So you were pleased to not have to be involved with that.
That’s an understatement. Just doing one sequel for me was excruciating. Once I got
into it, I had fun withSimCity 2000. But there are just so many games that haven’t been
done at all that I’d like to do, as opposed to going back and redoing games I’ve already
done. Probably my favorite part of designing a game is the research and learning a new
subject, and just totally diving into it. And, I’ve spent a lot of time reading about urban
dynamics and city planning. I still love the subject, but I’m kind of burned out on the
research in that area. There are so many other subjects I’d love to dive into and learn
right now.
I do have one question aboutSimCity 3000. When I originally saw a prototype
for the game it was fully 3D. But when it shipped it was back to the classic iso-
metric viewpoint. Why did that change so radically?
Well, for a number of rea-
sons, and it was a pretty
hard decision to make. In
retrospect, I’m convinced
it was the right decision.
Part of it had to do with
user interface. A lot of
people who playSimCity,
who tend to be a much
broader group, a lot of the
more casual gamers, have
a hard time moving around
and controlling a 3D cam-
era. And when you put on
top of that the idea of edit-
ing a system and then give
them a three-dimensional
camera, it takes what used to be a very simple, Lego-like thing, and turns it into an
AutoCAD. “What am I looking at? Oh, I see, I’m facing the building two inches away.” It
becomes that kind of experience. So that was part of it. The other part was the technol-
ogy. Without going with really severe restrictions on what you could build, we just
couldn’t have a decent frame rate and have the level of detail that we could have in an
isometric viewpoint. We’re getting to the point today where it’s pretty much feasible.
But you deal with real RAM limitations of texture memory and real polygonal limita-
tions. At the time that we were working on it, there weren’t enough people out there
with 3D hardware to require that. So we would have had to have a software solution that
was acceptable. There were a lot of reasons, but I’d say the two primary ones were per-
formance and user interface.
So you actually startedThe Simsright after you finishedSimAnt.
A long time ago, yeah. I also had a couple of projects that I started and then killed along
the way.
Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright 423
SimCity 3000