actually ended up using it forSimCity 2000. In fact, if you go back and look at the source
code forSimCity 2000, to this day the draw routines say DrawHouse and DrawYard,
because it was the original code shell forThe Sims. So then I got into that, and Fred and
I, basically we started from scratch. Fred and I work together really well, and we did it
in almost record time, for that complexity of a game. We did it in about twelve months
flat.
So the idea was to improve on what had worked well in the originalSimCity?
Roughly. Also, at that point, we had hundreds and hundreds of fan letters saying, “Oh,
you should doSimCityagain and add this and add that and add the other.” And I read
through all those letters. And there were a few things that were very common. And so
we added the really common and obvious suggestions: altitude, mountains, a water sys-
tem, more road types, that type of thing. Beyond that it was all of the things I wished I
could have done inSimCitythat, now that computers were faster and graphics were
better, we could do.
So, compared toSimAnt,it seems a lot less wacky. Was that because you were
working with the company’s prize franchise?
It was wacky enough I think, in its own way. It had the expectedSimCitywackiness,
plus a lot of things that were not in the originalSimCity. We had a lot of hidden things in
SimCity 2000that people didn’t realize for a long time that helped its longevity. There
was the Loch Ness Monster in there. It would only appear every two or three months
that you played the game, and it would only appear for about four seconds. And so there
were a lot of rumors about it. Two months after the game had shipped, people started
saying they had seen this monster in the water, and most people didn’t believe them
because it was so infrequent. And it was almost a year after we shipped the game that
someone actually managed to take a screenshot of it. And then you had Captain Hero.
Only under certain weird conditions you would get this superhero that would fly around
and fight your disasters for you. So we had a lot of stuff like that hidden in the game. The
originalSimCitydidn’t really have that level of depth.
Did you feel constrained since you were just doing a sequel?
Not really. At that point I was more in project management mode. I had a pretty clear
idea of what the design would be, since we were basically just doing a sequel, which is
always easier. It was more just making sure the engineering was good and the perfor-
mance was decent. It was a pretty tight piece of code. The originalSimCity 2000ran in
1.3 megs on a Mac. So, for what it was, it was actually pretty tight to work in that little
memory.
Wa sSimCopteryour next project?
That came quite a bit afterward, since I was actually working onThe Simsin the back-
ground while I was working onSimCopter. So, at that point I had a programmer
dedicated toThe Sims. In fact, inSimCopter, the behavior of the people that walked
around were actually using a very early form of Edith, which was the programming lan-
guage we developed forThe Sims. A lot of people at Maxis decided we really wanted to
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