Quaint, simple perhaps – but entertaining all the same. The Sims themselves were caricatures of real-life, representatives of what we might look like to an almighty being capable of a higher level of thought. But when they were describing it to me in the very early stages I just couldn't wrap my mind around it."Īs development went on it was clear that Wright needed to flesh out these ideas, and the key way to highlight what it was all about was through these virtual characters. I know the guys who made Myst and they were showing me one of the early versions and I was like 'what is this? It's just a slideshow', but once I saw the final version I played it and loved it. And I've been in the same position before, where somebody told me some idea they had and I just didn't get it and it sounded kind of stupid. "In my mind I had this concept of what it would feel like, but to expect somebody else to understand and have that concept, it's a hard thing. It was hard for others to really 'get' what The Sims was meant to be. He admits now that "it's hard to envision something like The Sims when you can't play it and you can't see it", adding that it's always difficult to really sell any idea forged in the back of a designer's mind.
Wright always believed in the concept, however, and with his secret team of programmers he set about creating an early part of the simulation. On its 20th anniversary, Edge Magazine reflects on how developer Maxis created an iconic living snapshot of '90s America in The Sims I remember the other four the focus testers said 'oh yeah, it was pretty good, we would play that', but when it came to The Sims and we were describing the idea to them, they were all universally like 'oh that's such a stupid idea, we would never play that, we hate that idea'. "We even did a focus group back in, I think, '93," states Wright, "where we were focus testing about five different game concepts.
It wasn't just his fellow developers that he had to convince either, with the game concept that would turn out to be one of the most important PC games of all time struggling to even appeal to focus testers in the earliest stages of development.
We had some programmers who were in a tool group that we weren't using really so I turned it into a Black Box project on my side and said 'can I have these four programmers', and nobody really cared so they said 'yeah'." "But I kind of understood that people are fascinated with people," he says, "and I knew it was interesting to me and I kind of had to fight for it internally. Wright persisted, however, knowing it was something he needed to make. For Will Wright, that would end up being The Sims.
SimCity had become a huge success and, as a result, Maxis had a little freedom to create ideas that it wanted to see made.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the behaviour of these people very robust, interesting and plausible no matter what kind of environment you put them in."Ĭreating these tiny people – AI characters that would interact with the structures built within the simulation – took about two years of Will's life, in between a variety of other projects. As I went down that path I started thinking I needed some way to 'score' what it was that you were building, and so I knew I needed little people living in these structures that you were designing. So originally, it was more meant to be an architectural version of SimCity. "I was always interested in architecture and architectural design," Will Wright explains, "and after SimCity I started thinking that I wanted to do something that was more around designing structures.