When I first heard the name "Safari"
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At first there was the secret development name, Project X, but everybody had a Project X, and we certainly couldn't ship with that.
Then there was Jamie's obvious name, Dollhouse, which was quite descriptive, but boys would hate it.
Then there was Will's quirky name, Super Happy Friends Home, which only the Japanese would love.
Then there was Jim's high minded name, Jefferson, for the pursuit of happiness, but it made everybody think of the sitcom The Jeffersons.
Then there was the legendary perfectly descriptive catchy epic name, that everyone on the team really loved, which we dreamed up together in a brainstorming session when we were all quite stoned, but by the next day we all forgot it, and nobody could ever remember what it was again, although we could all distinctly remember the warm glow of knowing that it was the best possible name in the world, which everyone would love. Those were good times! ;)
But for some reason, during all that time, despite racking our brains, nobody ever though of "The Sims", which is retrospect was a totally obvious name for a continuation of the SimCity franchise focusing on the people in the city. (The original SimCity manual referred to the people in the city as "the Sims," so there was a long standing precedent.)
I have no idea who eventually came up with the name The Sims, and I'm happy with it, but it definitely wasn't the perfect name that everybody forgot. It's lost in the sands of time...
There are a lot of great people lurking around here, but the really godly ones don't have time to surf the internet! The thing you realize by meeting such people is that there is really no limit on how much you can learn and what you can do. And it's a lot easier now to pick new stuff up, what with the internets and all those tubes. Just keep improving yourself all the time, and keep yourself open to luck.
And of course Will Wright has some great advice: Don't give up on your big dreams -- save and hone and cultivate them for later, when the time is right (and your skills and the technology have improved): "He encouraged designers with ideas for games that are far outside the box not to give up on those ideas, but instead to cultivate them and revisit them later, when the time, the team, and the technology might be right." http://www.gamespot.com/news/will-wright-wows-gdc-with-new-s...
"Super Happy Friends Home" is excellent, but yeah, I think "The Sims" worked out for the best. :)
The big problem was that nobody had any idea what players would think of it, so we just kept developing it and playing it and changing the design, while wondering about what it was all about.
There was one terrible phase we went through, trying to frame it like a simulated situation comedy, complete with a laugh track. That resulted in the first characters being named Edith and Archie (and I named the visual programming tool "Edith" for Edit House).
But fortunately the idea of simulating a TV show was eventually flushed down the toilet. It just took a few weeks to walk all the way to the bathroom. ;(
I was rooting for a weird name like "Perky Pat Layouts", based on Philip K Dick's book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which had an uncanny creepy plot about adults on drugs playing together with physical miniaturized doll houses in order to enter a shared virtual reality. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?bnum=577 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsN... But EA didn't like the idea of selling CAN-D...
I've put up some old design documents here: http://www.scribd.com/collections/4050497/The-Sims
This "Happy Friends Home" initial proposal from October 2 1996 is pretty funny, and captures the essence: http://www.scribd.com/doc/117483854/The-Sims-Happy-Friends-H...
Any thoughts on what happened to later Maxis games?
Will gave a talk about designing user interface to simulation games back some time around '96, to Terry Winnograd's user interface design class at Stanford (at the time I worked with Terry at Interval Research), and I sat in on the class and took these notes:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/WillWright.html
He demonstrated an early version of The Sims, at the time called "Dollhouse", which he'd shown me an even earlier version of about a year before. At the time I was skeptical that he could get the AI to work, and I suggested he punt on the AI and just make an online multi player game. In retrospect, I sure was wrong!
In the talk, he discussed why previous Maxis games were successful, and gave a demo of "Dollhouse," describing what he thought would be interesting about that game, which eventually became The Sims. The key to the AI was putting the intelligence in the objects, instead of in the characters, and making it possible to plug in new objects with their own content and programming, to expand the game on an open-ended way.
The reason Will explained that SimCity was successful was that people already know a lot about the way cities work, so it's engaging, and it doesn't have to simulate details as much as just imply them, and let your imagination do the heavy lifting and colorful illustration. Computer games are much better at implicating than simulating, because any simulation is necessarily a vastly simplified caricature of reality, while your imagination is unlimited and has its own built-in "ai" and common sense knowledge base to draw on.
There are two important models involved in a simulation game: the sparse digital model in the computer, which stays the same, and the rich organic model in your brain, which grows and changes as you play and explore the behavior and limitations of the game. As you play the game, the computer is downloading the details of an organic model into your brain, which elaborates them based on what you already know, and links them into your global understanding.
