So you didn’t have any trouble communicating your vision for the design to the
engineering team?
There were problems, but not for any lack of foresight or intelligence. Just because it
was a complex thing. In fact, I didn’t know what we were building for a long time myself;
a lot of it was experimental. But yeah, in terms of the programming staff, I could always
sit down and explain the dynamics I was looking for and be very confident of getting
them.
You also made the transition from doing everything yourself onSimCityto
working on a large team forThe Sims. How big was the team?
It depends on what you count as the team. You know, there were probably sixty people
who worked on it at some point, but what I would consider the team grew to about
thirty.
So that’s a pretty big shift from working in a small group. And the management
required for that big a team is quite significant.
It is, and it has a huge amount to do with the quality of the people involved. And Elec-
tronic Arts also, they came in with a totally different orientation. Before they came in, I
had about four or five people working onThe Sims. And it was actually a very good little
group and it was working out great, but I just couldn’t get any more resources. When
Electronic Arts came in, they came in and said, “What do you need?” And that was the
point at which we just started really building the team up. But Electronic Arts also has a
very strong concept of production and what producers do. They have like ten levels of
producers, and they put a very heavy load on the producers. So it’s one of those things
where if you get the right people in those slots, this stuff works pretty well; you can
actually manage a pretty large team efficiently. If you get the wrong people in those
slots, it’s a total disaster, absolutely unmitigated disaster. At that point hiring practices
become important, and how do you interview and make sure you get the right people,
and how do you quickly find out if you don’t have the right person. So it’s a model that
works with the right components and the right people, but if you get the wrong people,
you’ve blown it.
We basically got the right people. At the same time, in our situation at Maxis, Elec-
tronic Arts brought in this one guy to run the studio, to replace most of our old
management. His name was Luc Barthelet. And Luc and I hit it off from day one. We get
along great. Luc is not your typical manager in any possible sense. I mean, he’s very
technically literate. So forSimCity 3000, they were having problems with the traffic
model, and he came in and wrote the traffic code.
Really?
Yeah, the C level code. So it’s unusual that you can have somebody running a studio that
can also write some of the trickiest code in one of your simulations. And Luc’s that kind
of guy. There’s really an art to management, and what Luc is great at is knowing exactly
at what level you need to be concentrating on any given day. And so there was this point
when it was crucial that we got this one feature inSimCity 3000.It was going to have a
big impact on the success of the product, and that was the day he pulled out his compiler
436 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright