world inside the editor — that he found this task of creation much more compelling than the act of destruction that was actually playing the game. Might there be others who felt like him? Based on the success of Electronic Arts’s Pinball Construction Set, a program he hugely admired, he thought there just might be.

One fateful day Wright shared his world editor and his still half-baked ideas about what to do with it with his neighbor Bruce Joffe. An established architect and urban planner, Joffe had studied under Jay Wright Forrester at MIT, generally regarded as the founder of the entire field of system dynamics — i.e., using a computer to simulate a complex, dynamic reality. When he saw Wright’s little Bungeling Empire cities, Joffe was immediately reminded of Forrester’s work. He wasted no time in telling his friend that he really needed to check this guy out.

Even though the two have never to my knowledge met, Jay Wright Forrester and Will Wright were a match made in heaven; they shared much beyond the name of “Wright.” Both, to name one example, got their start in the field of simulation with a flight simulator, Jay Wright Forrester trying to build one and Will Wright trying to figure out how Bruce Artwick’s Flight Simulator really worked.

Driven by his desire to make a flight simulator, Forrester had been instrumental in the creation of Whirlwind, the first real computer, in the sense that we understand the term today, to be built in the United States. ^[1]The more canonical example in American textbooks, the ENIAC, could only be “programmed” by physically rewiring its internals. It’s probably better understood as an elaborate calculating machine than a true computer; its original purpose was to calculate static artillery firing tables. As in so many things, politics plays a role in ENIAC’s anointment. The first computer programmable entirely in software, pre-dating even Whirlwind, was EDSAC-1, built at Cambridge University in Britain. That such a feat was first managed abroad seems to be just a bit more than some Americans in Silicon Valley and elsewhere can bring themselves to accept. The flight simulator never quite came together, but an undaunted Forrester moved on to Project SAGE, an air-defense early-warning system that became easily the most elaborate computing project of the 1950s. From there, he pioneered economic and industrial modeling on computers, and finally, in the late 1960s, arrived at what he called “urban dynamics.” Forrester’s urban modeling created a firestorm of controversy among city planners and social activists; as he put it in his dry way, it “was the first of my modeling work that produced strong, emotional reactions.” He was accused of everything from incompetence to racism when his models insisted that low-cost urban public housing, heretofore widely regarded as a potent tool for fighting poverty, was in reality “a powerful tool for creating poverty, not alleviating it.”

Of more immediate interest to us, however, is the reaction one Will Wright had to Forrester’s work many years after all the controversy had died away. The jacket copy of Forrester’s book Urban Dynamics reads like a synopsis of the simulation Wright was now about to create on a microcomputer: “a computer model describing the major internal forces controlling the balance of population, housing, and industry within an urban area,” which “simulates the life cycle of a city and predicts the impact of proposed remedies on the system.” When Wright’s neighbor Joffe had studied under Forrester in the 1970s, the latter had been constructing physical scale models of his urban subjects, updating them as time went on with the latest data extracted from his computer programs. If he could build a similar program to live behind his graphical Bungeling Empire cities, Wright would have found a much easier way to study the lives of cities. At about the same time that he had that initial conversation with Joffe, Wright happened to read the Stanislaw Lem story that opened this article. If he needed further inspiration to create his own city in a box, he found plenty of it there.

Never one to shy away from difficult or esoteric academic literature, Wright plunged into the arcane theoretical world of system dynamics. He wound up drawing almost as much from John Horton Conway’s 1970 Game of Life, another major landmark in the field, as he did from Forrester. Wright:

System dynamics is a way to look at a system and divide it into, basically, stocks and flows. Stocks are quantities, like population, and flows are rates, like the death rate, the birth rate, immigration. You can model almost anything using those two features. That was how he [Forrester] started system dynamics and that was the approach he took to his modeling. I uncovered his stuff when I started working on SimCity and started teaching myself modeling techniques. I also came across the more recent stuff with cellular automata [i.e., Conway’s Game of Life], and SimCity is really a hybrid of those two approaches. Because his [Forrester’s] approach was not spatial at all, whereas the cellular automata gives you a lot of really interesting spatial tools for propagation, network flow, proximity, and so forth. So the fact that pollution starts here, spreads over here, and slowly gets less and less, and you can actually simulate propagation waves through these spatial structures. So SimCity in some sense is like a big three-dimensional cellular automata, with each layer being some feature of the landscape like crime or pollution or land value. But the layers can interact on the third dimension. So the layers of crime and pollution can impact the land-value layer.

This description subtly reveals something about the eventual SimCity that is too often misunderstood. The model of urban planning that underpins Wright’s simulation is grossly simplified and, often, grossly biased to match its author’s own preexisting political views. SimCity is far more defensible as an abstract exploration of system dynamics than as a concrete contribution to urban planning. All this talk about “stocks” and “flows” illustrates where Wright’s passion truly lay. For him the what that was being simulated was less interesting than the way it was being simulated. Wright:

I think the primary goal of this [SimCity] is to show people how intertwined such things can get. I’m not so concerned with predicting the future accurately as I am with showing which things have influence over which other things, sort of a chaos introduction, where the system is so complex that it can get very hard to predict the future ramifications of a decision or policy.

After working on the idea for about six months, Wright brought a very primitive SimCity to Brøderbund, who were intrigued enough to sign him to a contract. But over the next year or so of work a disturbing trend manifested. Each time Wright would bring the latest version to Brøderbund, they’d nod approvingly as he showed all the latest features, only to ask, gently but persistently, a question Wright learned to loathe: when would he be making an actual game out of the simulation? You know, something with a winning state, perhaps with a computer opponent to play against?

Even as it was, SimCity was hardly without challenge. You had to plan and manage your city reasonably well or it would go bankrupt or drown in a sea of crime or other urban blights and you, the mayor, would get run out of town on a rail. Yet it was also true that there wasn’t a conventional winning screen to go along with all those potential losing ones. Wright tried to explain that the simulation was the game, that the fun would come from trying things out in this huge, wide-open possibility space and seeing what happened. He thought he had ample evidence from his friends that he wasn’t the only one who liked to play this way. They would dutifully build their cities to a point and then, just like Excelsius in the story, would have just as much fun tearing them down, just to see what happened. Indeed, they found the virtual destruction so enjoyable that Wright added disasters to the program — fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, even a rampaging Godzilla monster — that they could unleash at will. As with everything else in SimCity, the motivation for a player consciously choosing to destroy all her labor was just to see what would happen. After all, you could always save the game first. Wright:

When I first started showing the Commodore version, the only thing that was in there was a bulldozer, basically to erase mistakes. So if you accidentally built a road or a building in the wrong place you could erase it with the bulldozer. What I found was that, invariably, in the first five minutes people would discover the bulldozer, and they would blow up a building with it by accident. And then they would laugh. And then they would go and attack the city with the bulldozer. And they’d blow up all the buildings, and they’d be laughing their heads off. And it really intrigued me because it was like someone coming across an ant pile and poking it with a stick to see what happens. And they would get that out of their system in about ten minutes, and then they would realize that the hard part wasn’t destroying, but building it back up. And so people would have a great time destroying the city with a bulldozer, and then they would discover, “Wow, the power’s out. Wow, there’s a fire starting.” And that’s when they would start the rebuilding process, and that’s what would really hook them. Because they would realize that the destruction was so easy in this game, it was the creation that was the hard part. And this is back when all games were about destruction. After seeing that happen with so many people, I finally decided, “Well I might as well let them get it out of their systems. I’ll add disasters to the game.” And that’s what gave me the idea for the disasters menu.

Wright asked Brøderbund to look at his “game” not as a conventional zero-sum ludic experience, but as a doll house or a train set, an open-ended, interactive creative experience — or, to use the term the market would later choose, as a “sandbox” for the player. Wright:

I think it [sandbox gaming] attracts a different kind of player. In fact, some people play it very goal-directed. What it really does is force you to determine the goals. So when you start SimCity, one of the most interesting things that happens is that you have to decide, “What do I want to make? Do I want to make the biggest possible city, or the city with the happiest residents, or the most parks, or the lowest crime?” Every time you have to idealize in your head, “What does the ideal city mean to me?” It requires a bit more motivated player. What that buys you in a sense is more replayability because we aren’t enforcing any strict goal on you. We could have said, “Get your city to 10,000 people in ten years or you lose.” And you would always have to play that way. And there would be strategies to get there, and people would figure out the strategies, and that would be that. By leaving it more open-ended, people can play the game in a lot of different ways. And that’s where it becomes more like a toy.

But Brøderbund just couldn’t seem to understand what he was on about. At last, Wright and his publisher parted ways in a haze of mutual incomprehension. By the time they did so, the Commodore 64 SimCity was essentially complete; it would finally be released virtually unchanged more than two years later.

SimCity on the Commodore 64

For the moment, though, nobody seemed interested at all. After halfheartedly shopping SimCity around to some other publishers (among them Cinemaware) without a bite, Wright largely gave up on the idea of ever getting it released. But then in early 1987, with SimCity apparently dead in the water, he was invited to a pizza party for game developers hosted by a young businessman named Jeff Braun. Braun, who envisioned himself as the next great software entrepreneur, had an ulterior motive: he was looking for the next great game idea. “Will is a very shy guy, and he was sitting by himself, and I felt sorry for him,” Braun says. In marked contrast to Brøderbund, Braun saw the appeal of SimCity before he ever even saw the program in action, as soon as a very reluctant, thoroughly dispirited Wright started to tell him about it. His interest was piqued despite Wright being far from a compelling pitchman: “Will kept saying that this won’t work, that no one likes it.”

Braun nevertheless suggested that he and Wright found their own little company to port the program from the Commodore 64 to the Apple Macintosh and Commodore Amiga, more expensive machines whose older and presumably more sophisticated buyers might be more receptive to the idea of an urban-planning simulation. Thus was Maxis Software born.

