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.