So you thought you could better communicate to the player the condition of
their planet through sound?
Well, it was just kind of a stupid little experiment in that direction. At some point I’d like
to sit down and do it right. The one that I thought worked pretty well was where it
would map your atmosphere into tones ongoingly, starting at the North Pole and going
to the South Pole. And if you left that in the background with the volume down, it was
pretty useful, because you could tell changes from that much sooner than you could
actually see them reflected on the visual graphs. And so, as a kind of threshold alarm, I
thought that worked pretty well. Because you could actually be doing that subcon-
sciously. After a while, you start getting used to this little tune, and then all of a sudden
when the tune changes, it comes to the foreground of your mind. And it can be doing
that while you’re doing other things, so you don’t have to be sitting there staring at the
display all the time. I always thought that was pretty cool.
SimEarthis a pretty serious game compared to many of your other titles. Why
did you opt for that approach?
I didn’t want to do too much anthropomorphizing in the game. One of the precepts of
the game is that humans just happened to be the evolved intelligence on this planet. It
could have just as easily been trichordates or something else. So I was really trying to
avoid a human-centered approach to the game. And, really, the focus of the game was
supposed to be on the planet. I’m trying to put myself back in my mind-set back when I
worked on that, it was so long ago. I mean, it’s one of those things that once you get into
the subject you’re just fascinated by it. I’m still to this day just blown away by continen-
tal drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring. So it’s
kind of hard to express the passion I had for that subject.SimAntwas the exact same
way. Still, I think ants are just the coolest thing around, and I don’t think I clearly com-
municated that with the game.
SimAntdoes seem to be a lot wackier thanSimEarthor evenSimCity.
It’s hard to take ants too
seriously. Also, SimAnt
really surprised me. It’s
the first time I did a game
that appealed to a totally
different demographic
than I was expecting.
SimAntwas actually a big
hit with ten- to thirteen-
year-olds. Parents would
buy it, and the kids would
play it, and the kids just
loved it. Still to this day a
lot of people tell me, “I
lovedSimAnt; it was my
favorite game.” And it did
418 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright
SimAnt