Anything of interest?
Well, I had project Z. For a while there I had project X, Y, and Z. X was what we were call-
ingThe Simsfor the longest time. Y wasSimCopter. For Z, I wanted to do a simulation of
the Hindenburg. And I really researched that and really enjoyed it. This was a really odd
idea. But it was a combination ofMystand a flight simulator, if you can imagine that. It
was going to be a very elaborately rendered, beautifully, meticulously drawn virtual
Hindenburg that you could walk through and explore, every little nook and cranny. But
it would also be completely functional, so every valve that you would turn would have
the real effect, and every switch that you would flip would do what the real switch did.
And you would find yourself all of a sudden, on the Hindenburg, over the Atlantic, head-
ing to Lakehurst. You would be the only one aboard, you’d be on this ghost ship.
Basically, history would keep repeating itself, and if you didn’t do the right thing you
would always blow up when you got to Lakehurst. And so it was going to be kind of a
mystery game. And we were going to take the top ten or twenty theories for why the
Hindenburg blew up, there are quite a few of them actually. And every time you started
a new game it would pick one of those at random. So every time you played the game it
wouldn’t be the same reason why it blew up. So there’d be a totally different set of
things you’d have to do to prevent it. In fact, you could also go up to the control cabin
and pilot the thing, you could fly it around to different areas. You’d actually have to learn
how to fly a zeppelin from scratch, which for one person is quite difficult.
That’s really quite different from any of your other games.
Yeah. You know what really killed that project the most, the reason why I really gave up
on it? It seems like a really minor reason, but it was the fact that the Hindenburg had a
swastika on its tail. And even if we took the swastika off, a lot of people have this associ-
ation in their mind of the Hindenburg as a Nazi symbol. Which is unfortunate, because
the guy who designed and built the Hindenburg was one of the fiercest opponents of the
Nazis, and he actually had to sign this pact with the devil to get the thing built. And so
the Nazis actually paid for its final construction. So, anyway, that was one of my failed
game designs.
So didThe Simsstay pretty much the same throughout its development?
It definitely went through a focus change, from architecture to more about the people,
but not a major one. In fact, I uncovered a tape, just before we finishedThe Sims, which I
had forgotten I had. It was a tape of one of the very first focus groups we did back in ’93.
And on the focus group tape, the moderator describes the concept that I had written
down ofThe Sims, and it’s remarkably close to what we ended up shipping.
Did the focus group like the idea?
No, actually, this was probably the most negative focus group experience I have ever
seen. It was actually quite remarkable. They universally hated it.
Was that why you couldn’t get staff for the project at first?
Yeah, that was part of it, that certainly didn’t help. It wasn’t my idea to have the focus
group in the first place. Our marketing people said, “Hey, let’s have a focus group and
424 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright