The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything | Hacker News Reader

The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything

filfre.net

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I'm glad to collect any questions for Will Wright and post his replies!

He's especially obsessed with cornering you at a party and telling you all about Care Bears.

The Adorable Will Wright Minutes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7G6c097oWU

Speaking of single minutes of short attention span theatre, here are a couple of one minute robot movies we made:

Servitude:

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

Empathy:

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

Was the game Ökolopoly an influence on him? It was a 'cybernetic environment game (kybernetik unweltspiel)' from West Germany where players run a country and strive to hold off economic, social and ecological collapse. It was released as a board game (beautiful, if I may so so, owning a copy) in the early 1980s and then the true, apparently fully realised DOS videogame followed later. It always seemed like a simple Sim City to me.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96kolopoly

https://archive.org/details/oekolopoly_202509

Further question, how much did he read about cyberneticş beyond Gaia Theory? Was he influenced by Norbert Wiener?

You're question in committed -- Thanks!

We're making a "Repo Show": You're welcome to open issues and make prs to edit your questions and audience character description. (Price-is-Right and Furry costumes welcome!)

https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

I'll toss ya a few!

What unexplored frontiers does he wish game developers would pay more attention to?

How does he feel about the state of science education for children today in terms of schooling, television, toys, internet, and so forth?

What are his thoughts on the effects of current AI trends on culture and education?

What games, if any, has he been playing lately?

Committed your question, now in the queue! You can submit a PR with more questions, or describe what funny costume you want to wear, wigs, prosthetics, signs, or whatever!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZxJ4IsvSPY

I can’t even estimate how many hours I sunk into some of these Maxis games. SimCity grabbed me harder than any game had ever grabbed me before and I’m sure I spent the equivalent of years of full time work playing it. SimEarth’s manual felt like a PhD program for a kid.

This game isn’t covered in the article but SimGolf had such an impact on my sense of humour that decades later I still think “gregiscool.com” would be a great name for a startup.

Simcity was the first sandbox simulation game I played, and all my favorite ones have really been in that genre in some way: Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, Cities Skylines, even Minecraft.

Widget Workshop (1996) was my favorite: with a large selection of widgets (such as logic gates, switches, displays, number generators, sound and graphics modules) you build 'functional cause and effect pipelines' in a a cute drag and drop canvas. There is a puzzle mode too. Very Rube Goldberg. Great fun, and educational!

You might enjoy this writeup of the related "The Incredible Machine"

https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/the-incredible-machine/

At a young age SimEarth made a huge impression on me. I think it was the inscrutability and huge manuals that spoke of a wonderful ecological secret, tantalisingly out of reach no matter how many times I tried...

I might be misremembering since it's been over 35, but the orinal Mac versions of these games would be better to play today with the higher resolution they had.

I grew up playing SimCity and SimEarth at 512x342 in black & white. The lack of colour was a tradeoff, but the higher-resolution graphics were very legible. Still enjoyable on an emulator for some nostalgia!

the original builds were black and white only, however there was a supreme and classic build that was in color and higher.

I just wish the Maxis games retained that awesome simulator feel and Win32 GDI integration that SimCity 2000 had, and not turned into full screen PlaySkool kiddie-gamer interfaces with big dumb buttons and junk.

Also like Mr. Wright I too was fond of the Care Bears, Nelvana's series particularly. Why bronies became a thing and not care bros, I will never figure out!

Terry Winnograd is a user interface researcher and professor at Stanford, who has a regular user interface seminar:

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

Stanford University, CS Dept., HCI Group, CS547 seminar videorecordings, 1990–2012 (collection SC1217). Terry Winograd's open, recorded, one-guest-a-week public seminar. 339 talks catalogued.

https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...

Many of the videos are now online, including this 1996 talk by Will Wright, who gives a retrospective of SimAnt (too simple, but kids love it), SimEarth (too complex, but professors love it), and SimCity 2000 (just right).

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26

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

In response to a student's direct question about his current projects, Will seemed momentarily taken aback before deciding to reveal something genuinely groundbreaking:

*Student:* What projects are you working on now, and if you'd rather not talk about that, what projects or models had you considered before that were kind of interesting that you didn't do?

*Will Wright:* You mean like what systems have I considered modeling?

*Student:* Right.

*Will Wright:* Oh, God...

*Student:* And also what systems are you currently working on, if you if you can talk about them?

*Will Wright:* Okay, well one thing we're working on, is a — we've been kind of interested in our company for a long time about the idea of data portability. Really, let me back up just a little bit here, and this might be a little bit more of an answer than you were looking for, but…

He then proceeded to demonstrate an early prototype of what would become *The Sims*, at the time called "*Dollhouse*."

"This is a game I call *Dollhouse*. And if this looks familiar, it's because I've just loaded a *SimCity* file into here. Okay, so what we're seeing is a *SimCity* file, but now at this point I can actually zoom down to the street level."

More info and transcript:

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

Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update)

A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!

These resources are amazing, thanks for sharing.

The short-term realization of data portability was done in Streets of SimCity, which allowed you to import a SimCity 2000 file and actually drive through the city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_SimCity

Another great example of -- if not data portability then -- microworld embedding was done by SimSlice, one of the best Sims object programmers out there:

A Lilliputian SimCity embedded in The Sims, complete with a power plant, buildings, doll houses, skyscrapers, crowds of people (cloned cockroaches that leave red blood splotches when you stomp on them instead of green), modular airport components with towers and runways and planes that fly around and drop parachutists who land and become crowds of people you can step on to splat their blood, and a whole lot else (even a weather machine that lets you make it rain, snow, hail, blow leaves, and literally rain dogs and cats that shit on your lawn and scurry away):

https://simslice.com/

Demo of The Sims Transmogrifier, RugOMatic, ShowNTell, Simplifier and Slice City (burns up at the end):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imu1v3GecB8

The Sims 1 Slice City Mod Base Game (including people squishing):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMde4h1ZF1Y

The Sims 1: Weather Machine (Human sacrifice, dogs and cats raining together, mass hysteria):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kf7o3JXZeGw

Oh what I wouldn't give for a copy of simfarm...

You're in luck

https://archive.org/details/msdos_SimFarm_1993

Just hearing the music takes me back...

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