Wright ported the heart of the simulation from Commodore 64 assembler to platform-independent C while a few other programmers Braun had found developed user interfaces and graphics for the Macintosh and Amiga. The simulation grew somewhat more complex on the bigger machines, but not as much as you might think. “It got more elaborate, more layers were added, and there was higher resolution on the map,” says Wright, “but it had the same basic structure for the simulation and the same basic sets of tools.”

SimCity on the Macintosh

While Wright and the other programmers were finishing up the new versions of SimCity, Braun scared up a very surprising partner for their tiny company. He visited Brøderbund again with the latest versions, and found them much more receptive to Wright’s project this time around, a switch that Wright attributes to the generally “more impressive” new versions and the fact that by this point “the market was getting into much more interesting games.” Still somewhat concerned about how gamers would perceive Wright’s non-game, Brøderbund did convince Maxis to add a set of optional “scenarios” to the sandbox simulation, time-limited challenges the player could either meet or fail to meet, thus definitively winning or losing. The eight scenarios, some historical (the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the fire-bombing of Hamburg in 1944), some hypothetical (a nuclear meltdown in Boston in 2010, the flooding of Rio de Janeiro in 2047 thanks to global warming), and some unabashedly fanciful (a monster attack on Tokyo in 1957), were all ultimately less compelling than they initially sounded, being all too clearly shoehorned into an engine that had never been designed for this mode of play. Still, Brøderbund’s perceived need to be able to honestly call SimCity a game was met, and that was the most important thing. Brøderbund happily agreed to become little Maxis’s distributor, a desperately needed big brother to look after them in a cutthroat industry.

SimCity shipped for the Macintosh in February of 1989, for the Commodore 64 in April, and for the Amiga in May. Some people immediately sat up to take notice of this clearly new thing; sales were, all things considered, quite strong right out of the gate. In an online conference hosted on June 19, 1989, Wright said that they had already sold 11,000 copies of the Macintosh version and 8000 of the Amiga, big numbers in a short span of time for those relatively small American gaming markets. Presaging the real explosion of interest still to come, he noted that Maxis had had “many inquiries from universities and planning departments.” And indeed, already in August of 1989 the first academic paper on SimCity would be presented at an urban-planning conference. Realizing all too well himself how non-rigorous an exercise in urban planning SimCity really was, Wright sounded almost sheepish in contemplating “a more serious version” for the future.

SimCity for MS-DOS

SimCity would begin to sell in really big numbers that September, when the all-important MS-DOS version appeared. Ports to virtually every commercially viable or semi-viable computer in the world appeared over the next couple of years, culminating in a version for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in August of 1991.

SimCity for Super Nintendo

It’s at this point that our history of SimCity the private passion project must inevitably become the history of SimCity the public sensation. For, make no mistake, a public sensation SimCity most definitely became. It sold and sold and sold, and then sold some more, for years on end. In 1991, the year it celebrated its second anniversary on the market, it still managed to top the charts as the annum’s best-selling single computer game. Even five years after its release, with Wright’s belated “more serious” — or at least more complicated — version about to ship as SimCity 2000, the original was still selling so well that Maxis decided to rename it SimCity Classic and to continue to offer it alongside its more advanced variant. In that form it continued to sell for yet several more years. Shelf lives like this were all but unheard of in the fickle world of entertainment software.

In all, the original SimCity sold at least 500,000 copies on personal computers, while the Super Nintendo version alone sold another 500,000 to console gamers. Spin-offs, sequels, and derivatives added millions and millions more to those numbers in the years that followed the original’s long heyday; at no point between 1989 and today has there not been at least one SimCity title available for purchase. And, believe me, people have continued to purchase. SimCity 2000 (1994) and SimCity 3000 (1999) both became the best-selling single computer games of their respective release years, while post-millennial iterations have sold in the millions as a matter of routine.

But almost more important than the quantities in which the original SimCity sold and the veritable cottage industry it spawned are the people to whom it was selling. By the time they signed Maxis to a distribution contract, Brøderbund had long since demonstrated their knack for getting past the nerdy hardcore of computer users, for bypassing Dungeons & Dragons and military simulations and all the rest to reach the great unwashed masses of Middle America. Brøderbund’s The Print Shop and their Carmen Sandiego series in particular remain icons of ordinary American life during the 1980s. SimCity must be added to that list for the 1990s. Beginning with a June 15, 1989, piece in no less august a journal than The New York Times, seemingly every newspaper and news magazine in the country wrote about SimCity. For a mainstream media that has never known quite what to make of computer games, this was the rare game that, like Carmen Sandiego, was clearly good for you and your kids.

SimCity even penetrated into the political sphere. With a mayoral election pending in 1990, The Providence Journal set up a contest for the five candidates for the post, letting each have his way with a simulated version of Providence, Rhode Island. The winner of that contest also wound up winning the election. More amusing was the experiment conducted by Detroit News columnist Chuck Moss. He sent Godzilla rampaging through a simulated Detroit, then compared the result with the carnage wrought by Coleman Young during his two-decade real-world reign as mayor. His conclusion? Godzilla had nothing on Mayor Young.

If the interest SimCity prompted in the mainstream media wasn’t unusual enough, academia’s eagerness to jump on the bandwagon in these years long before “game studies” became an accepted area of interest is even more astonishing. Articles and anecdotes about Will Wright’s creation were almost as prevalent in the pages of psychology and urban-planning journals as they were in newspapers. Plenty of the papers in the latter journals, written though they were by professionals in their field who really should have known better, credited Wright’s experiment with an authority out of all proportion to the fairly simplistic reality of the simulation, in spite of candid admissions of its limitations from the people who knew the program best. “I wouldn’t want to predict a real city with it,” Wright said. Bruce Joffe, the urban planner who had set Wright down the road to SimCity, responded with one word when asked if he would use the program to simulate any aspect of a city he was designing in the real world: “No.” And yet SimCity came to offer perhaps the most compelling demonstration of the Eliza Effect since Joseph Weizenbaum’s simple chatbot that had given the phenomenon its name. The world, SimCity proved once again, is full of Fox Mulders. We all want to believe.

In that spirit, SimCity also found a home in a reported 10,000 elementary-, middle-, and high-school classrooms across the country, prompting Maxis to offer a new pedagogical version of the manual, focused on techniques for using the simulation as a teaching tool. And SimCity started showing up on university syllabi as well; the construction of your own simulated city became a requirement in many sociology and economics classes.

Back in May of 1989, Computer Gaming World had concluded their superlative review of SimCity — one of the first to appear anywhere in print — by asking their readers to “buy this game. We want them to make lots of money so they’ll develop SimCounty, SimState, SimNation, SimPlanet, SimUniverse… billions and billions of games!” The hyperbole proved prescient; Maxis spent the 1990s flooding the market with new Sim titles.

SimEarth on MS-DOS

Jay Wright Forrester’s follow-up to his book Urban Dynamics had been Global Dynamics, an inquiry into the possibility of simulating the entire world as a dynamic system. Wright’s own next game, then, was 1990’s SimEarth, which attempted to do just that, putting you in charge of a planet through 10 billion years of geological and biological evolution. SimEarth became a huge success in its day, one almost comparable to SimCity. The same year-end chart that shows SimCity as the best-selling single title of 1991 has SimEarth at number two — quite a coup for Maxis. Yet, like virtually all of the later Sim efforts, SimEarth is far less fondly remembered today than is its predecessor. The ambitious planet simulator just wasn’t all that much fun to play, as even Wright himself admits today.

But then, one could make the same complaint about many of Maxis’s later efforts, which simulated everything from ant colonies to office towers, healthcare systems (!) to rain forests. New Sim games began to feel not just like failed experiments but downright uninspired, iterating and reiterating endlessly over the same concept of the open-ended “software toy” even as other designers found ways to build SimCity‘s innovations into warmer and more compelling game designs. Relying heavily as always on his readings of the latest scientific literature, Wright could perhaps have stood to put away the academic journals from time to time and crack open a good novel; he struggled to find the human dimension in his simulations. The result was a slow but steady decline in commercial returns as the decade wore on, a trend from which only the evergreen SimCity and its sequels were excepted. Not until 2000 would Maxis finally enjoy a new breakthrough title, one that would dwarf even the success of SimCity… but that is most definitely a story for another time.

Given its storied history and the passion it once inspired in so many players, playing the original SimCity as well for the first time today is all but guaranteed to be a somewhat underwhelming experience. Even allowing for what now feels like a crude, slow user interface and absurdly low-resolution graphics, everything just feels so needlessly obscure, leaving you with the supreme frustration of losing again and again without being able to figure out why you’re losing. Not for nothing was this game among the first to spawn a book-length strategy guide — in fact, two of them. You need inside information just to understand what’s going on much of the time. There are games that are of their time and games that are for all time. In my perhaps controversial opinion, the original SimCity largely falls into the former category.

But, far from negating SimCity‘s claim to our attention, this judgment only means that we, as dutiful students of history, need to try even harder to understand what it was that so many people first saw in what may strike us today as a perversely frustrating simulation. Those who played the original SimCity for the first time, like those who played the original Adventure, Defender of the Crown, and a bare handful of other landmark games in the history of the hobby, felt the full shock of a genuinely new experience that was destined to change the very nature of gaming. It’s a shock we can try to appreciate today but can never fully replicate.

You can see traces of SimCity in many if not most of the games we play today, from casual social games to hardcore CRPG and strategy titles. Sid Meier, when asked in 2008 to name the three most important innovations in the history of electronic gaming, listed the invention of the IBM PC, the Nintendo Seal of Quality… and, yes, SimCity. “SimCity was a revelation to most of us game designers,” says Meier. “The idea that players enjoyed a game that was open-ended, non-combative, and emphasized construction over destruction opened up many new avenues and possibilities for game concepts.” Many years before Meier’s statement, Russell Sipe, the respected founder of Computer Gaming World, said simply that “SimCity has changed the face of computer-entertainment software.” He was and is absolutely correct. Its influence really has been that immense.