It can be educational in that it makes you think about the issues you're dealing with, but you learn more by thinking about what you already know (and having your curiosity stimulated and being inspired to learn more), than it teaches you about what its simulation actually knows about. Instead of taking the simulation at face value as an accurate representation of reality, you explore and find the edges and limitations of the simulation, and compare them to reality. As you find the limitations of the game's model (in order to figure out how to take advantage of its limitations and cheat), you scoff at the game because you understand the world is much more complicated and nuanced than a computer game. But that's a good exercise to think about, and it stimulates you to discuss it with other people and learn more through other channels!
That is one aspect of what Seymour Papert and Alan Kay refer to as "Constructionist education": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theor...
Anyway, SimCity was successful because it was about a domain everybody knows a lot about. And The Sims was even more successful since it was even "closer to home", so to speak.
But most people don't know much about plate tectonics, ant colonies, evolution or galactic conquest, so while SimEarth, SimAnt and Spore might teach you something about those topics and stimulate your curiosity, they weren't able to engage people and play off of their vast existing knowledge as much as SimCity and The Sims did.
But independent of how engaging or commercially successful it was, I think Spore was a very interesting and successful experiment in several important aspects of game design, which had to be done.
When Will described the early concept to me, of an online game with multiple levels that moved at different time scales, the first obvious problem I saw was that it would be impossible to coordinate the independent timelines in a massively multiplayer online game, since at each level, time moved at a different speed, so different players would be traveling through time at different rates, and it would be impossible for them to interact with each other in real time.
But Spore solved that problem by being an "Massively Single Player Online Game", where players shared content asynchronously, but didn't directly interact together synchronously.
I think the idea of sharing user created content asynchronously online is a great one, and Spore performed it very successfully.
The other important concept that dovetails with that was tackling in-game content creation tools. And I think those were a wonderful success, and paved the way for other games to do similar things.
With games like The Sims, it has some easy-to-use in-game tools for building architecture, but you have to go outside of the game and use tools like Photoshop to make skins, 3D Studio Max to make meshes, Character Studio and Biped to make animations, etc.
We made some simplified tools for The Sims (like Transmogrifier) that let you make objects by exporting and importing bitmaps and editing them with 2D tools like Photoshop instead of requiring 3D tools like Max, which opened up content creation to a lot of people, but making 3D objects still remained a very tough problem, and we never released the tools we developed internally to do that, since they were very hard to use and had a lot of environmental dependencies (like requiring expensive commercial products).
Building 3D editing tools into the game the way Spore did was very ambitious, and I think it worked extremely well. The user interface was very easy and fun to use in and of itself, and it gave players a huge amount of freedom to make everything from walking penises to hopping penises to flying penises to crawling penises, and even penis huts, penis houses, penis towers, penis planes, penis trains, and penis mobiles.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFOVYx90Ni8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv-NjbyhXFo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puv6pwG_AZo
Spore had some great and successfully executed ideas about building and sharing user created content in it, but since it was an amalgam of several different games, and each sub-game was kind of like a tribute to an existing classic game, those games in themselves were not any better than the existing games, and they were not very well integrated.
Here are some notes I took from Will's talk at GDC, which I had him review for accuracy at the time:
http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/35
You can compare it to what Spore actually delivered, and see the differences. There was a big gap between the ideal design as he articulated at that time, and what they were able to finally deliver. Of course that was inevitable, when working for a big company like EA, even with the freedom they gave him.
There was an overall high concept that the stack of sub-games was a ladder you would climb to get to the higher level storytelling based game, and that you would then swoop down into the sub-games to perform scenes of the story. (The "T shaped game".) But the sub-games were never consequentially integrated enough for that to work. So I don't think the storytelling game was ever fully realized.
That gap between the original design and the final product was of course because of the harsh constraints of reality and the necessity to ship something. They had to simplify it a lot, of course. And different people had ownership of each level, and the design decisions that one person would make at a lower level would spill over to the next levels as constraints and limitations they had to work within.
I think the essential problem of how can each level consequentially effect the other levels in a way you can make a high level storytelling game around is a very hard one.
The high level storytelling missions don't really require you to go back to the previous levels you climbed to get up to the galactic conquest level, and I have a hard time imagining how they could even do that. ("Go down to the protozoa level and conquer the evil amoeba who is about to sabotage the delicate diplomatic negotiations, by making the president throw up in the prime minister's lap!")
You should consider pasting this into a blog post or somewhere that's slightly less ephemeral than an HN thread.
And sometimes, after some of the worst of these outrages,
the Dwellers in the Forest would send a Messenger to
either the Leader of the Princes of the Plains or the
Leader of the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides and demand
to know the reason for this intolerable behavior.
And the Leader, whichever one it was, would take the
Messenger aside and explain the reason to him, slowly and
carefully, and with great attention to the considerable
detail involved.
