Did you thinkThe Simswas going to be such a big success?
I always thoughtThe Simsseemed to have much more potential thanSimCityever did.
I was never that confident aboutSimCity. And I’m not sure why I was that confident
aboutThe Sims, but just because it hit so close to home with human nature, I always
suspected that people would like playing with people, as close as they could possibly
get. And most games don’t let you get that close to people, or if they do it’s in a very
scripted, linear format. It’s not in an open-ended format.
Usually it’s more in aZeldasort of way, where you can talk to this character but
they always say the same thing.
Exactly, and instantly the model breaks in your head and you say, “Oh, it’s just a robot
and it’s repeating the same thing over and over.” And if we could keep it open-ended,
and we didn’t try to get too close to the people and left the interpretation in there, peo-
ple could reasonably believe that these were little creatures with desires and
relationships and all these things.
Among all the praise, I’ve seen a lot of little complaints about the game. Like
there aren’t any weekends, or you can never play with your sims outside of the
home environment. Do you often hear such complaints about your games?
That happens a lot. It’s happened probably more withThe Simsthan any other title I’ve
worked on, probably because more people consider themselves an expert on the sub-
ject than they do on ants or planet thermodynamics. It’s hard to look atSimEarthand
say, “Well, I really don’t think ocean currents have that much of a thermal transfer rate
with the atmosphere.” But anybody can look atThe Simsand say, “Well, I don’t think we
would slap her for that.” We’re more experts in that field, so that’s kind of natural. The
other thing though, is that, judging by the things that they feel that they’re missing,
people don’t realize how much of it is actually clicking and working. Because there
were so many hundreds of things that had to work before they were complaining about
weekends. For weekends to be the big concern, that implies that a lot of the other stuff
that we were sweating over is actually working.
Was deciding what to include and what to leave out a function of how much
time you had to complete the game?
That was certainly a big part of it, although whenever we hit one of those situations we
tried to leave the game open-ended so that we could expand it in that direction with a
download. We haven’t fully demonstrated how much we can expand the game with
downloaded objects. Also, it’s easy for people to say that they want weekends, but
they’re not thinking through all of the ramifications of it, which we did. And most peo-
ple, when I sit and explain why we don’t have weekends, all of a sudden they realize
why not and say, “Oh, you’re right, I guess I don’t want weekends.”
So how did you decide what limits to put on the simulation?
That very much was a resource issue. We could have put in the nightclub and the work
and all that and added another year to the game’s development. At which point it would
have been past its best time. Another thing is, we could have done all that on a similar
428 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright