Wright, Will

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Will Wright

Personal

Born 1960, in Atlanta, GA; married; wife an artist; children: Cassidy (daughter). Education: Attended college. Hobbies and other interests: Robotics, buying collections of things on eBay.

Addresses

Home—Northern California. Agent—c/o Electronic Arts, 209 Redwood Shores Pkwy., Redwood City, CA 94065. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

Computer game designer. Maxis (now part of Electric Arts, Inc.), co-founder and chief designer, 1987—. Stupid Fun Club (design and film studio), Berkeley, CA, cofounder, 2000—.

Awards, Honors

Named to Time Digital 50, 1999; Invisionary Award, 2000; GDC Game-of-the-Year Award, 2001, for The Sims; Lifetime Achievement Award from International Game Developers Association, 2001; inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame, 2002; numerous other awards for SimCity.

Writings

DESIGNER; COMPUTER GAMES

Raid on Bungeling Bay, 1982.

SimCity, 1989.

SimEarth: The Living Planet, 1990.

SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony, 1991.

SimFarm, 1992.

SimCity 2000, 1993.

SimCity 2000 Urban Renewal Kit, 1994.

SimCity Classic, 1994.

SimCopter, 1998

The Sims, 2000, adapted for PlayStation 2 and X-Box, 2002.

The Sims: House Party, 2001.

The Sims: Hot Date, 2001.

The Sims: Unleashed, 2002.

The Sims: Vacation, 2002.

The Sims: Livin' Large, 2002.

The Sims Online, 2002.

SimCity 4, 2003.

The Sims: Superstar, 2003.

SimCity 4: Rush Hour, 2003.

The Sims: Makin' Music, 2003.

The Sims: Bustin' Out, 2003.

(With others) The Sims 2, 2004.

Work in Progress

More "Sims" and "Sim City" games.

Sidelights

From their start in the days of Super Mario Brothers and Pac Man, computer games have gained a reputation for violence. Games with titles like Doom, Hitman, and TombRaider attracted the concern of parents, teachers, and social activists due to their "point-and-shoot" underpinnings. However, in the mid-1980s Will Wright changed all that with his brainstorm: SimCity.

SimCity, an exploration of community micromanagement, is a game where players construct a city from scratch. Sewage design, community centers, and school budgets take the place of interstellar gun battles and car chases. Even more revolutionary was the fact that SimCity could never be "beaten" because there was no bad guy to kill, no aliens to rout, no Earth to save. Players can create countless simulated communities, testing out new ideas and observing their impact. Decades after its release Wright's SimCity has grown into a mini-industry, with numerous spin-off games and the creation of a second series, "The Sims," that lets players create and then enter the lives of simulated characters.

From Robots to Engineering

Wright was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1960, the son of a chemical engineer and plastics company owner and a stage actress. As a child Wright coupled an early love of reading and a vivid imagination with an increasing fascination with robots. When his father died in 1969, Wright's mother moved the family—Wright and his sister—to Louisiana, where she could be close to her own family.

In high school Wright continued his love affair with robotics, and constructed several robots from found parts and Radio Shack kits. He also became interested in human behavior and motivations. Eventually he focused on building and analyzing a robot he called "Mister Rogers," a three-wheeled contraption that was able to map out the room it was in and send the coordinates to Wright's Apple II computer. He occasionally took the robot out in public, where he enjoyed watching people's reactions to Mister Rogers, particularly their tendency to humanize the mechanical oddity.

Finds Focus with Computer Games

Meanwhile, Wright had graduated from high school and enrolled in college, where he dabbled with architecture and mechanical engineering, but never settled on a major course of study. But in 1980 he played his first computer game—a flight simulator—and knew he had found something that combined all his interests. The aspect that particularly intrigued Wright was the opportunity the game provided for the player to create an entire world on the screen in front of him; he enjoyed just flying around, admiring the little communities and rural areas that he could view, as from aloft, on the computer monitor. As Wright recalled to Salon.com interviewer Daniel Sieberg, "What inspires me is how much people were able to read into that little rectangle [in the early video games]. You only have to give people the briefest, most tentative scaffolding to hang something on and they'll build an elaborate narrative and fill in the gaps with their imagination. We humans are so good at that. . . . We can do a lot of really cool stuff with graphics and sound, but that's not where the magic happens."

Realizing that video games, and not robotics, were the wave of the future, Wright refocused the energy he had previously given Mr. Rogers and set about designing a flight simulator of his own. After five years spent hopping from school to school, he also abandoned the idea of a college degree. Instead, in 1984 he created the helicopter action game Raid on Bungeling Bay and marketed it for the Commodore 64 console. Although the game was focused around attacking a small island by helicopter, Wright saw a new marketing niche that had yet to be explored in video games: games that challenged decision making and people's ability to react to the unexpected. How then to build a game that utilized players' organizational skills, creativity, drive, and survival instincts? Taking on his own challenge, Wright developed the idea for SimCity.

Welcome to SimCity

SimCity, which Wright originally developed for the Commodore 64, is a real-time strategy game that pits players against real-life problems: the local high school receives lower-than-expected SAT scores, or a tornado hits a major shopping center. While Wright believed the game would catch on with consumers, he mustered only tepid enthusiasm from anyone outside his immediate circle of friends. Fortunately, at a pizza party in 1986 he met Jeff Braun, who liked Wright's idea and had the business knowledge to make his vision a reality. The following year the two men founded Maxis as a way to support and market SimCity.

Wright worked with a group of friends to perfect SimCity and ultilized a complex technique to create realistic simulations on a PC platform. Then the game was tested, Wright looking on as impartial players learned the rules and then set about micro-managing their simulated cities while battling the many barriers the design team had placed in their way. After Maxis convinced well-known publisher Broderbund to distribute the game, SimCity was released in 1989. It was now time for Wright to sit back and let the market take its course.

Although the game quickly captured the imagination of a niche market, SimCity did not exactly burst onto the computer game horizon, and Wright and friends handled all the tech support for their small customer base from Braun's apartment. However, the game soon found a fan at Newsweek magazine, and after that magazine published a page-long article about Wright and his game, sales started to climb. Within months of the article, hundreds of thousands of copies had been sold.

Wright's SimCity revolutionized computer games by transforming the species from mindless entertainment to a creative challenge. Among the most enthusiastic customers for SimCity were teachers, who now had a way to interest students in concepts from urban dynamics to simple cause and effect. Other companies quickly followed Maxis's lead, and titles like Civilization soon appeared in gaming stores. Even the U.S. military took notice and began developing software similar to SimCity that could guess the behavior of a potential enemy. SimCity has gone on to sell more than one million copies, and continued to be a solid seller more than a decade after its release.

From Ant Farms to Human Households

The premise behind SimCity has limitless applications, and Wright and his Maxis colleagues were
quick to find new ways to intrigue and challenge creative gamers. In the first few years after its release, SimCity spawned a number of variations on the "Sim" theme, including SimEarth: The Living Planet, SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony, and SimFarm. They also revised the original game; SimCity 2000 sold 300,000 copies in the first four months after it was released in 1993. However, the game that has truly established Wright's career as one of the most impressive in the history of the gaming industry was still to come.

Taking simulation to its most intimate form, Wright developed The Sims, and released the game in 2000. The Sims was inspired by a setback Wright and his family encountered in 1991, when their home in Redlands, California, burned during a series of wildfires. The family was left to rebuild their life from scratch, and Wright thought that a similar challenge would be attractive to "Sim" gamers. The Sims players create their own "skins," or identity, as well as their own neighborhood, are given a plot of land and a variety of opportunities, and then take things from there. As Lev Grossman explained in Time: "The object of the game, to the extent that it has one, is to keep your Sims—your digital alter egos—well fed, solvent, healthy, entertained and, in short, happy. The game never formally ends; you can keep on living your simulated life as long as you like." The reviewer compared playing The Sims to "taking part in an open-ended community theatre production."

