The Story of Maxis Software (1999) | Hacker News Reader

The Story of Maxis Software (1999)

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154 pointsecliptik59 comments

This language dates the article, and (as a queer person) amuses me.

"A homosexual programmer at Maxis objected to the use of female characters as objects of affection in SimCopter. So, he decided to protest by putting what he termed "muscle boys in swim trunks" into the game. During the game, these characters would mysteriously appear and kiss each other, but only on very rare occasions. At least, that was the idea. Unfortunately, as the programmer told Wired magazine in 1996, "My random-number generator didn't work as I'd planned," and the characters appeared with startling regularity. Upon discovery of the errant code, the programmer was immediately fired, but the transgression spoke volumes about the frenetic and fragmented state of affairs at Maxis"

That's a pretty hilarious easter egg though, too bad the RNG didn't work correctly, then no one would have really noticed.

Part of me suspects this was probably a known thing that it went it, and he was only fired because the RNG didnt work correctly and it appeared too often.

For anyone who's curious, here's a video of the Easter egg in action, along with a some more interesting backstory on Jacques Servin, the programmer in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4mh7Pc5MSI&t=495s

Ahhh he’s one of the Yes Men, that’s great, I had no idea.

Ha, the RNG didn't work as planned. Do the women kiss anybody?

Even in 1999, the use of the term "homosexual" in that context was pretty dated, unless it was coming from the mouth of Lucille Bluth. [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/XFH5WeJfQJ4

For anyone (like me) who missed that this is a multi-page article, the quote is from page 6: https://web.archive.org/web/19991109030656/http://www.gamesp...

Jacques Severn is the "homosexual programmer at Maxis" who was responsible for the easter egg. The term he used for the buff dudes in speedos was "himbos" (male bimbos).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Servin

Jacques was actually dismissed for inserting unapproved content into the game, not because there was a bug in the code, nor because he was gay.

One consequence of the bug was that it delayed the release of SimCopter so it missed the Christmas season, which lost Maxis a lot of money.

The people at Maxis were not anti-gay or close minded or homophobic bigots, like Brendan Eich and his ilk who want to cancel gay marriages because they hate the idea of treating gays equally and don't believe in human rights for everyone regardless of sexual preference, or I would not have hired on there in January 1997 to work on The Sims.

It might have gone a lot differently (and been better QA'ed, tested, and debugged) if Jacques had told Will and others about his objections to the unbalanced bimbos, and his ideas about including gay characters, which I know because that's what I did on The Sims, and my suggestions made it into the game. (Will loves weird easter eggs! In fact SimCopter even had some officially sanctioned cannibalistic behaviors, which is more controversial and illegal than himbos.)

After EA bought Maxis, I made a point of bringing up the "SimCopter fiasco" in my reviews of the early Sims design documents (before it was called The Sims). The original implementation was Heterosexist and Monosexist, but that was only because it was rapidly prototyped by straight people who didn't think things through, but who were fortunately open to constructive criticism, not because anybody involved was homophobic and actively anti-gay like Brendan Eich.

And that is exactly why game development teams (and all other teams) need to be inclusive (but not include bigots), and open to all different points of view (that aren't hateful). Because people without particular life experiences and outlooks simply aren't aware of everyone else's perspective, and don't take them into consideration by default, so they need to be reminded, not because they're bigots who would do something as crass and hateful as donating money to a campaign to cancel gay marriages, and then hypocritically whine about cancel culture themselves.

The Sims Design Documents:

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...

>This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 3, 8/7/98.

>On page 5, he wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game:

>The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitly going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...

>This is a PDF file with a scan of the handwritten notes, and a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 5, 8/31/98.

>On page 4, there is a section about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships.

>Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships. To be outlined in 9/30 Live Mode deliverable.

>Currently the game only allows heterosexual romance. This will not be the only type available – it just reflects the early stages of implementation. Will is reviewing the code and will make recommendations for how to implement homosexual romance as well.

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...

>This is a PDF file with the annotated Word document of Don Hopkins's Review of The Sims Design Document Draft 7, 10/2/98.

>On page 21, there is a section (same as above) about Same Sex and Opposite Sex relationships, which reflects Don's suggestion to change the design to support same sex relationships.

>After discussing it with Patrick J. Barrett III, we've determined that the sequence of events that led to The Sims having same sex relationships: The initial prototype implementation did not support same sex relationships, and I noticed that, when I tried to have two women kiss, the would-be-kissee slapped the kisser. So I wrote up my opinion that it should support same sex relationships, instead of resulting in homophobic violence, and proposed a straw man 2-dimensional way of modeling it. Subsequent design documents said heterosexual romance would not be the only kind available, and that Will was reviewing the code and would make recommendations on how to implement it. Patrick was hired soon after that, and was set to task implementing some social interactions. But Will didn't get back to Patrick and the production database didn't reflect his opinion by the time Patrick started working on it. But Patrick implemented support for same sex relationships anyway, but not by explicitly modeling sexual preference as property of The Sims personality -- just as a behavior that was possible at any time for any character.

I admit that the model for sexual preferences I proposed in the comments I wrote on the design document [linked below] wasn't as "woke" as it should have been. For one thing, I mistakenly compared asexual people (who are perfectly normal) to a terrible person, Mother Theresa:

https://twitter.com/gay4dimitri/status/1151994153317748737

>Jay || Crab @gay4dimitri Replying to @itstheshadsy: I hope their concepts of asexual people have evolved a bit beyond 'Mother Teresa' since 1998 but this is really damn good and that last line gets me right in the pants.

>xardox @xardox Replying to @gay4dimitri and @itstheshadsy: Sorry about that -- I didn't know what horrible fraud Mother Teresa was at the time. ;(

Mother Teresa’s Sainthood is a Fraud, Just Like She Was:

https://medium.com/@KittyWenham/mother-teresas-sainthood-is-...

"Hells Angel (Mother Teresa) - Christopher Hitchens":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJG-lgmPvYA

The model I proposed in the design document comments also mistakenly presumed there were only two genders. And in retrospect, I was mistaken that sexual preference should be directly represented as a property of the characters.

In retrospect, I'm actually quite happy with the way that Patrick programmed The Sims to not actually model sexual preference in the character's personality data in any way at all, so instead of reducing it down into a stark numeric property, it's purely dynamically defined by what you do, and your relationships with other people, which can change over time, so it's always up to you to decide what to do next, and change your mind and act any way at any time.

That non-model may or may not be at odds with reality, the nurture -vs- nature debate, and certain branches of "queer theory", but it makes for better game play, and enables players to easily role play, experiment, and explore. It's a lot like Will's comments on SimCity's model:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-...

>Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996): A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winnograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

>[...] Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.” [...]

It's not actually important to the gay rights debate whether sexual preference is a choice or not (and it still isn't even known for sure), because everyone absolutely deserves the human rights to make their own choices and decisions about who they love and marry, what their favorite color is, and which foods they like to eat, whether or not they're biologically determined or immutable.

Phil Salvador wrote a series of tweets with a link to some Sims Design Documents I scanned and put online:

https://twitter.com/itstheshadsy/status/1151868012707962881

>Phil Salvador @itstheshadsy: Sims developer Don Hopkins released a bunch of design documents from The Sims, including this one from August 1998 with his notes about romance:

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/

>It's incredible to see the internal discussion about romance in The Sims written out so strongly like this.

>For more background: Will Wright's notebooks from the making of The Sims (viewable at @museumofplay !) mention "same sex move-in romance" as a potential feature, but it sounds like there wasn't a plan about how or whether to implement that until Don Hopkins stood up for it here.

>It's not clear if Will Wright's notes predate the design document, but either way, it sounds like there was a delay implementing it. Further down the page, Don Hopkins says that Patrick J. Barrett III was the one who just added it in without waiting to hear back.

>Here's an article with additional context from Barrett's perspective about when/how same-sex relationships were added. The article mentions "going back and forth for several months" before he joined, which likely refers to what these documents are saying.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...

>Hey, it's Don Hopkins himself! ( @xardox )

>He shared a screenshot of the actual scripting before same-sex relationships were added.

https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1152266586025332736

>@xardox Replying to @itstheshadsy: Here's the offending "tree code" from "The Sims Steering Committee" internal release of June 4, 1998. [screen snapshots in the tweets]

>Also here's a demo of "The Sims Steering Committee" release, a very early version of the game from June 4 1998 (almost two years before the March 2000 release) that we distributed internally at EA to convince them please not to cancel our poor little game. [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY&list=PLX66BqHq0q...

>The Sims Steering Committee - June 4 1998. A demo of an early pre-release version of The Sims for The Sims Steering Committee at EA, developed June 4 1998.

>It includes an old klunky version of Edith (the "EDIT House" game programming tool). I listed out all the people, clicked "New Object Instance", and got the old gang of original Sims back together (including lots of extra clones)! Check out Archie Bunker with a cigar in his hand!

>The flamingos were pretty ugly: [screen snapshot]

>Not to mention the phone that looked like it had Halloween candy corn springing out of it whenever you got a call, and the carpet that looked like 40 grit sandpaper (but at least it kept their feet from skating and moon walking)! [screen snapshot]

Here are some more tweets with screen snapshots of The Sims Steering Committee demo:

https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223211835823984642

>The Sims turns 20 today! Here's an early pre-release version of The Sims for The Sim Steering Committee, from June 4 1998. #TheSims #PreRelease #Demo [screen snapshots from the video linked above in the tweets]

HN post on The Sims Design Documents:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22886489

Here's the abstract and a link to the draft of a paper I was writing for QGCon about "How Inclusivity Saved The Sims", before the conference got derailed by Covid-19. When I find the time I'll finish the paper and publish it somewhere, but for now, here it is in rough outline form, including a detailed timeline of events. Also I'll link some other documents with lots of references and excerpts from other sources.

QGCon Abstract

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13u-kNaWC2AAd-L0_5OoLc_-x...

How Inclusivity Saved The Sims By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software.

The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive, tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players impress their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives with tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange.

The Sims presumes to model human minds and relationships, but necessarily makes brazen simplifications due to technological constraints. It optimizes for playability instead of realism, while making concessions to marketability, corporate interests, societal norms, and taboos. But somehow it works, and this paper attempts to explain some of the magic.

Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.

The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters of the Sims microworld. But it magically offloads most of the heavy lifting into the player’s own imagination, incorporating and enriching their intertwingled tapestry of common-sense knowledge and stories about people, families, and communities.

The graphical design of The Sims was inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, in which he illustrated how the “Masking” visual style draws abstract characters against realistic backgrounds, which increases empathy and projective identification, empowers emotional connections, and permits players to easily and deeply identify with characters.

The educational philosophy of The Sims and SimCity was inspired by Seymour Papert’s “Constructionism” learning theory, with which learners construct mental models to understand the real world by building tangible personally meaningful shareable microworlds, and learn by discovery and exploration, by leveraging information they already know to learn more, and architecting their own educations.

This paper reviews the history of inclusivity in The Sims franchise over two decades, and explains some techniques for imagination, persuasion, identification, empathy, storytelling, and education, which can also make other games more inclusive, expressive, and enlightening.

The Sims References:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YEK0Y1l5ByC2koU4nGrCBNHj...

Lots more Sims Design Documents:

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments

There's so many interesting bits of info and here, I've fav'd it. Thanks :D

> I'm actually quite happy with the way that Patrick programmed The Sims to not actually model sexual preference in the character's personality data in any way at all, so instead of reducing it down into a stark numeric property, it's purely dynamically defined by what you do, and your relationships with other people, which can change over time

It's funny, this completely flew over my head at the time when we played it as kids. I wonder if there were any players were goofing around with the usual things (walling in guests, trapping them in the pool), thought "lol I'll make my guy gay" and then had an a-ha moment realizing it was no big deal and totally normal.

> The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters of the Sims microworld

This sounds interesting! update: in case anyone else was also curious, there's a wiki with some info: http://simantics.wikidot.com/

Yeah, super interesting post. In case we're going to get answers, I'd love one on this too:

> In fact SimCopter even had some officially sanctioned cannibalistic behaviors

I own Sim Copter (bought it in the 90s) and I certainly never noticed this, and can't see it mentioned anywhere else on the Internet.

I think it happens if you kill somebody, and after a while other characters will eventually kneel down by them and eat their corpse.

It's just something dark and funny I remember hearing Will mention in passing once, but I never saw it documented anywhere or tried it out myself. Maybe he was joking, but that's just the kind of easter egg he would lay.

Determining if it's true would be a fun software archeology task! ;) You could disassemble the behavior tree code (it used a predecessor to the SimAntics visual programming language in The Sims, which is well documented online), or you could just go around killing people and watching what happened.

And as you probably discovered, the easiest way to kill someone was with your helicopter blades. And then the game rewards you by paying you to bring their mangled bodies to the hospital.

That was especially problematic when the himbo easter egg was active, since there were so many hundreds of himbos swarming around your helicopter, it was practically impossible not to slaughter many of them.

SimCopter Swarming Himbos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozL3LtSsYd8

Here's where you can download SimCopterX and SimStreetsX, which run on Windows 10:

http://alekasm.com/

http://alekasm.com/scx.html

http://alekasm.com/ssx.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbf9cEWZZZs

>SimCopterX - Windows 10 + High Resolution (26 May 2019): SimCopterX is a standalone program which patches SimCopter (various versions supported) so it can run natively on Windows 10 and prior. Additionally you can run SimCopter in higher resolutions and modern aspect ratios such as 16:9 and 16:10, the original "vanilla" game is still supported. SimCopterX is NOT a CPU Killer or an emulator of any sort. This video just shows off some of my actual gameplay using SimCopterX Version 3 on SimCopter Classics edition.

Cutting Room Floor: SimCopter Content:

https://tcrf.net/SimCopter

Cutting Room Floor: Streets of SimCity Content:

https://tcrf.net/Streets_of_SimCity

And on the topic of easter eggs, cut, pre-release testing, and unreleased content, here's a long illustrated thread on "Sims 1 Beta discussion/Pre-Release Sims Footage Pics" (4 pages):

https://modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=615258&c=1&ht=&page...

>I think it happens if you kill somebody, and after a while other characters will eventually kneel down by them and eat their corpse.

My childhood memories are a bit fuzzy, but I think I remember this. The chewing sound in particular was very.. distinctive.

Then again, memory is susceptible to the power of suggestion. If only there was a game about that..

Just wanted to say your work was an integral part of my childhood. Thank you.

Wasn't expecting to read something this good this morning.

Do you have to personally attack Brendan Eich?

Story Time with Don Hopkins is my favorite part of HN comments.

In my opinion, that really does go beyond being an "easter egg" and into being "personal activism", which has no place in a professional studio.

Flip some narratives on the of the personal activism and you can easily see how it was incredibly unprofessional behaviour. That his activism is more accepted nowadays doesn't make it less unprofessional back then. It was good that he was fired for adding this to the game.

You only consider it "personal activism" because it was politically transgressive at the time. And unjustifiably so. If it hadn't been it would've obviously just been an easter egg. And now that we are all on the right side of history (thanks to people like him), we can recognize it as such.

Great guy!

I agree. Personal activism is obviously what it was and it's sad that we can't say as mutch without being down-voted.

It would be much better if the gay people defending this would do so for the right reasons and not simply because they are 'rooting for the team.'

So if a game includes Christian marriage, are the creators engaging in personal activism?

What makes you think that only gay people support gay rights for their own team? I know a hell of a lot of straight people who vigorously and sincerely support gay rights, not because they're "rooting for the team", not because they're "virtue signaling", but because it's the right, moral, ethical, logical, and decent thing to do.

You should get out more and make different friends, and actually get to know some real live gay people, before you talk so much shit about them like that, and presume to know what their motives are.

>Straight people don't like homosexuality shoved down their throat by all the gay people that want the world to accept it.

No, hateful bigoted assholes don't like homosexuality. Stop talking shit about straight people, too. Most straight people have no problem with homosexuality, because there's nothing wrong with it, and it's no threat to them, so they're not hysterically frightened by it like you are. You're getting rightfully downvoted, flagged, and deadened because what you're posting is wrong, close minded, stupid, and bigoted (and because you're whining and butt-hurt about the totally justified downvotes your earned, too), so the moderation system is working perfectly as it was designed.

Maybe it's because you're a bigot that you said you "have a hard time getting a single opportunity and feel lucky when we get a job". Bigots should have a hard time finding jobs. That's a good thing. Nobody wants to work with them.

Are you also a free market advocate? Because the free market decided that it was just fine for The Sims to support gay romance and same sex marriages (with the franchise grossing over $5 billion in sales), and in fact it's gotten much more inclusive and "woke" over two decades.

Do you also believe that the fact that abolitionists are more accepted nowadays doesn't make it less unprofessional back then?

You're nothing more than yet another angry old bigot who's on the wrong side of history, so your opinion really doesn't matter, and you should keep it to yourself if you don't want to be publicly criticized and reviled.

I worked at Maxis for about six months during the middle part of the events described in the article. I started during the tumultuous days surrounding the initial attempt at SimCity 3000 (I didn’t work on that project, though I saw its prototypes from time to time), up until shortly after the EA buyout was announced (but before it actually happened).

On my first day at work there was a giant poster in the reception area which you’d see on your way back out to the elevators, which began with the text, “To departing staff:”. The SimCity 3k debacle was already bleeding their staff, and I remember thinking — even as a fresh university graduate with no real work experience — that that probably wasn’t a good sign. (I don’t remember noticing it again after the first day; it may actually have only been up for that one day)

My cubicle was about two meters from Wil Wright’s glass-fronted office, with direct line of sight into it. My major regret is that I never introduced myself to him or even spoke to him at all (I was just a fresh university graduate and he was freaking Wil Wright. And also, he always looked kind of stressed and unhappy in there and I never wanted to impose)

RE: the story’s comment “There was absolutely no explanation as to why SimCity 3000 needed to be 3D,” I again wasn’t actually on that project, but it was clear to see that it wasn’t possible to make the game in 3D at that time. This was the era of the original 3DFX Voodoo card, and there were only two of them in the entire company (and somehow I had one of them and I never understood why). But the reason I was given for making the game in 3D was that it was a decision from Marketing; it was a core game bullet point that was going to be required if SimCity 3000 was going to save the company the way that SimCity 2000 had done. No 3D? The company wouldn’t survive. So there were epic battles between marketing and sales saying that it was what was required to save the company on one side, and the programmers who would have to actually implement the game saying that it wasn’t technically possible on the other side.

It was an interesting situation to be tossed into as your first thing out of university, I have to say. Even if I was kind of over to one side working on Streets of SimCity and only seeing it in my peripheral vision.

I just want to say that my brother and I played _the_hell_ out of Streets. So thanks for being a small part of our childhoods.

I did as well! I also shared a lot of crazy driving cities online.

> Streets of SimCity

Maybe that's why you had a Voodoo card? My brothers and I loved Streets of SimCity. That you could load your game from SimCity 2000 and drive around in it was genius. We had so much fun with that game. The ridiculous songs on the radio and the over-the-top cheesy dialog were just icing on the cake.

I love it too, if I remember correctly I believe you could set it up to play your own mp3s in the car radio.

I devoured all and any news around Maxis and Sim games as a kid, from Happy Puppy and the like. I don’t think I ever made a connection at that point in time that it was possible to be part of the action, however dire the situation was in reality.

Like the other two commenters, me and my brother also played Streets! I'd love to hear dev gossip stories about its development.

I'd love to hear what kind of delicious spaghetti code caused it to crash all the time and then eventually stop running on newer CPUs.

Edit: And why, IIRC, some of the weapons were split out into their own DLLs. Faster compile times?

Obviously there were some amazing physics hacks to make it possible at all to drive a car over the sorts of extreme slopes (and extreme changes in slope) from SimCity 2000 maps, where the ground was always either completely flat or else a 45 degree upward slant. IMHO the physics folks did an amazing job in trying to paper over all those problems, but there was one known driving physics bug that I'm pretty sure we never managed to fix, and it was this:

Setup: in SimCity 2000, put a railroad track adjacent to a road so that the two are parallel with each other. Have them travel flat, then up a slope, and then flat again.

Loading the map into Streets, drive your car so that two of its wheels (either the left wheels or the right wheels) are on the road, and the other two are on the railroad tracks. Now drive as quickly as you can, keeping your wheels on the two different surfaces.

Everything seems fine until you crest the hill at the top, at which point the various physics hacks trying to keep a vehicle from bottoming out as it goes over the hill compound with each other catastrophically, and the car gets launched into the air like a rocket; flying high into the air and super fast, typically wrapping around the entire world a half dozen times before finally coming back down far enough to hit anything.

RE: the DLLs, I don't remember the reasoning for separate DLLs for the weapons, but it was kind of amazing for our LAN sessions; you could create your own weapon as a DLL and it'd just work in the networked games even if your opponents didn't have it (since your client is authoritative over your own projectiles), and they could use any art asset available to the rest of the game.

I remember in particular one LAN session where one of the programmers had made a custom weapon which just caused a mayor statue to smash down from the sky, instantly destroying their foe. You'd never get away with leaving those sorts of holes open in a networked game these days; in retrospect it was ripe for all sorts of abuse. (I don't know whether they hardened that at all before shipping the game, but it was a different era back then)

LGR's Streets of SimCity Review:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi60A2-PcpM

> Somehow, Christmas 1996 came around, and Maxis did manage to ship all four games... or at least something resembling them. But no one was very happy about meeting the deadline, as corners were cut on all the projects. Wright was the most disappointed of all. "The low point for me was releasing SimCopter when we did," he says. "The gameplay was developing nicely, but we just had to ship it too soon."