(Sources: Magazines include Amazing Computing of October 1989; Game Developer from April 2006; MacWorld from April 1990; Computer Gaming World from May 1989; Compute! from January 1992; The New Yorker from November 6 2006. Newspapers include The San Francisco Chronicle from November 3 2003; The New York Times from June 15 1989; The Los Angeles Times from October 2 1992. Books include The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem; The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook by Johnny L. Wilson; Game Design Theory and Practice by Richard Rouse III; The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning by Le Corbusier; The Second Self by Sherry Turkle. Current and archived online sources include John Cutter’s blog; Game Research; articles about Will Wright and Sid Meier on Wired; The Next American City; Reform; GameSpot; a 1989 talk given by Jay Wright Forrester, which is hosted at MIT; First Monday; Taylor Francis Online. And finally, there’s the collection of Brøderbund archives I went through during my visit to the Strong Museum of Play.

Beginning with SimCity 2000, the more playable later iterations of the franchise are all available for purchase in various places online. For those of an historical bent who’d like to experience the original, I offer a zip that includes the first three versions — for the Macintosh, Commodore 64, and Amiga.)

Footnotes[+]

Footnotes
↑1	The more canonical example in American textbooks, the ENIAC, could only be “programmed” by physically rewiring its internals. It’s probably better understood as an elaborate calculating machine than a true computer; its original purpose was to calculate static artillery firing tables. As in so many things, politics plays a role in ENIAC’s anointment. The first computer programmable entirely in software, pre-dating even Whirlwind, was EDSAC-1, built at Cambridge University in Britain. That such a feat was first managed abroad seems to be just a bit more than some Americans in Silicon Valley and elsewhere can bring themselves to accept.

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Posted by Jimmy Maher on June 10, 2016 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: amiga, brøderbund, c64, macintosh, maxis, simcity, wright

The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything

03 Jul

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software.

I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring.

— Will Wright

Gamers are both extremely dedicated to and really good at preserving the history of their hobby. Seldom has a month gone by in the fifteen years that I’ve been writing for this site that I haven’t had cause to feel grateful for their efforts. During the early years, I was most thankful for their lovingly curated archives of 8-bit disk images and the emulators to run them on our modern-day supercomputers; more recently, it’s initiatives like ScummVM and the welter of patches and fixes that make it easier to experience games that are, for all that they may be infinitely more advanced than the ones I started out writing about, nevertheless decades old by this point, designed for versions of Microsoft Windows that fell out of support before some people who are old enough to vote today were even born. More recently still, projects like Wine and Lutris have allowed me to run these games on Linux, in many cases more easily than I could under Windows. And then of course there’s MobyGames, a site I have visited and will doubtless continue to visit almost every single day that I write about gaming history.

It therefore pains me just slightly to say that, for all the good they do, these same fans can create a somewhat distorted impression of the history they work so hard to preserve. The fact is that the version of our ludic past which you find chronicled on a site like MobyGames is often markedly at odds with the real facts on the ground from back in the day. The games which get most of the attention there, and garner multiple loving retrospectives in fan journals like Retro Gamer magazine, are seldom the ones that actually sold the best. Then as now, the best way to sell a lot of games was to make ones that appealed to people who don’t self-identify as gamers, who would have no idea how to even begin to interact with a DOOM or a Starcraft, to whom it would certainly never occur in a million years to visit a site like MobyGames. For these people, games are just a way of passing the time, not a passion or a lifestyle. And there are a lot more of them than there are of us, my friends. If you’re basing your understanding of which games were the most successful in their day on the ones that have the largest quantity of nostalgic reviews on MobyGames, Steam, and GOG.com, you’ve gone badly astray.

The canonical example of this disconnect is Myst. Widely dismissed by the hardcore set as nothing more than a slideshow of pretty pictures wired together with a handful of switch-flipping set-piece puzzles, Myst was the face of the multimedia revolution in personal computing in the eyes of Jack and Jill America during the 1990s. As a result, it became the best-selling single game of the decade. There’s a surprising number of other non-core-gaming successes of almost the same magnitude to be spotted if you only pause to look, most of them without the note of highbrow artsiness that has always elevated the discussion around Myst. The most successful game ever made by Dynamix — the studio behind such hardcore classics as Articfox, Red Baron, Betrayal at Krondor, and Aces of the Deep — was a far more populist offering called Trophy Bass, which as of this writing has precisely zero reviews on MobyGames. And don’t even get me started on Deer Hunter, the schlocky big-box-store sensation of the late 1990s, a punchline among hardcore gamers that just sold and sold and sold and sold.

A subtler example of the phenomenon — also one that gives a modicum more hope than Deer Hunter for the taste and intelligence of the proverbial unwashed masses, even as it cuts across some of the boundaries behind hardcore and casual play — is SimCity. Designed by Will Wright and published in early 1989 by a company he co-founded called Maxis Software, SimCity‘s combination of compulsive playability with the serious, adult-approved theme of urban planning famously inspired Time magazine to write its first computer-game review ever within mere weeks of its release. The sky was the limit from there. The rumpled, chain-smoking, mile-a-minute-talking Wright became a minor celebrity in his own right as magazines, newspapers, and even television shows piled in to cover this game and this man that conformed to none of their preconceived stereotypes. Reflecting on those heady days in 2013, Wright called SimCity “kind of the earliest example of a game that was leaning more to a mainstream audience. They were interesting people that were not necessarily into dragons or history or sports. And so they were into games that were more about reality than fantasy.” The only game of the time that gained as much traction among people who didn’t usually play games was Tetris. But there was only so much you could say about a game of falling blocks, whereas the literally-titled SimCity, a game which really did purport to simulate an entire city, opened up endless vistas of thoughtful exposition in middlebrow media.

This discourse was frequently self-contradictory. On the one hand, SimCity’s lack of explicit goals or winning states caused it to be deemed the harbinger of a new generation of “software toys,” a frivolous-sounding description which Will Wright nevertheless enthusiastically embraced. On the other hand, the same media was full of reports of university professors and city councils who claimed to take the software toy seriously enough as a simulation to apply it to their work. Wright was more ambivalent about this sort of thing, presumably because he knew all too well just how much SimCity was not based on anything real in any but the most abstract of senses. Still, he couldn’t quite find it in himself to say that these folks were full of it either. Not until years later did he feel he could come completely clean and admit that SimCity was really “a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model.”

Many people come to us and say, “You should do the professional version.” That really scares me because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared to reality. The last thing I want people to come away with is that we’re on the verge of being able to simulate the way that a city really develops, because we’re not.

At the time, though, few proved able to grasp this reality that, just because something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck on a computer screen, that doesn’t mean it is an accurate simulation of a duck. “When I was running Lower Gomorrah, something that looked like a city and felt like a city,” pondered tech journalist Steven Levy, “was I really manipulating anything that bore formal resemblance to a city? How relevant is the imitation of the real thing?” (The answers to these questions, for the record, are “not really” and “not very.”)

But whatever its shortcomings as a real, honest-to-God simulation of urban spaces, there can be no doubt that SimCity should be numbered among the most influential games of all time. In this respect, it makes a stark contrast to Myst, which proved to be something of an evolutionary dead end after the inevitable flurry of largely unsuccessful clones (and one almost as successful direct sequel) had exhausted themselves. SimCity spawned a new gaming sub-genre known as the city-builder, a niche category to be sure but one that proved far more popular and enduring than first-person slideshow adventure games. And yet this constitutes the merest beginning of SimCity’s actual influence. By showing how a real-time approach could benefit even a game that wasn’t particularly interested in testing its player’s reflexes, it revealed new possibilities to designers, who went on to implement real-time in a wide array of strategy games, from Railroad Tycoon to Europa Universalis. And in popularizing and legitimizing the notions of “builder games” and “software toys,” it likewise changed design aesthetics forever; after it, even games that did boast the campaigns and stories and goals that SimCity had so conspicuously lacked felt obliged to provide a “sandbox” or “free-play” mode to satisfy the appetites that Will Wright had inculcated. In all of these ways and more, SimCity’s influence extends astonishingly far afield. For example, Sid Meier has gone on record many times to say that Civilization would never have come to be absent SimCity. (He actually tried very, very hard to make the original Civilization run in real-time before finally accepting that it just wasn’t a good fit with the other parts of the design.) Whatever your favorite modern game happens to be, the odds are better than even that it bears a trace of SimCity somewhere in its DNA.

In a more immediate context, though, the success of SimCity posed a dilemma for Will Wright: what would he and Maxis do to follow up a game that was being discussed in borderline worshipful terms in such unlikely media organs as InfoWorld, The New York Times, and Newsweek? Wright was determined to keep on keeping on with his idiosyncratic vision of games as intricate systems to be tinkered with and learned from rather than competitions to be won or interactive stories to be experienced. Why should he do anything else, given the money and celebrity that SimCity was garnering him? Maxis’s co-founder Jeff Braun, the business mind to complement Wright’s creative one, thought his responsibility was “to protect him [Wright], in a sense, and create a structure where he can do his thing. It really was not about me and what I thought would be successful. It was about Will and getting his creative thing out.”

At the Game Developer’s Conference in the spring of 1990, Wright made a presentation that says as much about his way of thinking about games as it does the heady tenor of the times. He proposed an industry-wide standardized file format “so that players could switch accomplishments from one imaginary world to another. For instance, one might be able to use the road system from SimCity in order to race in Vette!, or one’s approval rating for the former might be enhanced by one’s accomplishments in, say, Ultima VI.” (Had these three games ever been mentioned together in the same sentence before?)

Naïve and ultimately pointless though the proposal may be, it demonstrates something important about Will Wright. In his mind, all of the games he would make or enable to be made in the future would be in some sense part of a single larger, overarching game, an entire simulated universe. To Will Wright it was, to paraphrase Neil Young, all one game.

The dawn of the 1990s was an important period for environmental science, when talk of temporally and/or geographically localized effects like acid rain began to shift toward wider-frame discussions of human impacts on our planet over a scale of many generations; not coincidentally, it was at this time that the term “global warming” first entered the popular discourse in a big way. The original Civilization’s inclusion of global warming as a game mechanic, one of the few drawbacks it saw to its larger theme of boundless human Progress, is very much a reflection of the period in which it was conceived. This statement is even more true about Will Wright’s SimEarth, which appeared a year and a half before Civilization, in mid-1990. Rather than just incorporating one trending aspect of environmental theory as a mechanic, it aspired to be a full-blown simulation of the Gaia hypothesis about our planet.

Dating back to the mid-1970s, and with philosophical and spiritual roots stretching back thousands of year further, the Gaia hypothesis was the brainchild of a former NASA scientist named James Lovelock. It proposed that all of the Earth, both its living and its non-living components, ought to be seen and understood as a single interlocking system, almost a meta-organism unto itself. By Lovelock’s own description,

Gaia is a hard-science theory about the evolution of the Earth and the life upon it. In no way is it contradictory to Darwin; it extends Darwinism to include the evolution of the rocks, the atmosphere, and the oceans. Gaia theory sees the evolution of the material world and the evolution of the organisms as a tightly coupled process. Changes in the organisms always affect the environment, and vice versa.

The problem in the opinion of most mainstream scientists was that Lovelock was never able to adequately explain just how this symbiosis occurred, how the living could so comprehensively communicate with and affect the non-living. It sounded to them more like mysticism or religion than science, a point which they hammered home again and again. Said point is probably valid enough according to the principles of hard science, but the Gaia hypothesis remains immensely appealing and even inspiring as a thought experiment, almost regardless of its literal truth. This was expressed with surprising eloquence back in 1990 by gaming journalist Rusel DeMaria:

The Gaia hypothesis helps us to see this warm, blue sphere not as a rock which happens to support life in the middle of the forbidding void of space, but as an organism that has successfully sustained its own state of aliveness for billions of years. Are we part of the evolution of a super-organism? Will we be the beings that help that organism reproduce itself in space and throughout the galaxy? These are some of the questions I’ve considered since encountering Dr. Lovelock’s remarkable theory. My view of the world is forever changed.

James Lovelock was always interested in using computers to model and teach his hypothesis, believing that it was easier to understand Gaia if one could see it in action than if one could only read about it on the page. In the early 1980s, he and a colleague named Andrew Watson developed an extremely simple simulation they called Daisyworld, which modeled a planet that was host to only two forms of life: white daisies that reflected sunlight and black daisies that absorbed it. Therefore white daises would tend to make the planet cooler, all else being equal, while black daisies warmed it up. The fun, if you chose to call it that, was in tinkering with the daisy numbers and coverage to see what kind of climate resulted. Daisyworld was partly intended as riposte to those scientists who said that the Gaia hypothesis lacked a mechanism to explain how living things could affect the planet to the extent claimed. Alas, most of them were still not convinced: they said that such a simplified model was all well and good for understanding some aspects of the environment, not least human-caused climate change, but it didn’t begin to address the full scope of the symbiosis of the Gaia hypothesis.

But the point remains that Lovelock had a well-known interest in computer modeling. On that basis, Stewart Brand, a proudly unreformed hippie with a techno-optimist bent, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, introduced him to Will Wright in the first blush of the latter’s SimCity fame. The two quickly decided to collaborate on a simulation of a living planet that would be far more sophisticated than Daisyworld, that would model the evolution of a planet and all of the life that might eventually arise on it over billions and billions of years. This planet could be as similar to or different from our Earth as the player wished. At first, Wright and Lovelock thought to call their simulation simply Gaia, but bowed in the due course of things to the wisdom of Jeff Braun, who said that Maxis had the beginning of a wonderful brand in the name of SimCity and that they ought to exploit it. Thus Gaia became SimEarth: The Living Planet.

SimEarth was an almost achingly earnest exercise, a million miles away from what the average person on the street might imagine a videogame to be. The official strategy guide, written by the aforementioned Rusel DeMaria, included what might have been the only call to political action ever presented in this genre of books that were usually all about tips, tricks, and cheats to improve your score and impress your friends: “It is my hope that by bringing these issues to your attention, we’ll all be able to remember our priorities and perhaps take action to stop our destructive behaviors and find ways to live in harmony with our world.” Maxis promised to funnel a portion of the game’s proceeds into environmental charities. Lovelock wrote that he hoped SimEarth “might develop into something more [than just a game], a personal model that might become a guide for living right with the world. A way of testing for ourselves the long-term consequences of different ways of living.”

If there was a goal to be found in SimEarth, it must be to guide one’s personal Gaia along until it yielded intelligent life capable of surviving and thriving in harmony with the planet. Johnny L. Wilson, an ordained Christian minister who also happened to be the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine, took on the task of reviewing SimEarth himself. One might have expected him to be hostile to the very idea of a game where Darwinian evolution took such pride of place, but he declared that in the end SimEarth only reaffirmed his faith, by showing him that life could only evolve if he, in the role of the God of this simulation, tinkered with the system constantly to ensure that the fragile flora and fauna on his planet could progress from stage to stage. It wasn’t the dramatic creation narrative of the Book of Genesis, but it was good enough for him.

Of course, we shouldn’t get too carried away by SimEarth, any more than we should by SimCity. It may have been created with a more serious intent than SimCity, but all of the same caveats about its accuracy as a simulation apply; if anything, they’re amplified by the absurd vastness of its scope. Yet that need not have mattered so much if it could convince its players to think differently about our delicate planet and our relationship to it. Sadly, however, it never found anything like the same audience as SimCity, because it just wasn’t as relatable. Even colossal failures of urban planning could be fun in SimCity — in fact, sometimes the most fun of all. But if you failed to twiddle the knobs just right in SimEarth, you just wound up with a dead lump of rock rather than a cataclysmic fire or an epic traffic jam to gawk at. It was all so very slow and abstract, so divorced from real life as its players knew it.

This would prove to be something of a problem for Will Wright and Maxis going forward. Their earnest simulations of big ideas weren’t always all that obviously fun. Although SimEarth sold well initially, its momentum petered out as it became clear that this software toy was less joyously playful than its predecessor. The same fate would befall almost every Maxis game that didn’t bear the name of SimCity for a long time to come.

That said, Wright’s next game did include more whimsy and humor than were to be found in the stolidly portentous SimEarth. Like so many of his other games, 1991’s SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony was inspired by his readings in popular science: in this case, by the book The Ants by E.O. Wilson, the dark-horse winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. This time, however, Wright was not able to work directly with the man whose theories he was trying to bring to interactive life on the computer. Wilson neglected to read closely the letter Wright sent him proposing a collaboration, and was thus left to find out about SimAnt after it was finished, just like everyone else. But when he did, he praised its “sophistication and precision,” so it was all good.

E.O. Wilson was the man who first discovered that individual ants, although each possessed of only the most rudimentary forms of awareness, communicate over amazingly long distances using pheromones, resulting in a group intelligence that enormously transcends that of its constituent parts. Seen in a certain light, then, Wright’s first three Sim games were all grappling with what he liked to called “distributed,” communal forms of sentience: SimEarth on a macro level, SimAnt on a micro level, and SimCity somewhere in between. In SimAnt, you have to find the right ratio of breeders to workers to soldiers in the colony you build around your all-important queen. You also have to contend with a rival ant colony and other, bigger creatures that can wreak havoc on your insect society, such as a marauding tarantula.

Wright and the slowly growing team around him at Maxis did look for ways to make this simulation more relatable than SimEarth. If you need an action fix, you can take direct control of one of your soldier ants and charge into battle. Maxis even deigned to include a score and a high-score table. The ultimate achievement is to drive a hapless human and his dog right out of their house. Observing all of this, Computer Gaming World noted that there weren’t actually all that many differences between the life of your ant colony and “an exciting space-opera story line”: “The horrible, nearly indestructible insect-like monster in the movie Alien was, after all, a souped-up, acid-puking, survivalist ant from a mixed marriage with a scorpion.”

But, for all that ravenous insects — not to mention hive minds — had been a staple of science fiction since the very beginning, the answer to the question of whether people wanted to spend hours on end seeing the world through insectoid compound photo-receptors proved mixed. Although SimAnt did considerably better than SimEarth in the long run, selling over 100,000 copies, Wright was vaguely disappointed that its primary demographic wound up being “ten-to-thirteen-year-old” boys, the group best primed to respond to its squishy sound effects and shadings of the grotesque: “I was expecting it to be more older people that would appreciate how amazingly interesting ants are as an example of distributed intelligence. But in fact, I ended up appealing to twelve-year-olds who just loved playing with ants.” Ah, well… it’s better to have the “wrong” customers than no customers at all. The latter would be the case to an alarming degree for the two games after SimAnt.

Those two games marked the first times that Maxis applied the Sim branding to the work of other designers than Will Wright. By now, the studio had developed into a utopian collective of thinkers and dreamers, who barely felt they were a part of the commercial games industry at all and definitely didn’t feel like they had to abide by its usual rules. SimCity, that gift that kept on giving, ensured that, funding whatever esoteric experiments they wished to pursue.

A former Apple hardware engineer named Ken Karakotsios was responsible for SimLife, Maxis’s most esoteric simulation yet, which abandoned all of the concessions to accessibility that were to be found in SimAnt. SimLife was responding to yet another buzz in popular science, in this case over the prospects for digital “cellular automata” — or, to use the title of a popular 1992 book by Steven Levy, Artificial Life.

