feature of the landscape like crime or pollution or land value. But the layers can interact
on the third dimension. So the layers of crime and pollution can impact the land value
layer.
What made you think that such scholarly techniques could lead to something
that people would find fun?
At that point I wasn’t trying to build something that people would play for entertain-
ment value. It’s more like I was just having fun doing this on my own. At the same time I
was reading about urban dynamics, just on the theoretical side. And having this little
guinea pig city on my computer while I was reading about the subject made the subject
so much more interesting. So I could read a theory and then try to figure out how to for-
malize it, code it, put it in the model, and see what the results of it were.
At what point did you start to think it might be something that other people
could have fun with?
After about six months or so I started attaching some graphics to it. It was fairly
abstract to begin with. And then I started thinking, you know, this might be an interest-
ing game. I had actually done my first game with Broderbund Software, and I showed it
to some people there and they thought it was pretty cool. They agreed to pick it up, and
we had a contract for it and everything. And I worked on it for about a year to the point
where it was where I wanted it to be. And they kept thinking it wasn’t finished. They
kept saying, “When is it going to be a game? When is it going to have a win/lose situa-
tion?” It was very unusual for its time, and this was about five years before it was
actually released. This was around 1985, and we didn’t actually release it until ’89.
They didn’t think it was enough of a game to fit in with their other products?
They just didn’t see how they could possibly sell it. And I just left it there, and they left
it there, and that was that.
So were you pretty discouraged?
I always thought it was a cool little thing I did; I never really thought it would be a main-
stream thing. But I thought it would be worthwhile getting it on the market. So later I
met my eventual partner, Jeff Braun, and I showed it to him. And he thought it was
really cool. He really, really was into it. He, in fact, thought there was probably a big
market for something like that. At that point, the two of us decided to start a company
ourselves, and that’s when we started Maxis.
So it had sat around, unpublished, for a number of years?
Yeah, for a couple of years. About the time we decided to start Maxis, the Macintosh had
just come out, and the Amiga was coming out, and we decided we would rewrite the
game for those computers. So we hired a couple of programmers, and I recoded the sim-
ulator in C. It had all been in assembly before. We had these other programmers helping
on the graphical front ends on the Mac and on the Amiga, and those were actually the
first versions that were released. We actually did go back and release the Commodore
version about a month after we released those.
Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 411