alt Hacker NewsThe Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything
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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:
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 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!
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.
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.
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!