This notion of self-replicating digital organisms was an old one in computer science even then, having originated in the 1940s with John von Neumann. It was given a practical spin circa 1970 by the mathematician John Conway, whose Game of Life allowed the user to set up collections of “cells” in different configurations on a computer and then watch to see what patterns they created as they lived and died. The claims that were made on the basis of simple experiments like this one were either boldly visionary or wildly overblown, depending on your point of view. But, as so often happens in fields of or adjacent to artificial intelligence, the boosters found it hard to explain how genuine consciousness was going to arise from their crude imitations of life.

This isn’t to say that cellular-automata couldn’t be useful and intriguing. Will Wright himself had employed some of these approaches in all three of his Sim games. Ken Karakotsios’s implementation of them was at bottom a dramatically expanded version of The Game of Life, which permitted the single cells to evolve into all manner of plants and animals, then compete and cooperate in various simulated environments while the player tinkered from on-high as much or as little as she preferred. It was interesting enough conceptually even if one hadn’t drunk all of the artificial-life Kool Aid — it was a decent simulation of the way that evolution is believed to work in the non-digital world as well — but the things that had made SimEarth problematic as a marketplace proposition were exaggerated even further here: it was all just so attenuated, so very abstract. And it didn’t help that, on a superficial level at least, it was plowing so much of the same ground as SimEarth, which had also allowed you to watch lifeforms evolve, albeit in the context of a grander world simulation.

Computer scientist Christopher Langton, the most prominent academic booster of cellular automata at the time, said that SimLife was “awfully close to being a useful tool for scientific research.” Yet it was competing with games, not with scientific tools. It became Maxis’s worst-selling release to date.

SimFarm, which was conceived and designed by a former Maxis playtester named Eric Albers, was more down to earth in all respects. As Maxis’s marketing copy put it, it was “SimCity’s country cousin,” simulating the life of a farm. But it turned out that digging irrigation ditches was less exciting than building roads, and that watching cows graze was less entertaining than watching human commuters go about their day. SimCity was kinetic; SimFarm just sat there baking in the sun, succeeding mostly in demonstrating why fleeing the farm for the bright lights and big city has long been such a staple of fiction and nonfiction. It didn’t sell much better than SimLife.

A meeting of great gaming minds. Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, and Jeff Braun in Japan, October 1989.

Indeed, SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, and SimFarm combined struggled to come within an order of magnitude of SimCity’s total sales. Defying the usual logic of the computer-game marketplace, SimCity’s sales increased rather than decreased year by year, as more and more people who weren’t traditional gamers, hackers, or nerds brought computers into their homes, thanks to the excitement about CD-ROM and multimedia, the user-friendliness of the latest versions of Microsoft Windows, and, soon enough, the chatter about the burgeoning World Wide Web. SimCity subsidized everything else that Maxis did.

It had been widely ported from its first home on the Apple Macintosh. First it had made its way to the Commodore Amiga, then to MS-DOS, the platform where it really started to drum up the sales figures. After that came just about every other viable or semi-viable computing platform in the Western world, including even such aged refugees of an earlier computing epoch as the Commodore 64 (the machine on which Wright had coded his first prototype of the game), the Sinclair Spectrum, and the BBC Micro. But the next really key port after the MS-DOS one was to the new Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the much-anticipated successor to the best-selling single games console to date. When the SNES came to North America in August of 1991, SimCity was one of its launch titles, serving as an early demonstration that this console was capable of far more than the likes of Super Mario Bros.

It’s therefore ironic to note that SimCity’s biggest champion inside Nintendo was none other than the creator of Super Mario Bros., the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto. Wright had first bonded with him over the course of a week-long, exploratory visit to Japan in October of 1989. Nintendo then agreed to undertake the port themselves under Miyamoto’s guidance, “Nintendoizing” the game without losing its essence. Miyamoto inserted his American friend into the proceedings as “Dr. Wright,” who popped up from time to time to offer comments and advice, doing much to personalize a game that was, like all of Maxis’s software toys, utterly bereft of identifiable characters in its original form. Having SimCity on the SNES, which quickly became a bigger self-contained market for games than all of the existing computer platforms combined, was another huge boon for Maxis, even if the more cartoony look wasn’t going to do them any favors with the furled-brow Time magazine crowd.

At the same time that they were expanding onto a living-room console, Maxis was becoming a publisher of out-of-house games. These weren’t generally given the Sim branding but did tend to be aligned with it in spirit. Maxis provided an entrée to the American market for any number of international studios whose abstruse concepts had been given short shrift by other publishers. Their games ranged from A-Train, a Japanese-developed, finance-heavy Railroad Tycoon competitor that gave the lie to the idea that all Japanese games were simple and cutesy like Super Mario Bros., to a passive Russian “aquarium simulator” called El-Fish that was as proudly goalless — some might opt for the term “pointless” — as anything that ever sprang from the mind of Will Wright.

Many of these were worthy, even noble efforts in their way, even if they don’t float your humble author’s particular boat. But that fact kind of points out the problem with them: they were ultra-nichey titles that demanded players who were seriously interested in their unusual subject matter, at a time when the distribution systems of commercial computer gaming were not well-suited to such products. Maxis struggled even to get them into the stores where they might be bought. Few retail orderers were excited about wasting precious shelf space on El-Fish when that same shelf could be filled with yet more copies of DOOM and Myst — and yes, of SimCity as well.

In the summer of 1992, Jeff Braun traded 30 percent of Maxis’s equity and a seat on the company’s board for a cash injection of $10 million from Warburg Pincus Ventures. The deal was predicated on the understanding that some of the money would be used for a new SimCity that was more in tune with the expectations of the 1990s, one that could be sold to all of the people who had bought the first one all over again, at the same time that it hopefully reached large numbers of new people.

At the time, Will Wright had been tinkering for months with something that even the dreamy minds around him didn’t quite understand, a virtual dollhouse that he was building up from some of the core algorithms of SimAnt. By Wright’s own admission, Braun had to “drag” him away from it to do SimCity 2000. He wound up devoting more than a year of his life to the project, but he did so more begrudgingly than passionately, because his trusted business partner was telling him that Maxis needed this game in order to survive and make possible all of the other ones. “I was in management mode,” he says. “I had a pretty clear idea of what the design would be, since we were basically just doing a sequel, which is always easier. It was more just making sure the engineering was good and the performance was decent.”

Co-designed by Fred Haslam, who had previously worked with Wright and James Lovelock on SimEarth, SimCity 2000 was a new software-development experience for Maxis all the way around. Prior to this point, Maxis had been as much a creative playground as a serious company, happily thumbing its nose at all of the established industry logic about what you needed to do to actually sell games. And, sure enough, they hadn’t sold all that terribly many games beyond the sui generis SimCity. Now, Braun told everyone, they needed to make their sequel to that game match a set of bullet points that were demanded by the marketplace, needed not to challenge anyone’s expectations unduly while they were doing so, and, most importantly of all, needed to have the finished product ready to go for the Christmas buying season of 1993. They managed all of these feats, but not without some friction and hard feelings. Some employees, finding the dictates to be a betrayal of everything they had thought Maxis stood for, quit rather than abide by them. Those who stayed became familiar before all was said and done with the nature of crunch, another new experience for Maxis people.

In the end, though, SimCity 2000 did exactly what was required of it, both as a computer program and as a commercial product. The most obvious improvement over its predecessor of four and a half years previous was in the visuals. An isometric view replaced the old top-down one, the onscreen color count increased from 16 to 256, and professional artists were… well, suffice to say that they were present this time. The difference really was night and day.

To the improved visuals were added an improved interface and a host of fairly commonsense gameplay extensions: hospitals and schools, new types of heavy industry and power plants, a plumbing system, subways and trains and other new transportation options. (One can detect some influence from Railroad Tycoon in these, feeding back into the game that had done so much to inspire it; game design has always been a dialog.) You could choose an historical starting date for your game and take advantage of new technologies as they became available: subways in 1910, buses in 1920, highways in 1930, etc., all the way up to microwave and fusion power in 2050. (If only…) As your city’s mayor, you could issue ordinances and read about your accomplishments and your follies in an in-game newspaper. It was all done well, but at the same time not overdone, being still eminently recognizable as the same SimCity that the old fans knew and loved. In the eyes of a business professional like Jeff Braun, it was the perfect sequel.

He was amply rewarded for his foresight in getting it out before the first SimCity cash cow had dried up completely. SimCity 2000 rocketed up the bestseller charts that Christmas of 1993 in just the way that all of those other recent Maxis games hadn’t. Then it kept right on selling for months and then years, another rare perennial in an intensely seasonal industry, a game so popular that it spawned three separate trade-paperback strategy guides from big outside book publishers. Although Maxis had as yet found only one way to actually make consistent money, they were fortunate in that it made them a lot of money. Having given SimCity another lease on life, they could go back to being weird… okay, no, let’s call it esoteric.

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Sources: The books Games That Sell! by Mark H. Walker, Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold, SimEarth: The Official Strategy Guide by Rusel DeMaria, SimCity 2000: Power, Politics, and Plumbing (revised ed.) by Nick Dargahi and Michael Bremer, SimCity 2000 Strategies and Secrets (2nd ed.) by Daniel A. Tauber and Brenda Kienan, The Official SimCity 2000 Planning Commission Handbook by Peter Spear and Johnny L. Wilson, Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd ed.) by Richard Rouse III, and Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology by Steven Levy. Macworld of April 1990; Computer Gaming World of September 1990, January 1991, March 1992, September 1992, April 1993, July 1993, and November 1993; Retro Gamer 115 and 210.

Online sources include the collection of Maxis articles by Phil Salvador at The Obscuratory, Matt Barton’s video interview with Jeff Tunnell, and Tristan Donovan’s interview with Will Wright for the old Gamasutra site.

Where to Get Them: Of the Maxis games described in this article, only SimCity 2000 is currently available as a digital purchase.