And the terrible thing was, it was a very good one. It was
very clear, very rational and tough. The Messenger would
hang his head and feel sad and foolish that he had not
realized what a tough and complex place the real world
was, and what difficulties and paradoxes had to be
embraced if one was to live in it.
"Now do you understand?" the Leader would say.
The Messenger would nod dumbly.
"And you see these battles have to take place?"
Another dumb nod.
"And why they have to take place in the Forest, and why it
is in everybody's best interest. the Forest Dwellers
included, that they should?"
"Er ..."
"In the long run."
"Er, yes."
And the Messenger did understand the reason, and he
returned to his people in the Forest. But as he approached
them, as he walked through the Forest and among the trees,
he found that all he could remember of the reason was how
terribly clear the argument had seemed. What it actually
was, he couldn't remember at all.
And this, of course, was a great comfort when next the
Tribesmen and the Princes came hacking and burning their
way through the Forest, killing every Forest Dweller in
their way."Bud" is also a slang term for marijuana (which is made from the buds of the cannabis plant.)
Have you considered it only seemed legendary because you were all stoned? When I'm drunk every idea seems a good idea...
I wonder if the name would still seem legendary if you guys had remembered it.
?
I just saw a talk by him yesterday where he confirmed what you can read (and see) here, http://www.will-wright.com/willshistory7.php
Not that it has anything to do with your point, but still :P
mkdir [blinking cursor]
name it something. mv works if you need to change it.
Also I'm pretty sure that they make new Pokémon faster than anyone starts projects...
http://ajf.me/imagedump/screenshots/ihavewaytoomanyprojects....
Ever since then I've been a codename fan. I go for liquor names (since I work at home across from the booze shelf)- I'm currently building Frangelico.
It's actually a clever name for what they're doing
"There are only two hard things in computer science. Cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors."
7 years ago, when I was a new programmer, I did use a technique like that to fix some JavaScript. I feel brave confessing that.
Answer: http://search.cpan.org/search?query=Acme%3A%3AMetaSyntactic&...
http://search.cpan.org/~jforget/Acme-MetaSyntactic-soviet-0....
"Great repository names are short and memorable. Need inspiration? How about drunken-nemesis."the project, and compiled output, on every platform, is called 'pc.elf' (or .vcproj or .exe or whatever) SIGH
there's an inverse correlation between awesome-ness of directory name and chance-of-shipping, in my experience.
Sackboy's law? It's absolutely true.
Thanks for sharing that about LBP: it's great to hear that my nominative inertia is shared by such high company.
For example, in Debian, they take a character name in Toy Story for their codename. In Ubuntu, they take an animal name in alphabetical order.
I remember when I was working on ACDSee, the original author said, "If I knew it was going to become popular, I would have picked a better name." The company originally made catalog software, and a Co-op student made ACDSee as a side project. It's sustained the company for almost 20 years.
Pick a language you don't know, and have at it:
"picture site" => "irudi_gune" (basque)
I find that Basque, Portuguese, and Welsh produce very good names.
"Sangue bom," for example, is not visually translatable to English.
"First press the home button"
"Ok"
"Now tap on Safari"
"But I don't want to see animals"
"..."
And that's when I realized why Internet Explorer was so successful.
Safari is not for one time use.
1. Lincoln Navigator - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Navigator
2. Ford Explorer - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Explorer
3. Tata Safari - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Safari
That fits it in with the browsers of the time:
Netscape Navigator
Internet Explorer
Safari also has the right feelings associated with it with almost everybody. Some will think "hah, killing elephants", others will think "paying people to help me watch elephants, so that they no longer need or want to kill them", but nobody (nowadays) will associate negative thoughts (exploiting the natives; killing rare animals) with it. And, apparently, there also is a link with surfing the ocean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfin_Safari. I think that may have led to thinking of the name, but I doubt that is strong enough to choose the name.
Caterpillar is such an excellent name, that almost everybody remembers it once they have seen it. That can't be said about many other building machinery brands. But you can bet that when that name was proposed, somebody raised objections because "you can't name our powerful machines after an insect"
Virgin Airlines has very negative connotations ("Virgin communicates that we are inexperienced and not safe to fly, and that's a show-stopper in airline industry, Mr. Branson. shouldn't we consider another brand for our airline subsidiary?")
It takes balls to pick a great brand name, because almost all names have minus sides.
Oh, how the jokes flowed when the name was announced. Then the sales numbers came out, and people stopped joking.
Genius.
The brand name "Virgin" arose when Branson and a partner were starting their first business, a record shop. They considered themselves virgins in business.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Group
It is a very British story so most of us in the UK probably know the success story a lot better.
