THE SIMS

THE MAKING OF...

HOW WILL WRIGHT AND A STUBBORN FEW TURNED HUMANITY INTO A GAME THAT ANYONE COULD PLAY. By Dan Griliopoulos
Sims: having the exciting life that you wont.

THE SIMS

READ ME
FIRST REVIEWED PCG 80, 85% PUBLISHER EA DEVELOPER Maxis/EA RELEASE 2000

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n 20 October 1991, Sim City creator Will Wright thought he could smell smoke at his home in California. He gathered his family and, as a precaution, left the house. The smell turned out to be the Oakland Firestorm, an event akin to a massed flaming cyclone, which raged for three days and did $1.5 billion of damage. One of the nearly 4,000 homes it destroyed was Wrights. He had already been thinking of creating a virtual dolls house. Now, bereft of possessions and home, he found himself gathering the belongings that were basic to modern human life. Charles London worked on The Sims from 1997 and is now creative director of the series. Being the incredibly creative and introspective guy [Will Wright] is, London explains, it naturally led him to a fascination with what does it mean to have or not have certain objects? What does it mean for buildings to be arranged one way or another? How does that end up manifesting itself in the wellbeing of its inhabitants? The people who live in a building and use those objects are the read-out of the quality of the arrangement and choice that were made in the environment. Wright worked on the idea by himself at first, then in late 1993 formed a small project team inside the company he co-founded, Maxis. He based his concept on several academic works, notably Christopher Alexanders theories of environmental structure as happiness and Charles Hampden-Turners theories of mental structure. Key to the game though was Abraham Maslows 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation and its core concept: the hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy puts peoples needs in a pyramidal order: until certain basic needs are met, higher needs cannot assert themselves. So for example, the most basic need is hunger, then sleep. We know that people who are desperately hungry have difficulty sleeping, says London. Until you are rested you cant really be concerned with how clean you are. Until youre rested and fed and clean, you cant really worry about whether or not you have shelter. So these needs climb up the ladder until you reach things like fun and humour and self actualisation. Will, from the earliest point, was using Maslows hierarchy of needs as the filter for testing whether or not the efficiency of the architecture and the quality of the objects and their arrangement in that architecture was good or bad. It is notable that morality, creativity and spontaneity dont even enter into peoples desires until all else is satisfied. In a focus group test in 1993, The Sims came bottom of all Maxiss game concepts in development. That scepticism meant that the game developed very slowly. It was a battle,

Rumours that Will Wright has a god-complex are nonsense.

the first few years, inside Maxis, Wright told PC Format in 2004. It was referred to as The Toilet Game. Despite this, Wright secured a young engineer named Jamie Dornbos on the sly, and together they aggressively prototyped. The small team worked on-and-off in

Key to the game was the 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, and its core concept: the hierarchy of needs
Maxiss Walnut Creek headquarters before moving to a tiny rented office in San Mateo around 1996. During those three years, the prototype was known as Home Tactics. It grew slowly, bringing in a graphics engineer, an animation tech engineer and a project manager. London, then an art director, takes up the story. Around August 1997, they were looking for someone to put the artwork not just on a more professional footing but actually setting up pipelines. I was essentially the sixth member of the team... I was hired the same day as EA officially acquired Maxis. Six months or so after I joined, the team was moved to EAs headquarters in Redwood City... while the disjointed disruption of the acquisition played out in Walnut Creek. Will wanted the project isolated from the distractions of that. Many of the design decisions at this stage followed naturally from the hierarchy of needs,

but it took time. It was really anything but a straight-ahead clear road to development, says London. We were developing a type of game that had never been made before. Will is a very intuitive designer. He has experiments he wants to run, he wants to see how something will feel... we build, we iterate, we play with it, we tear stuff out, we put new stuff in. Its one of the reasons it took so many years. Now, its easy to portray a game as being one mans creation. Its true that Wright came up with the initial concept for the game, prototyped it and pushed it relentlessly. But his concepts have always been less about people and more about systems, normally based on whichever book hes currently obsessed with. As London says: The people were kind of an afterthought. The architecture part was so robust and well-polished at launch as it had been in development the longest. It wasnt until two very influential designers, Clare Curtin and Roxy Wolosenko, joined the team that the focus shifted away from objects and architecture, and onto people. They made many changes to the design, including adding children to the game. Because there were no children, it lacked a certain depth and humanity. The changes started by Curtin and Wolosenko also changed how the team thought about the game. Previously it had featured three modes the player would switch between as they played: People, Objects and Architecture. With its new focus on people, the modes changed from nouns to verbs: Live, Buy and Build. Originally, a nickname for the game was The Human Pinball Machine. And the exciting thing in a pinball machine is the machine, not the ball. Its the designs and the bumpers and the slides and the lights. The pinballs are all alike from machine to machine, says London. Changing the focus from architecture and nouns to people and actions meant that the people had to become more than pinballs, and the game more about providing gamers with the tools to tell their own stories. The earliest characters for these stories were made using off-the-shelf art programs. We envisioned the game like a sitcom... the first characters we made were essentially copies of famous sitcom characters from American television. Specifically, Archie and Edith Bunker from All In The Family, and George and Louise Jefferson from The Jeffersons. We did not ship with those assets! Soon, the team worked up a character creator, which changed the dynamic again. The minute that a player facing the character creator went in, the urge to want to create yourself, or the urge to pick an asset that kind of looked like you, or to make a family structure that was like the one you lived in or someone you know, was immediately evident.
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THE MAKING OF... THE SIMS

Everybody wanted to do that. That was one of the moments when we realised we had magic on our hands. For London, that realisation came on one particular day: I was trying to test something. So, you put a Sim in and you set up your situation and you go back, and he would have wandered off. You had to spend a long time looking for him. You would end up penning him in. Then you would go about doing your other things and he would not have what he needed, hed be getting hungry and tired and he wouldnt be in position for your test. So all right, now I have to feed him... all right, now hes tired, lets put a bed in there... Suddenly I realised that 45 minutes had gone by and Im not testing. Im picking out wallpaper because, without knowing it, Ive switched modes into nurturing him. Hes no longer just a test asset Im starting to care about whether he has a nice enough bed, Im playing the game. Thats the magic of The Sims. The magic didnt extend beyond the team, though and getting the game approved for full development still wasnt easy, even for Wright. The Maxis board had been wary of the game, with co-founder Jeff Braun saying they thought Will was out of his mind. Wright himself was skeptical, telling the press at the time that hed love to make a dolls house game, but it just wasnt marketable. Notably, EA were a lot more enthusiastic. London, still at EA, is full of praise. We had a very challenging path to getting into full production... I dont know that this game could have been made at any other company. EA was incredibly supportive and incredibly brave to let this game go forward. It wasnt like anything that had been done before. Throughout 1998, there was a back-andforth process with the EA management and the development team, mediated by director of development Jim Mackraz. We would show them something that greatly excited us, and they would have some difficulty understanding how it was relevant or where it was leading. They would demand that we add things, and then when they saw it next time we wouldnt have, but we would have added others that did pique their interest... and they were very tolerant of this. To get the game to market, an executive producer called Kana Ryan was put in charge. Shes the one who really put the pressure and guidance and focus on getting this thing to stop being a laboratory experiment, and to actually turn it into something we could sell... she was the grown-up in the room. I want to point out that this happened over and over: a woman joins the team and makes the game deeper, more appealing, more buildable or responsible. The gender balance on our team, I think, was a very important thing for us.
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GAMEOGRAPHY
A Sim-ple run-down of Maxiss most Sim-nificant simulations [fire him, then hire him so we can fire him twice Ed]. Sim City (1989) Sim City is an urban-planning simulator that was the bestselling series of games until The Sims. Now open source. Sim Ant (1991) You control a single ant at a time, which you can use to leave pheromone trails to guide other black ants. Watch out for lawnmowers! The Sims 2 (2004) Incorporated a new 3D engine and allows Sims to age and die of old age. Sims now have life goals, fears and wants. The game sold 13 million copies. The Sims 3 (2009) Set in one continuous world, Sims can also now progress without you being around. Not a great leap forward. It sold 10 million copies.

We had one machine to demo on. I dont even remember if we had a sign; we may have printed out something on a jotter
With Ryans new focus, the game was ready for E3 1999 although EA didnt exactly prioritise it. Back then, E3 was huge and so was EAs booth: The top of the mountain, London calls it. The closer you were to the front of the booth, the more important you were. We were literally stuck on the back side of the booth. We had one machine to demo on. I dont even remember if we had a sign; we may have printed out something on a jotter and taped it on. Despite this, word of mouth spread on the first day, and lines started to form. As there was only one machine, the lines grew. By the end of the first day wed won the Game of the Show Award. The lines were, like, over the curve of the earth, man... Everybody at E3 wanted to see the game. The line snaked through

every other booth, even on competitors stands, clogging them up. Those poor people would try to show their demo and the queuers would be like, No no, were just waiting in line for The Sims. Command & Conquer developer Joseph B Hewitt IV remembers the morass, demoing Red Alert at the same E3: We had the corner of the EA booth, and The Sims were wedged in behind us. It was off in a corner and no one was demoing it. We all thought it was the greatest thing in the world. We were like, This is just so cool!, so while everybody else is looking at Red Alert, were behind the little cockpit chair playing The Sims. This was the watershed for the game; the EA higher-ups threw their weight behind it, lavishing marketing money, television advertising and attention on it. We started galloping towards the finish line. The game got polished and then in February 2000 we released it, and the rest is historical record. We were the best-selling game of that year, the year after, and the year after that; we were best-selling game three years in a row. We had to start figuring out what else to do. Luckily Wrights team had spent an entire year making the game totally expandable, hence the object-oriented system, where new objects contain the verbs for their own usage, so they could be added and removed easily. Cue expansions galore and 16 million sales, plus 13 million sales for The Sims 2, 10 million sales for The Sims 3, and over 100 million sales including expansions. Given its huge success, particularly among the once-inaccessible female market, its a tribute to the strength and difficulty of its design that The Sims hasnt been effectively cloned. It has however been translated into 22 different languages, has its own postage stamp in France, and even its own in-game lethal virus which was spread maliciously by Wright himself, from a downloadable guinea pig.

Doctor Love is on duty.

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Sims: like you but slimmer and in nicer clothes.

Not everyone could shake their booty to Leonard Cohen but Tony can! What a waste of cake, thought Tim.

Igloos werent put in the game because its a stupid word, thats why. God. Riding the Cow of Tragedy.

Fish forget so easily you need tanks for the memories.

Little did Graham know his private bath would one day feature in PCG.

Before the Fail Whale was the Lark Shark.

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