game, and I felt bad that I didn’t use those last eight. And there are a lot of tricks you do
when you’re running out of memory, because the memory was the ultimate concern.
There were some cool little tricks for that.
I read that the level editing tool forBungeling Baywas your inspiration for
SimCity.
It was a character set that actually described a bunch of islands with little roads and cit-
ies on them. And so there was such a big area that I developed my own little character
editing program to draw this scene that I could scroll around really smoothly, like a paint
program. I found that I was having so much more fun with the paint program than I was
with the game that after I finished the game I kept playing with the paint program. And
it eventually evolved intoSimCity.
So you wouldn’t cite any other games that inspiredSimCity?
I’d say the biggest inspira-
tion, if there had to be one,
was the work of Jay For-
ester, who is considered
the father of system
dynamics, and one of the
very first people to use a
computer for simulation.
So when I started getting
the idea for SimCity,I
started going to the
library and reading. He did
a lot of his work back in
the ’50s, working with
very primitive computers
and very primitive mod-
els, but yet he was the
first person to try to simulate a city. And he did it with like twenty variables: one was
population, one was production, one was birth rate, stuff like that. Very simple models.
System dynamics is a way to look at a system and divide it into, basically, stocks and
flows. Stocks are quantities, like population, and flows are rates, like the death rate, the
birth rate, immigration. You can model almost anything just using those two features.
That was how he started system dynamics and that was the approach he took to his
modeling. I uncovered his stuff when I started working onSimCityand started teaching
myself modeling techniques. I also came across the more recent stuff with cellular
automata, andSimCityis really a hybrid of those two approaches. Because his approach
was not spatial at all, whereas the cellular automata gives you a lot of really interesting
spatial tools for propagation, network flow, proximity, and so forth. So the fact that pollu-
tion starts here, spreads over here, and slowly gets less and less, and you can actually
simulate propagation waves through these spatial structures. SoSimCityin some
sense is like a big three-dimensional cellular automata, with each layer being some
410 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright
SimCity