As with SimCity, Wright encountered some initial skepticism on the part of colleagues at Maxis, and decided to continue working on his new game in his spare time. In the meantime, Maxis became a publicly traded company in 1995, and two years later was purchased by Electronic Arts, the largest game publisher in North America. The new owners, trusting their designer, gave Wright a team and The Sims was released in 2000.

As Wright predicted, The Sims was an immediate hit with gamers, and the game's expansion packs, such as The Sims: House Party, The Sims: Vacation, and The Sims: Hot Date, have consistently ranked in the top-ten best-selling games, making it, to date, the best-selling computer game of all time. In 2002 another innovation took place with The Sims Online, which allows players to take their favorite virtual creations into a larger, open-ended world, where they get virtual jobs, fall in virtual love, and make virtual enemies. With each player put in control of their own piece of virtual real estate, "Wright's goal is to create a sprawling metaverse in which real persons can participate in the world's biggest real-time drama," according to Entertainment Weekly contributor Geoff Keighley. In Esquire Ted C. Fishman called The Sims Online "a kind of massive sociological experiment, the only game that recreates society."

Still Finds Time for Robots

When he is not conjuring up new challenges for the growing army of "Sim" addicts, Wright still builds robots, sometimes with the help of his daughter, Cassidy; the pair has made annual television appearance on Comedy Central's Battlebots, where creations such as their "Chiabot," a robot that hides its weapons in the Chia-Pet-like shrubbery perched on top of its head, have proved triumphant against those of other contestants.

Not surprisingly, Hollywood also took notice of Wright's success, and in 2003 he agreed to work with Fox Broadcasting on a television series. Though a T.V. version of The Sims might seem an obvious outcome of this project, one of Wright's pilot shows, dubbed M.Y. Robot, mixes animation and puppetry in a storyline set in a feudal Japanese village. Through his Berkeley, California-based Stupid Fun Club, he continues to brainstorm ways to bring robots into the media mainstream.

If you enjoy the works of Will Wright

If you enjoy the works of Will Wright, you may also want to check out the following:

John Carmack and John Romero, the creators of Doom and Quake.

Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley, the designers of the simulation game Railroad Tycoon.

Shigeru Miyamoto, the designer of DonkeyKong and Super Mario Bros.

Although Wright has had fun with his gaming creations, he sees his work as more than mere entertainment; there is an important lesson imbedded in the workings of SimCity "The real resource everybody has in life is time," he told John McLean-Foreman in an interview for Gamasutra.com "You can convert time to a lot of other things—you can convert it into money, objects, and friends—but how you choose to spend your time is how you're playing the game of life."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Computer Gaming World, May, 2000, "Good Will Gaming: An Interview with Gaming's Great Constructor, Will Wright," p. 64; July 1, 2003, "Will at Work."

Electronic Gaming Monthly, February 1, 2004, interview with Wright.

Entertainment Weekly, December 6, 2002, Geoff Keighley, "Wright On," p. 38.

Esquire, December, 2002, Ted C. Fishman, "First, Will Wright Reinvented Computer Games with The Sims. Now He's about to Reinvent the World," p. 146.

Forbes, May 28, 2001, Carol Pogash, "His Life as a Petri Dish," p. 12.

Newsweek, November 25, 2002, Brad Stone, "Will Wright Likes His 'Stupid Fun,'" p. 53.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 22, 2004, Steven L. Kent, "'Sims' Creator Is Livin' Large."

Teen People, September 1, 2001, Christopher Healy, "All In The Family: What's the Secret behind the Top-selling PC Game 'The Sims'? The Answer Could Be 15-Year-Old Cassidy Wright," p. 116.

Time, November 25, 2002, Lev Grossman, "Sim Nation," p. 78.

U. S. News and World Report, May 3, 1999, Richard Folkers, "The New Sims on the Block," p. 66.

Wired, January, 1994, Kevin Kelly, "Will Wright: The Mayor of Sim City" (interview).