"Safari", to me, is a word foreigners use unnecessarily and some locals chuckle at when they hear it. Locals simply say "We're going to Blahblah National Park for Christmas." It's also the name for a brand of dried fruits and nuts, which makes it even weirder to hear it in conversation here.
I honestly didn't grasp the relevance of the name to the Internet until you explained it now, despite programming for over 15 years and living in Africa for over 29 years.
We roll our eyes at the tourists, then just go and do whatever it is we were doing.
- It does not work in the browser!
- Which browser?
- The browser!
- I got that, you idiot. WHICH browser?!http://internet.mail.ru/ (there are no English version)
You'd go on Safari to observe (not necessarily hunt) wild cats like Tigers, Lions, etc.
Also along with the binoculars for remote desktop, I thought they'd be going for a Safari theme throughout the OS, but it ended up going more space themed.
I guess you could say the OS (both Safari and space) fall into the exploration theme as a whole.
Navigator -> Explorer -> Konqueror
With the order the arrive at a new found / colonized land.
And then you just go there for Safari.
If we do not count the typical geek crowd (HN, /. etc.), then I am pretty sure most people go online to do exactly that: go on a safari, see animals (baby animals! cats! cats! dogs! cats!), babies, and Facebook is sort of a safari, allowing you to observe your online friends in their natural habitat. ;)
Ironic that this was a concern, given the later iPad
1) List the name of all competitors that made into the business plan; // this is important mainly to avoid problems
2) List of nouns that evoke a basic understanding of the root problem the program tries to solve; // I know it's obvious, but finding a name right here create an instant connection with your target users
3) List all the features that make the program stand out; // Again it's obvious, yet this is a great source of names
4) Mix and match all these these words, throw them into a bucket, and sleep on it for a while;
5) Usually, after some days have passed I come back, and weed out the crapy ones; // and...
6) Work a little more on the rest with a dictionary, if needed go back to 3;
7) Finally, when I have a short list of good names I try to find domain names;
8) mkdir <project_name> // or mv <old> <new> :)
How do you go about your process?
While on holiday and in need of some internet, a (highly intelligent) friend searched around the local town and could only found a Mac in a hotel lobby. Despite being very motivated she was unable to persuade it to open a browser and eventually gave up and was left wondering how Macs could possibly be described as intuitive or user friendly.
I guess at some point one intellectually reaches a no-return state where due to some Dunning-Kruger corollary you find everything you do sucks to various degrees.
It follows that "it's brilliant" is much less impacting than "it doesn't suck" since the former, while authentic, may feel shallower in the reasoning that led to it.
[0]: http://www.mutt.org
Related anecdotes:
When trying to come up with a name for Firefox (after having two other names rejected due to trademark snafus), a friend of mine sarcastically rattled off a bunch of alternatives using the same prefix as the outgoing "Firebird" on IRC one night. I think it was "Firecrap, Fireturd, Firefox". I stopped him. The consonance was great, and the team loved the name. The rest is history.
At the beginning of Chrome, we had to come up with a project name. Inspired how Netscape did their project naming, we did a vote. The results were truly awful. I think "Goose" was the winner. At this point Linus came in and put us out of our misery, "How about Chrome... it's kind of ironic given the UI design." Everyone agreed that it was much better. That was before we'd written really any code, so it stuck for the entire project. Shortly before launch the marketing folk did a brief exploration, but we threw up all over their suggestions, and Chrome stuck.
When I first heard the name Barack, though... http://rense.com/general84/brck.htm
'Not only had we gotten very used to calling it that, the string “Alexander” was all over the code and buried in its resources. So the engineering team wasn’t just curious about the real name, they were worried about correctly and completely changing the placeholder name at the last minute.'
Why would you litter a codebase with disparate string literals referring to a "placeholder name" rather than using a single resource file or a single #define?
It is free from the negative connotations of a reference to Africa and consistent with the sort of Californian to which Jobs aspired. Apple was funded by a VW microbus after all.
The play on surfing is consistent with Apple's image of how consumers should be oriented to use their products.
I personally codename my projects pffft.
[1]http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&s...
That’s one of those things that make perfect sense to me. I’m mystified in what respect that would not be a fitting icon. It’s certainly better than an “e”.
(To be fair, Mozilla shipped a browser in a few months after founding, and Konqueror didn't work well enough for me to use it as my primary browser at the time that the Safari guys took it. And, as the other comment pointed out, it actually took the Safari guys a couple of years.)
Not to discount the work of the kHTML guys, but it was more than a year of work to get from kHTML to Webkit.
Describe to me a product and I'll name it for you.