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Posted by Jimmy Maher on July 3, 2026 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: maxis, simant, simcity, simearth, simfarm, simlife, wright

The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 2: SimWorld

17 Jul

Would you trust these two men with your investment? Jeff Braun and Will Wright shortly before Maxis’s IPO.

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software.

Maxis came into 1994 riding high on the wings of SimCity 2000, the hit of the previous holiday season. They followed up that success with… SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation. This may sound like satire, but it was all too real.

To be clear, SimHealth was not, say, a playful look at the life of a hospital, with eccentric doctors and bizarre made-up diseases. It wasn’t even an earnest simulation of performing surgery. No, this was exactly what it said on the tin, a simulation of healthcare in the most macro sense. It was, to put it another way, literally a simulation of government bureaucracy. If you were getting bored with saving fantasy worlds from evil wizards and fighting the Second World War over and over, said Maxis, you could buy this game and engage with some truly exciting dilemmas. “Who gets health insurance? What does it cover? Who pays for it? How do you control costs? How will your plan affect business, physicians, specialists, insurance companies, lawyers, medical research, and the average citizen?” Hours and hours of fun for the whole family, am I right? Um… am I right?

Ironically, this most defiantly esoteric Maxis game ever arose from the same set of circumstances that gave birth to the multi-million-selling SimCity 2000. The venture capitalists at Warburg Pincus Ventures, who had traded $10 million in cash for 30 percent of Maxis’s equity and a seat on its board in 1992, thought that the company could find a profitable sideline — or possibly even a mainline — in making simulations for Corporate America to use for internal training and planning. The sticking point was that neither Will Wright nor any of the other idealists around him had much interest in such things. Jeff Braun’s solution was to buy a little software house called Delta Logic, built around a couple of refugees from the wreckage of Digital Research, the firm that had made the most popular business-oriented personal-computer operating system in the world until Bill Gates and Microsoft came along. Since then, John Hiles, Greg Rossi, and their colleagues at Delta Logic had been tinkering with social simulations of various stripes. They were now to be rebranded Maxis Business Simulations, given a lot more money than they had ever had before, and set loose to realize the venture capitalists’ dreams. “There’s the potential for this new business to be bigger than the games business,” enthused Braun dutifully.

That didn’t happen, although a surprising number of projects came and went during the less than two years that Maxis Business Simulations was a going concern. There were a simulation of an oil refinery for Chevron, a simulation of the power grid for the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, a simulation of a telephone network for a communications consultancy, a simulation of pollution management for the Environmental Protection Agency, and a simulation of the closure of a military base (?) for the new Maxis subsidiary’s hometown of Monterey, California. With the exception of a prototype version of SimRefinery, none of the actual software that resulted from these initiatives has been preserved, to whatever extent it came to exist at all. Constant churn was a fact of life at Maxis Business Simulations. It seems safe to say that the idea of doing corporate or civic planning via interactive simulations was one of those that looked better on paper than it tended to turn out on the computer screen.

SimHealth‘s origin story isn’t that different from most of the other Maxis Business Simulations projects. It began when the Markle Foundation, a bedrock of old-school American philanthropy, requested a simulation to illuminate one of the hottest political debates of the 1990s, as it seems to be of every decade: what, if anything, to do about the uniquely strange and byzantine American healthcare system. President Bill Clinton, who in January of 1993 became the first Democrat to occupy the Oval Office in twelve years, made reforming healthcare on a more efficient, equitable basis the flagship issue of his first term. So far, so good. But then he decided to place the project under the stewardship of his unelected wife Hillary Clinton, who was already at this early date a lightning rod for Republicans and no small percentage of independents. It turned into an epic fiasco, burning up most of the president’s political capital without benefiting anyone and setting the stage for a brutal midterm shellacking at the hands of the Republicans. Indeed, many political scientists argue that the current, hyper-partisan era of American politics dates from those 1994 midterms, when Republicans under their future Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich first learned to characterize their Democratic opponents as not just misguided about means but evil in intent.

Is this the weirdest game ever to be reviewed in Computer Gaming World?

If this is the case, then SimHealth stands today as an oddly touching artifact of the Before Times, when there was still more than lip service paid to the notion of politics as a good-faith quest for the policies that yield the most good for the most people. In that spirit, the Markle Foundation decided to make SimHealth available to everyone as a boxed… well, I suppose the word “game” is the only one to use, considering that it was sold in the games section of those stores who were willing to sell it at all, and considering that it was given a two-page review by Computer Gaming World magazine, alongside the likes of Wing of Glory, Alone in the Dark 2, Carriers at War II, Ravenloft, and Aces of the Deep. (One of these things was not like the others…)

SimHealth even played like a game, albeit one with unusually sober — not to say boring — subject matter; in some ways, it was actually more of a game than Maxis’s earlier SimEarth or SimLife. You start out with your political party having just won an election, and have to try to maintain your mandate and with it your chosen approach to healthcare through the elections that follow. Everything about it is incongruous. Once it was decided to release SimHealth publicly, the main Maxis office pitched in with art drawn in the house style; inevitably, it brings to mind nothing so much as good old SimCity. All told, SimHealth stands today as one of the more bizarre games ever to be put in a box and sold. One doesn’t know whether to hail it for its chutzpah or laugh at it. Whatever else you can say about it, it certainly didn’t embrace the then-prevalent gaming mono-culture of sci-fi, fantasy, and war.

The discussion that sprang up around SimHealth was, to the extent it sprang up at all, dogged by the same fallacies that swirled around SimCity. For all that SimHealth presented itself as an early example of a “serious game” with something to say about the real world, there was no reason to believe that this purported “simulation,” created by a few harried programmers in well under a year, could possibly be modeling anything as complicated as a national healthcare system for one of the more populous and diffuse countries in the world with any sort of accuracy. Approaching it as a gamer would — because how else was he supposed to approach it? — Computer Gaming World’s Keith Schlesinger quickly found a winning strategy.

All you have to do is adopt an extreme libertarian ideology, eliminate all federal healthcare (including Medicare!), and cut other government services by $100-300 billion per year. The polls never sink below 57 percent favorable, and the behavior point total is almost a perfect 400. You can set the game to “Run to the End” and breeze to victory while hardly touching the mouse or keyboard. Institutions wax and wane, but the “invisible hand” of the free market keeps everything pretty much in line.

There is one catch: the entire private insurance industry goes bankrupt in the first three months of the game! That means no one has any protection even from catastrophic disease and injury. One wonders what people are doing about this. Why aren’t [they] rioting and burning down Main Street?

Once they’re through celebrating this endorsement of their views, even the extreme libertarians among us may, if they’re being honest with themselves, feel a twinge of concern at the pernicious idea that simulations like this one are somehow modeling abstract truths instead of being a morass of oversimplifications, biases, and highly questionable judgment calls on the part of their designers. I do suspect that the anecdote above arose by accident rather than out of any deliberate attempt to instill an ideological slant into the software. In fact, to their credit I suppose, the designers of SimHealth included an “Assumptions” menu which lets players tinker with the most fundamental rules of the simulation itself. But it does rather raise the question of what the point of it all is. What am I meant to learn from SimHealth if even the designers aren’t sure what the rules should be? The whole project was noble and well-meaning — and also kind of useless.

Unlike SimCity, though, SimHealth came and went quickly enough that the debate around it hardly got started. By the time it was released to retail in early 1994, Maxis was already in the process of divesting themselves of their brief-lived Business Simulations division. “The gap between building simulations for entertainment and simulations for businesses was too great,” said an older and wiser Jeff Braun. “One was a product, the other was a service.” The former Maxis Business Simulations would soldier on independently for a while as Thinking Tools before closing up shop for good.

In his (excellent) article on this side quest, Phil Salvador of The Obscuratory states that Maxis sold about 50,000 copies of SimHealth. I find that number extremely surprising, assuming it’s correct — not because it’s so low but because it’s so high. My guess would have been more in the range of 5000 copies — and that’s if I was feeling generous.

Regardless of the exact numbers that SimHealth did, we can say with confidence that Maxis’s second and last Sim title of 1994 sold far more. SimTower: The Vertical Empire still stands today as the best-remembered Sim game of the 1990s that isn’t a SimCity. That said, this particular apple didn’t fall that far from the SimCity tree. Your task in SimTower as well is that of building a functioning community — but here you’re to do it all inside a single skyscraper. It feels only appropriate that the game was conceived and coded in Japan, where people have long been in the habit of living small and vertically.

Yoot Saito, the mastermind of SimTower, was once memorably described by Jeff Braun as “a rock-star groupie who became a rock star himself.” He fell in love with SimCity not long after its release: “I didn’t leave the Macintosh for almost 24 hours. I so much admired the creator of this genius and crazy software.” He chased Will Wright into a hotel lobby during a MacWorld exhibition like a screaming girl from A Hard Day’s Night. He then proceeded to tell his cornered hero about his idea for a SimCity inside a single building. One thing led to another, and in late 1994 Maxis brought his SimTower to the West.

Your goal in SimTower — and yes, you do have a goal — is to eventually erect a five-star building, meaning one that has at least 100 floors and at least 10,000 more or less happy residents, with a cathedral as the cherry on top of the imposing sundae. How you do this is entirely up to you. Your biggest challenge, the direct equivalent to SimCity’s need for efficient roadways and subways, is your elevator system; get this wrong and your gleaming utopian tower will soon collapse into impatience and discord. As Yoot Saito would be the first to tell you, the rest of the game was really born out of his odd fascination with elevator systems.

Late one night, I was waiting in my building’s lobby for an elevator. There are two cars in my building’s shaft. I pushed the button, but instead of the closest car coming to my floor, the farthest car arrived first. In my usual questioning way, I asked myself, “What happened here? How are these cars logically synchronized?” That was the beginning of SimTower.

Yoot Saito was truly a man after Will Wright’s heart.

SimTower has many of the cute, juicy touches that lent personality to the Japanese ports of SimCity. Add a restaurant to your tower, and a food critic will stop in to eat and pass judgment. Play the game on Christmas, and Santa Claus will fly overhead. SimTower isn’t as deep or complex as SimCity 2000, but this was probably more of a plus than a minus for the nascent casual-gaming market of the mid-1990s. It became a surprise hit for Maxis, giving them their second holiday season in a row with a new game near the top of the bestseller charts. Suddenly the bottom line was looking pretty darn good.

As a result, Jeff Braun made a fateful decision, one that he would later deem “a big mistake.” He took Maxis public on May 25, 1995. It “was just sort of the thing to do, and it just felt right,” he says. This year would prove the first of the dot.com boom, highlighted by Netscape’s $3 billion public bow in August. Maxis’s own $35 million IPO may have been a vastly more modest affair on the face of it, but the cachet of SimCity and SimTower were enough to get Jeff Braun and Will Wright mentioned in some of the same conversations as Netscape’s dynamic duo of Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. In December of 1995, Braun showed up alongside Andreeseen in Newsweek’s list of “The Net 50,” despite the fact that Maxis had yet to release a game that connected to the Internet in any sort of way. Newsweek was blissfully unfazed: “Look for Braun to start moving his world of fantastic simulations to the Internet sometime next year.” Maxis took out a lease on the glass-enclosed sixth floor of a glitzy high-rise in Walnut Creek, California.

In addition to the generalized furor over all things tech, the Maxis IPO was fueled by the excitement surrounding educational and edutational software. These categories were widely considered to have a very lucrative future in the offing, as school administrators bought the new generation of multimedia computers and looked for things to do with them in classrooms at the same time that parents were doing the same at home. If Maxis perhaps wasn’t quite of the category, their games’ non-violent nature and engagement with real-world topics placed them solidly adjacent to it. Their new Sim games of 1995 reflected a desire to align themselves still more closely.

SimTown was a kid-friendly, simplified version of SimCity, wrapped in a bright, cartoony aesthetic. “This town is run by kids!” screamed the back of the box. Unfortunately for Maxis, children tend to require less simplification than many adults think they do, even as they can smell adult condescension from a mile away. SimTown wasn’t a big seller.

SimIsle: Missions in the Rainforest was a worthier effort with a lot more heart and soul put into it, so much so that I’m prepared to call it the hidden gem in the 1990s Maxis catalog. Developed in collaboration with a British house called Intelligent Games, it plunks you down in a tropical archipelago of 30 islands. But instead of settling for being just another “SimCity except somewhere else,” SimIsle brings some fresh ideas to the table. Each of the islands constitutes a set-piece scenario, complete with a set victory condition and a defined endpoint. As Computer Gaming World wrote in its review, SimIsle has “a lot of good old SimCity charm with a bit more game than is customary in the series.” It replaces the usual Sim abstractions with a distinctive and compelling sense of place, fed by digitized photographs and an evocative soundtrack. At times, it feels less like a Maxis Sim game that it does an early version of Tropico.

Some of the islands are to be developed for tourism, some for resource extraction or industry, some as wildlife preserves. There’s an environmental message to SimIsle, but you’re never beaten over the head with it in that way that can make some other Maxis games feel so simultaneously noble and dull. “If you want to explore what happens when you tarmac an entire island, that’s your affair,” said lead designer Matthew Stibbe. “Alternatively, you can see if it is possible to marry economic growth, with all its benefits, to ecological safety.” The game succeeds in making you want to preserve and conserve as much as possible, by making its archipelago an interesting and even exciting place to explore. Finding a new species of flora or fauna or an unsuspected ancient ruin is a genuine thrill. Destroying such things can be devastating, but sometimes you feel like you have no choice if you want to satisfy a scenario’s goals. You often have to settle for preserving what you can. These agonizing tradeoffs convey a different sort of realism than most Maxis games, showing the world to be a messy place where exploitation and conservation are less binary choices than a precarious balancing act.

In keeping with this Sim game being not only about nature, science, and other such abstract forces, it features, for the first time ever — outside of the SNES SimCity, that is — individual people. You can accomplish things on your island only by directing “agents,” each with a picture, a capsule biography, a personality profile, and a unique set of skills and abilities, from “flora and forestry” to “construction,” “negotiation” to “local ecology.” You can even find agents with underworld connections, if that’s your bag; setting up a drug trade is a possibility for the unscrupulous player. Your agents can improve their skills with experience and training, further tightening the bond between you and them. The lack of just such a personal touch is one of the reasons that most Maxis Sim games leave this player feeling kind of cold. Everybody is different, of course, but I have to say that SimIsle is the direction that I wish Maxis had begun to take much earlier and had stuck to thereafter.

The agents system of SimIsle smacks oddly of Sir-tech’s cult classic Jagged Alliance, which came out the very same year.

Indeed, the places where SimIsle disappoints me most are the ones where it misses opportunities to take its freshly “game-like” approach still further. The archipelago itself positively begs for a larger campaign to structure your play. As it is, though, SimIsle maintains no memory of what you’ve done before as you go from island to island; nor can you take the same team of agents with you. But this failing isn’t enough to keep it from becoming my personal favorite Maxis game. I first played it shortly after its release, played it again more briefly for this article, and really wish I had the time to play it some more. I highly recommend it to anyone who is left a little cold by the rest of Maxis’s catalog for any or all of the same reasons that I am.

Sadly, SimIsle was not rewarded for its uniqueness. It was no more commercially successful than SimTown, being written off by most gamers as just more of the same, from a publisher that had become rather too much of a known quantity. From the perspective of the marketplace, the bloom had come off the Sim rose just as the post-IPO firm was supposed to be taking flight.

SimGolf wasn’t a bad effort as golf simulations went, but it never had a prayer against the Links juggernaut.

So, by 1996, the Sim line was flailing, casting about for the right combination of familiarity and freshness that could make it feel relevant again. There were no fewer than five new Sim-branded games that year, and they were well and truly all over the place. SimPark was a simulation of a wildlife park, but with the kid-friendly branding and simplifications that had made their dubious debut in SimTown. SimTunes was a visual music-making system that could have been released under any of a dozen educational-software imprints. And SimGolf was nothing more nor less than a straightforward golf simulator, dumped onto a market that was already full to bursting with the things. One of the most distinctive brands in the industry just a couple of years earlier, the Sim line was now being diluted to the point of meaninglessness. Was it for adults or children? Was it games or educational software? Was it products in the mold of SimCity or just anything upon which you could conceivably slap the label of “simulation?” Maxis seemed to want the answer to all of these questions to be “Yes,” full stop. The result was just confusion.

Even the stuff that ought to have been in their wheelhouse didn’t quite pan out. SimCity 2000: Network Edition added online-multiplayer functionality to the venerable city-builder; rumors of this product were presumably the reason that Newsweek had buzzed about Jeff Braun “moving his world of fantastic simulations to the Internet.” But the sales of the finished product weren’t anything like Maxis had hoped. This may have been because they did nothing to update the graphics or interface, leaving the Network Edition looking like exactly the three-year-old game it otherwise was. But more likely, it was down to the questionable value proposition of a multiplayer SimCity. How was such a thing supposed to work, given that competition was so conspicuously absent from the franchise’s DNA? Maxis’s approach was to let you divide a city into different zones, then place one person in charge of each of them, to compete or cooperate as they chose. It felt more forced than exciting.

You may have noticed that the name of Will Wright has appeared in this article much less than it did in the one before it. There’s a reason for that: after completing (the non-networked) SimCity 2000, he had stepped back from day-to-day game development to work on various “research projects.” One of these tried to make a reality out of the idea he had presented at the 1990 Game Developers Conference, for a new ecosystem of interoperable games. He was no longer so bold — or naïve? — as to imagine the entire industry joining him in this effort right away, but he did think it could be a very good thing for Maxis games at least to learn to talk to other Maxis games, as summarized in Game Developer magazine:

Most Maxis games occupied some of the same intellectual real estate, which made them natural candidates to extend into each other. For example, one of the central strategies a player can use in SimCity is to develop a mass-transit system to help the city grow. In A-Train, a game Maxis imported from the Japanese company Artdink, the goal is to help a community expand using a commuter rail line. In the same vein, the monster towers of the future in SimCity 2000 are similar in nature to those players build in another Japanese game imported by Maxis, SimTower.

Thus the SimWorld project was born. The goal of this project was twofold. It would allow Maxis to create future games with the capability to extend and merge into other preexisting and future games. And it would leverage SimCity and the millions of hours of playtime that people have invested in SimCity saved games into new markets.

The most intriguing Sim title of 1996 was also the first concrete manifestation of all this. SimCopter was a helicopter simulator, marking the brand’s first foray into first-person vehicular simulators of any sort and Maxis’s first foray into 3D graphics. But this was a helicopter simulator with a difference. You could take a city you’d built in SimCity 2000, load it into SimCopter, and fly around looking at your handiwork close-up. No one could say it wasn’t a cool gimmick.

SimCopter did have other things to enjoy as well once you got past the gimmick. The flight simulator itself was pleasantly forgiving, making it stand out in a genre that usually wanted to make games only for the hardcore of the hardcore. Best of all, SimCopter took a lesson from SimIsle in structuring the time you spent with it more than did your typical Maxis game. If you play in “career” mode, you take the role of an urban helicopter pilot tasked with putting out fires — mostly figuratively, occasionally literally. In addition to extinguishing the literal conflagrations, your assignments can involve traffic jams, rooftop rescues, crowd control, police chases, medical evacuations, and VIP taxi flights. If you do well, you earn money and points and advance to better helicopters, bigger cities, and more difficult (and profitable) missions.

It’s surprisingly engaging, although it can leave you wanting more in the longer term. The reality that there are less than ten types of mission in all, procedurally generated over and over, sets in well before the campaign is over. “We could not miss Christmas, which meant we really couldn’t aim too high,” admits Will Wright. “Had we had another six to eight months to work on it, I think it would have turned out much, much better.” (How many times has a game developer said this?)

Immediately after its release, SimCopter and Maxis were embroiled in an unwelcome but kind of hilarious controversy, when it was discovered that the virtual citizens over whom the helicopter flew included crowds of strapping young men in Speedos who enjoyed kissing one another. The source of the transgression proved to be a gay Maxis artist named Jacques Servin, who wished to make a statement about the “aggressive heterosexuality” of game culture: “I’ve always wanted to be an activist, but activism is so moribund now. Do you think these heads of corporations are going to walk into an art gallery and say, ‘Oh, wow, I was wrong?’ Symbols are so much more powerful where you don’t expect them.” Servin was fired by Maxis after his handiwork hit the press — not, the company was careful to say, for being gay, but for inserting unapproved content into its game. Nonetheless, a brouhaha with the gay advocacy group ACT UP followed, despite Servin’s own statement that his former employer was actually “very enlightened” about sexual orientation. This was publicity that Maxis emphatically didn’t need, managing to cast them in an unfavorable light with the accepting and the bigoted alike. It became one more data point to contribute to the growing impression of a company for which absolutely nothing was going right anymore.

I never saw any men in Speedos during my time with SimCopter; Maxis patched them out of the game just as quickly as they could. But never fear, the Internet preserves all.

Just eighteen months after the IPO, Maxis was looking like a hot mess. From a high of $50, the stock price was down to barely $10. None of their Sim games since SimTower had done very well, nor any of the grab bag of non-Sim oddities they had published on behalf of other studios. Meanwhile the excitement over educational software that had done so much to fuel the IPO was starting to look misplaced, for the same reason that the buzz over non-game multimedia CD-ROMs was fizzling out: the World Wide Web was eating those offline software markets alive.

Development had begun on a new SimCity, traditionally the company’s savior, but that wasn’t going well either, having gotten bogged down in a bid to make the game fully 3D. A free-floating 3D camera, noted Will Wright,

takes what used to be a very simple, Lego-like thing and turns it into AutoCAD. “What am I looking at? Oh, I see, I’m facing the building two inches away.” It becomes that kind of experience. So that was part of it. The other part was the technology. Without going with really severe restrictions on what you could build, we just couldn’t have a decent frame rate and have the level of detail that we could have in an isometric viewpoint.

Both of these issues were exaggerated by the need to cater to the casual players who made up so much of the SimCity base, who were neither comfortable with the latest generation of 3D games nor had computers that were up to running them all that well.

Maxis’s investors pronounced themselves “concerned” by the direction of the company, which was on track to lose more than $2 million in 1996. What revenues there were were mostly still being generated by SimCity 2000, now a steady-selling staple of the world’s budget bins. But even that wouldn’t last forever.

Jeff Braun was forced out of the company he had co-founded by his own board of directors in August of 1996. His replacement in the CEO’s chair was one Sam Poole, a former Disney executive who had joined up as sales manager at the time of the IPO. His marching orders from the board were clear: find a buyer before the ship of Maxis went under.

In June of 1997, Electronic Arts stepped up. No cash changed hands, only stock, worth $125 million on paper. “I entered the deal with a lot of trepidation,” says Will Wright. “I knew there were going to be layoffs, but not doing the deal would have meant even more layoffs down the road.” For its part, EA made it clear that it was buying Maxis for just one reason: to get its hands on the SimCity brand, the one item in the Maxis portfolio that it considered to be worth anything at all. Whatever was left of the old dream of SimEverything died the moment the contract was signed. As far as EA was concerned, Maxis was a one-product studio.

The last couple of shambling embodiments of the old spirit, in the form of products that had been a little too far along in the pipeline to cancel, came out in the months just after the acquisition. Streets of SimCity operated on the same principle as SimCopter, letting you drive instead of fly around your handmade city. But for some reason — one has to suspect the intervention of someone at EA, looking jealously at Activision’s hit Interstate ’76 — your car had guns to shoot the other cars on the road with. The whole thing was as ineptly implemented as it was abjectly tone-deaf. Had EA actually understood the brand it was buying? You know, the one that was always described as not being violent in the way of all those other videogames?

SimSafari was more defensible, if not ultimately all that much more compelling. It was another game in the mold of SimTown and SimPark, a “kid-friendly,” simplified version of the SimCity approach. But one might be excused for asking how big a difference there really was between building a “wildlife” park, as in SimPark, and a “safari” park, as in SimSafari.

Meanwhile back at the Maxis ranch, major if fairly predictable changes were afoot. Relieving Sam Poole of his duties, EA parachuted in a manager named Luc Barthelet to fix whatever ailed its acquisition and to get that all-important third SimCity back on track. In a report back to the mother ship that surprised absolutely no one, Barthelet bemoaned a lack of “focus” and “structure.” He set out to re-instill these qualities. “I told people from day one: we are going to be a PC studio that does top-ten products, and if we did that we’d stay in business,” he says. “A lot of people weren’t interested in this. They wanted to do their own little projects, and didn’t care if they would sell. Those people left.”

Barthelet may not have been an overly cuddly or sentimental sort, but his tough love was probably just what the moribund next-generation SimCity needed. He could see no reason why that game needed to be 3D. Stop screwing around, go back to the tried-and-true isometric view, and just get it done, he said. Ocean Quigly, the project’s art director, compares his early days on it to “running through the fog not knowing where we were going.” The fog was now lifted and a compass provided.

SimCity 3000 would prove another picture-perfect sequel. By some metrics, it expanded dramatically on its predecessor, with the possibility to construct 400 instead of just 100 different types of buildings in a city up to four times as big, all with sharper graphics and a cleaner interface. But it was still the SimCity that its fans and the media knew and loved, exuding a “don’t fix what isn’t broke” philosophy from its every pixel. The additions were largely commonsensical and cosmetic. The larger selection of buildings let you give your city a distinctive American or European aesthetic; the likes of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower were waiting for you right there in the menu. Borrowing a page from Civilization II, a franchise it had partially inspired (have I mentioned that game design is always a dialog?), SimCity 3000 had a panel of municipal department heads to offer their advice to mayors who happened to be in doubt. (Also like in Civilization II, some of their advice was wise, some of it self-servingly parochial.) The biggest conceptual leap was to turn your city from an isolated specimen under glass into a part of a larger nation, complete with other towns with which you could trade electricity, water, or sewage services and enter into other sorts of business arrangements. There was still no structure beyond abstract building for its own sake, no campaign or thread of narrative, placing it at odds with some other city-builders, such as the historical ones made by Impressions Games. That said, a substantial percentage of SimCity players probably wouldn’t want it any other way. This SimCity product was as in harmony with its brand as Streets of SimCity had been off-key.

Maxis learned some of the advantages of hooking up with a deeper-pocketed parent when the time came to demonstrate the game publicly for the first time at the 1998 E3 trade show: EA flew former New York City Mayor Ed Koch in to promote SimCity 3000 in person. Sure, as a spokesman Koch was better primed to entice the mainstream media than the E3 gamer crowd — but then, that was kind of the point, wasn’t it? EA knew well where its SimCity bread would be buttered.

The original targeted release date was the Christmas of 1998, but Maxis couldn’t quite get it done to their satisfaction. Rather than let this make-or-break game out in a less than ideal state, Luc Barthelet convinced the EA brass to let them hold onto it a few months more. SimCity 3000 finally shipped in February of 1999, whereupon it became clear that the franchise’s winning streak would continue, as it became Maxis’s first really successful game since SimTower four and a half years earlier. In fact, it became the best-selling single computer game of 1999. (Admittedly, its release date so early in the year did give it a longer runway than almost all of the competition.) Luc Barthelet had his top-ten game and then some; the old SimCity magic of mixing casual with hardcore appeal still worked. This was a game that your Starcraft-playing buddies could enjoy as much as your middle-aged dad. By the end of 1999, Maxis could boast of having sold more than 7 million copies of its three SimCity games over the past decade. In comparison to this figure, the sales of all of their other games combined constituted little more than a rounding error.

There was one thing that did separate SimCity 3000 from its two predecessors: Will Wright contributed practically nothing to it. “It was a running joke around Maxis that whenever the SimCity team would come to ask me for advice I would go running,” he says. “They finally gave up. You know, the day they shipped SimCity 3000 was one of the happiest days of my life. They proved that we have a team within Maxis that knows how to build a SimCity without my involvement.”

Yet Will Wright was still employed at Maxis. So, just what was he doing, wondered plenty of people at the time. The answer to that question would soon turn the games industry on its head, making all of SimCity’s success look like the merest prelude to this, the mad scientist’s main act.

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Sources: The books Games That Sell! by Mark H. Walker; Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold; Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd ed.) by Richard Rouse III; SimIsle: The Official Strategy Guide by Douglas R. Brumley, Phil Powell, and Selby Bateman; The Secret History of Mac Gaming (expanded edition) by Richard Moss. Computer Gaming World of June 1994, April 1995, December 1995, March 1997, and May 1999; Retro Gamer 115; The American Prospect of March/April 1994 and March/April 1997.

Online sources include the collection of Maxis articles by Phil Salvador at The Obscuratory, Tristan Donovan’s interview with Will Wright for the old Gamasutra site, and “SIMply Divine: The Story of Maxis Software” by Geoff Keighley for GameSpot.

Where to Get Them: Of the Maxis games described in this article, only SimCity 3000 is currently available as a digital purchase.

11 Comments

Posted by Jimmy Maher on July 17, 2026 in Digital Antiquaria, Interactive Fiction

Tags: electronic arts, maxis, simcity, simcopter, simhealth, simisle, simtower, wright

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Will Wright’s City in a Box

Footnotes[+]

The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything

The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 2: SimWorld

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