and usually it’s different.
There are thirty different
things that can happen,
and they’re totally weird
things. Like, all your ants
die. Or your ants double.
Or a giant rainstorm
starts. Or you switch
sides. Totally non-linear,
random things happen
when you click that
button.
Kind of like the disasters fromSimCitytaken to an extreme...
It’s almost meta-level disasters. Things that would all of a sudden erase your game or
give you twice the number of your opponents. Like the disasters inSimCity, what a lot
of people would do is they would play and play and play for hours and when they were
ready to stop, just before they would quit they would burn the city down just for the hell
of it. InSimAntpeople would play the game for a while and then, just before they quit,
they would hit the mystery button to see what it did today.
Your next project wasSimCity 2000. How did that come about?
Well, actually, before I did
that, I had spent about six
months working on the
very first incarnation of
The Sims. I had actually
done a little prototype and
some coding. At that point
Fred Haslam was working
onSimCity 2000.Hewas
the guy who I ended up
doing it with and who had
doneSimEarthwith me.
SimCity 2000wasn’t going
nearly as fast as every-
body liked, and they didn’t
like the graphics and all
this stuff, so I got dragged
into it. At this point, the company was really depending onSimCity 2000being a
best-seller and all that, so I basically dropped everything I was doing onThe Simsand
dove in with Fred. And, in fact, I took the code shell I had written forThe Sims, and we
420 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright
SimAntSimCity 2000