make sure about this.” Of course, when everybody in the focus group said, “There’s no
way I’d buy that,” that made it a little more difficult for me to sell the idea.
So how did you finally get a chance to make it?
I convinced everybody to at least give me one programmer to work on it in the back-
ground. It was a guy named Jamie Doornbos, who was the eventual lead programmer. A
really bright, young guy out of Stanford, a good science student. He was the one that
was developing the behavior model with me in the background. We were trying to fig-
ure out how we could simulate an open-ended system where the behaviors were
expandable and they had the level of intelligence that we would require for the game, so
that they could basically live out their whole home life and we could simulate it reason-
ably. So Jamie and I probably spent a year and a half just working on the behavior model,
as a little research project. At some point it just started really working out, and really
looking pretty good. And that’s the point at which I started getting more people on the
team. And even then, I had to fight and kick and struggle for every person I got.
After your success withSimCity, it’s surprising that no one trusted you.
But in fact, it’s funny, because just recently I started on a couple of other back-burner
type things. The last one I did, I started telling people this idea, and everybody said,
“That’s great, that’s great, go do it, here’s a programmer.” And in a sense it was disap-
pointing. It’s much more satisfying when everybody says, “That sucks, no way that will
work out” and then you go disprove them, rather than if everybody says, “Oh, that’ll be
great” and then if it doesn’t turn out to be great...Soinsome sense I miss the struggle.
What was your original inspiration forThe Sims?
I think the original inspiration forThe Simscame from a book calledA Pattern Language
written by a Berkeley architecture professor named Christopher Alexander. It’s a very
interesting book, it’s kind of controversial in the architecture world. It’s almost like the
Western version of feng
shui. He’s got two hun-
dred fifty-six design rules,
and each one looks at
some aspect of human
behavior and then derives
a design rule that you can
use. And the very first
rules are where cities
should be placed on a
countryside. As you move
up the rules, to rule ten or
fifteen, it starts talking
about the design of cities
and neighborhoods, and
circulation systems within
cities. And then you move
Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 425
The Sims