As someone who tried SimCopter as a kid I have to agree 100% that it shipped way too son. It felt rough and incomplete, almost like a prototype to test gameplay mechanics, a far cry from the quality and polish of SimCity 2000.

Maybe I misremember or it’s committed to the nostalgia zone but I remember SimCopter being a ton of fun. I only really remember it being prone to freezing.

Once I figured out how to get my SC2K cities ported into the game it was even more fun.

I remember SimCopter as a vastly more refined game than Streets of SimCity was, despite some technical issues.

SimCopter's presentation was beautiful and for the most part classy. Streets was trying to be Mad Max or something.

Actually, I take that back: the AH-64 unlock in SimCopter was classy just the same.

https://www.pcgamer.com/streets-of-simcity-is-available-to-p...

LGR's SimCopter Review:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4mh7Pc5MSI

I was going to say I miss the age in video games where there were well known players like Sid Meier or Will Wright, but then I noticed the article was written by Geoff Keighley who I still know of today for running the game awards. Kinda funny.

There are lots of famous names around, probably more so than before. Kojima and Myamoto come to mind, Tim Schafer is 20 years into a 'comeback', Minecraft - one of the most popular games of the last decade - has a well-known designer who'd still be part of the conversation if he hadn't taken it upon himself to torch his public reputation. And that's just scratching the surface.

Not to mention Chris Roberts appears to have invented a whole new business model: selling game development hype instead of games

How many of you remember the original SimCity, and the "secret" keys that you could type (as Mayor) to dramatically increase your cash on hand?

The word was "BRIBE", and you could get away with it (typically) twice. Around the third time your city would be devastated by a massive earthquake.

I used to do this at the beginning of a game as a kid, because the earthquakes were pretty harmless without buildings to knock down. You'd just load up on cash, then start building!

Possibly the first ever "cheat code" in a game.

plugh

Plover

Xyzzy

Okay, I guess those were cheats too.

https://gist.github.com/peteristhegreat/d3256bfa444023855de3...

Funny, I did not see "Zorton" in the list above.

Wow, I really am an old fossil. I found a reference to Zorton here: http://forums.delphiforums.com/xyzzy/messages/283/2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_video_games#Histor...

I once asked Will Wright where the SimCity 2000 cheat codes "PORN" "TIPS" "GUZZ" "ARDO" came from.

He said they were four-letter halves of eight-letter silly names he saw in the phone book! Mr. Porntips, and Mrs. Guzzardo.

And of course "CASS" is the name of his daughter, Cassidy.

So yeah, the dude spends some of his time looking through phone books for silly names, what's the big deal? Who among us can't say they haven't done the exact same thing? ;)

After The Sims came out, silly names were a hot commodity in our house!

The SimCity-SimCopter-SoSC tie in worked because I loved creating cities and then getting to see them in 3D. Albeit, I used the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit because I didn’t understand the gameplay enough to make money at age 8-9.

Thats why you were supposed to type “iamacheat” ;)

Interestingly I was playing Valheim today and to unlock cheats you type "imacheater" in the console. I wonder if this is a nod to Sim City, or just a happy coincidence.

SimAnt was a huge part of my childhood. Immensely inspiring.

SimLife too. There was a whole book written about it and ot taught me a lot about biology.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Simlife/degjkgEACAAJ?hl...

I still hope some indie dev will build something similar to Spore. Probably my favorite videogame as a kid.

With consolidation of studios in larger companies, you would expect them to be able to take on more risk. Sadly I don't believe that will be the case and we will see something similar we see in Hollywood. Predictable movies mean predictable success.

It is the indie devs that might change up the <franchise> #23 installment drag, hopefully.

Check out Dyson Sphere Program, by a small Chinese indie game developer called Youthcat Studio, which has an overwhelmingly positive rating (98%) on Steam. Caution: Programmer Crack. Not exactly a Spore clone, but WOW it's VAST and SEAMLESS! Kind of like 3D Factorio in Space. I'm running it right now, and was just dreaming about stringing together layered conveyor belt spaghetti factories last night, while my automated trans-galactic factory was churning out millions of widgets as I slept. I love it! Brilliant user interface and game design and solid efficient implementation.

After playing games like SimCity and Factorio for a while, you can step back and admire what you created from scratch, but with Dyson Sphere Program, you can just look up into the sky, or fly into orbit to look down on the planet, then warp outside the solar system to get a perspective on what you created by building and designing and assembling every single piece.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_Sphere_Program

Dyson Sphere Program Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJ3fDcm5qaQ

Dyson Sphere Program TGS2021 Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6xHlPki-jE

PERFECT START TO A NEW GAME | #1 | Dyson Sphere Program | Lets Play/Walkthrough/Guide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0xTNF7fPJg

Automated DYSON SPHERE BUILDER & 10 GW Ray Receiver BLUEPRINTS | Dyson Sphere Program Master Class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-ijrWXOdCs

Black Hole Dyson Sphere TIMELAPSE | Dyson Sphere Program (this will give you an idea of the vast scale at which this game operates):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEpTaXRIhE0

Strip-mining the galaxy has never been so satisfying. The goal of Dyson Sphere Program is efficiency, not battle:

https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/29/22255096/dyson-sphere-prog...

Omg, I loved this game. Played for several days until I saw that my journey will probably be quite long and complex. Still want to give it another shot, so thanks for mentioning this gem! I was thrilled when I realized I could travel to other planets

See also this discussion about a story from 2020 about Wright and Maxis, shared 15 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29957712

Amazes me that SimCity is still available (and on sale, today).

I spent many nights playing it and wondering how it was possible to have so many interactions affecting the outcome of your game/city.

Here are some old Sims design documents:

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments

This one describes Maxis's philosophy of Sim game design:

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSimsDesignDocuments/MaxisSimR...

MAXIS SIM GAME REQUIREMENTS

SUMMARY

The Maxis marketing department recently studied customer expectations of Maxis Sim games. The study revealed seven descriptions of what the Maxis Sim player thought a Sim game should be. While the “Seven Points of Sim” descriptions reflect customer expectations, they are not all necessarily the ingredients for a Sim game. To understand why Sim players perceive Sim games the way they do, we can look at the key factors that make a game a “Sim”.

REQUIREMENTS FOR A MAXIS SIM GAME

Dilemma

Players must always grapple with difficult decisions. In SimCity, pollution may be a problem, but there might be a strong industrial demand. In SimTower, condo-dwellers will need elevators heading down, while office workers will need elevators heading up.

Crisis

Crisis can also mean disasters. Players occasionally need to abandon long term strategy in favor of short-term success. If a fire is burning in SimCity or SimTower, players might need to destroy all their creations in the surrounding area.

Budgeting

The amount of funding a player has acts as both a limiting factor and a kind of score. Every action by the player costs money - even mistakes - and there are no refunds. “Cheats” to gain more money are the most popular cheats.

Aesthetics

Artwork is important for players to admire their creations. Also, the ability to place buildings, zones, crops, etc. in various places that may not have relevance to the Sim, fakes players into believing that their city or tower designs are “better” than other’s. Finally, aesthetics are a form of reward for the player. In SimTower, an aesthetic reward for reaching the 100th floor is the ability to place a cathedral. This is akin to “winning”.

Change in Rules over Time

Rule changes cause players to change their playing strategy. In SimCity, demand for Industry is high at first, but then swings to Commerce. In SimTower, the placement of condos is important at first, but nearly irrelevant after the 3rd Star.

Visual/Graphical Feedback

A Simulator is nothing but formulae operating on a data set. The player’s main interpretation of the change in data is graphical, in the form of tall buildings in SimCity, and long elevator lines in SimTower. An example failure in graphical feedback is Outpost from Sierra, where player feedback is in the form of numbers in a dialog box.

Cause & Effect are not Immediately Apparent

Because of the interleaving data sets in the simulators, players may not initially understand why certain actions have unexpected effects. One of the compelling reasons to play is to discover and understand various causes and effects.

Players are allowed to destroy their Creations

Who says there is no violence in Sim games? A favorite activity of the Sim player is to save a “masterpiece” copy of their creation, then unleash disaster after disaster, and bulldoze like crazy.

Regarding destruction:

I do not remember details, as I didn't play Sims much, but there was a persistent rumour that by pausing the game at appropriate time - mid-jump into swimming pool by a sim and replacing the target swimming pool tile with a toilet, one could get a Sim to swim in the toilet seat.

Another one, which I definitely had seen, involved taking away all doors, then replacing all of the house floor with swimming pool, for obvious end result.

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