Plus you had the disasters randomly occur.
Yeah, that seemed obvious after I had the disaster menu, that they should randomly
happen, but I didn’t originally have that.
SimEarthseems to be a logical extension ofSimCity. How did you come up with
the idea for that game?
It was more my interest in cer-
tain subjects that drove me to it.
I was very interested in certain
theories, most notably the Gaia
hypothesis, and also general
environmental issues that a lot
of times are counterintuitive. I
thought it would be interesting
to have a model of a global eco-
system. I learned a lot from
SimEarth. Actually, I was very
proud of the simulation of
SimEarth, and pretty disap-
pointed in the game design.
How do you mean?
It wasn’t a terribly fun game. It’s
actually a very nice model, and
we did a lot of research of the
current climatic models, and I
have still never seen anyone do
an integrated model with an
integrated lithosphere, hydro-
sphere, and atmosphere together like that. And we were getting some effects in the
model that were real effects, that really show up, that even some of the more elaborate
models that NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research] makes weren’t captur-
ing. But as far as the game goes, I started realizing that you can roughly look at all of our
Simgames and divide them into one of two categories: the economic ones and the bio-
logical ones. And, in general, the economic ones have always done better.
Which ones would you include in that group?
SimCity,SimTower,SimCity 2000,The Sims, andSimFarm, though that’s a bit of both.
The biologicals would beSimAnt,SimEarth, andSimLife, roughly.
Why do you think the economic ones have been more successful?
I think it has a lot to do with how much control you have over the systems. The biologi-
cal systems tend to be very soft, squishy things that you can do something to, and then
it kind of reacts and adapts. It’s not really clear what you did to it, because it’ll then
evolve around you. Whereas in the economic ones you have much better credit
416 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright
SimEarth