All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (39 page)

Maxis went public in June 1995. Though that success placed $35 million in company accounts, it was the beginning of the end of the pure, childlike fun of game making with a small group of buddies. Just as in the later years of Atari, arrogant idiots were brought in as bosses. They knew nothing about games. While the company netted a healthy $6 million that year, there was no way it could continue on that course, because the next SimCity was years away from hitting shelves. In 1996, bean counters forced Wright and his crew to release a quartet of generally unfinished, unpolished, sometimes untested games. Life just got worse for Braun and Wright. While working on SimCopter, a programmer who was secretly annoyed that there were no gays in Maxis products surreptitiously added two guys who kissed each other—often. That did not sit well with Wright and Braun, who had made certain that Maxis did not discriminate and had health care benefits for gay partners. The employee was shown the door, but the damage was done. SimCopter had to be recalled,
which hit the company’s stock hard, not to mention the harm it did to its reputation.

By 1997, Maxis was seriously in the red; it lost $2 million. The pressure from industry analysts and stockholders was constant and tremendous. Wright himself felt a combination of utter stress, frustration, and bemusement. He kept trying to look at the troubled times objectively. “This is a learning experience, nothing more,” Wright repeated to himself. But keeping on an even keel was trying; the business sapped much of his strength and his patience.

What had started as a lauded company now seemed to be something less, something that was joked about as having games that were a couple of steps above shovelware. When the payroll ballooned to 450 employees, many of whom the two did not know personally, Wright and Braun felt like strangers at their own company. And the stock was in a tailspin. Maxis needed serious help. Wright and Braun agreed that they were in a precarious position—their company was not big enough for them to go it alone or without a publisher, but they were not small enough to be left alone to simply do their own thing.

Braun let it be known that Maxis might be interested in being acquired. Activision was interested. But it didn’t understand Maxis games, nor did it have the deep pockets needed to satisfy investors. There was, however, another possibility. Depending on how Wright and Braun looked at it, there was either a savior or a wolf at the door. Because it wanted to have a more diverse stable of PC games, Electronic Arts, which always seemed to be in expansion mode, offered $125 million for the troubled company. Under extreme pressure from investors, Braun and Wright agreed to the sale. But it all came at a price. EA cleaned house with alacrity, firing executives and most of the Maxis sales and marketing employees. Braun was moved from the Maxis studio in Walnut Creek to Foster City, away from any influence at Maxis. It was a shark pit, and Braun left the company within a few months, saying to Wright, “These guys are out
for blood.” But EA recognized Wright’s brilliance and hired some of the country’s brightest designers to help him out. In 1999, they released SimCity 3000, starring the shoot-from-the-hip former mayor of New York City Ed Koch. By that time, Trip Hawkins was no longer involved in the company, but his edict to corral superstars for EA games had not been forgotten by what was becoming the world’s biggest videogame software maker. At the time, the crotchety Koch was a bigmouthed star with a series of bestselling books and was featured semiregularly on NBC’s
Saturday Night Live
. He was the perfect celebrity for SimCity 3000.

In part, it was SimAnt that gave Wright the idea for his next series of games. But Wright was also inspired by mathemagician Martin Gardner’s game page in the back of
Scientific American
. Gardner, who had been a puzzle lover since his first requests to Santa as a child, wrote the column for twenty-five years, until 1981. A game called Party Planner, in which you used variables to simulate the likes and dislikes of party attendees, also fascinated Wright. He thought about it for months. As well, when Maxis was still a public company, Braun had shown Wright a 1985 Activision game for the Apple II called Little Computer People. Little Computer People was occasionally hilarious and featured a slow-moving cartoonlike character called Darren who would write you letters saying, “I have many hobbies that occupy my time.” To prove it, he watched TV, exercised, and searched for someone to live in his computer with him. Finally, Wright was impressed with John Horton Conway’s theories of cellular automata, which were espoused in The Game of Life. In his 1970s simulation game, Conway showed that you could emulate the complex patterns of the birth and death of organisms living together in society—and everything in between. All these combined to influence Wright as he dreamed up a project whose working title was Home Tactics, the Experimental Domestic Simulator. Wright later tweaked the name to the slightly more appealing Dollhouse. In Dollhouse, you
controlled a human being, everything from his or her leisure time to work time. It was a miserable failure in focus group tests. Wright told his coworkers that it got “the worst response of any single game we’ve ever tested. Every person in the room said, ‘There’s no way I’m ever going to touch that.’ ” From that moment on, Wright harbored a distrust of focus groups (especially those that relied on people’s imaginations to fill in the blanks about specific play elements, as had been the case with Dollhouse). He would even bring up the story in future lectures and speeches. Truly, Dollhouse was a hideous name for a game. Wright wasn’t creating a toy with which only girls would play.

Then Wright received more disappointing news, news he refused to believe. EA’s sales prognostication for the game was a mere 300,000 worldwide. In the designer’s mind, the estimate suffered from a reliance on the tried and true over the innovative and interesting. Wright complained, “If it’s something like a successful game out there, their numbers will always be equal to the success of that game. If it’s something that’s radically new, the numbers drop off substantially.”

Eventually, the game became The Sims. EA dubbed it “a new way of life,” and gamers agreed, making it a phenomenal hit. When you first try The Sims, you likely play by the rules of society, by the straight and narrow. You go to work every day, and you do your chores when you come home. All told, you generally keep up with the Joneses. As time passes, you change. Your Sim becomes an extension of you and your passions, perhaps your need to be a slothful couch potato, a playboylike Lothario, or the lampshade-wearing drunken life of the party. And you’re thinking, “Hey. Maybe I can do the nasty in this game. That woman over there. She looks great. I mean—her eyes. I know she’s just an avatar, but that smile. Maybe it’s not about sex. Maybe it’s the big one. Maybe it’s love. Wait—this is just a damn game. Is that a
Star Wars
shirt she’s wearing? It MUST be love.” You might go so far as to steal a kiss from her, and be slapped upside the head for your brashness. But you keep trying.
You might even try to have an illicit affair or dip in the hot tub naked with the person of your dreams.

The Sims would become one of EA’s most popular games, eventually selling more than six million copies. It would become beloved by millions of women gamers, who would proudly outnumber male players by two to one. It would also be the first game to have its own official Visa credit card. The Sims was a brand. Riffing on McDonald’s signs, EA even sent out press releases saying, “10 million people served.”

Bubbling beneath the surface of The Sims were heady theories about computer science, popular culture, psychology, and education. By combining these theories just right, Wright was like experimental molecular gastronomist Ferran Adria, the famed Spanish chef who mixed contrasting tastes together to delight the daring foodie. For instance, if Wright hadn’t attended one of Maria Montessori’s schools, which taught self-sufficiency in education, The Sims might not have been so enthralling. Wright was a firm believer in the ability of a person to educate himself at his own pace. All he needed, according to Montessori, was the basic materials to build his own path of learning in a nonlinear format. At its core, that’s what The Sims was about: your own style, which is not like someone else’s, got you through life in the simulation. Individuality beckoned. Wright wanted those who indulged in The Sims to imagine this was their own world, one in which they had a creative stake in the outcome, just like when they were kids and reimagined
Gunsmoke, Miami Vice
, or
The Brady Bunch
in the backyard.

Wright believed that people would play The Sims in their own mind even when they had no access to the game, just as they would relive a movie or book they had enjoyed. In movies, you might ask, What if Harry Potter kissed Hermione early on in the series? What if Batman’s parents were still alive? What if the James Bond women were only evil and never good? Stellar story experiences are
deconstructable into little pieces that evoke a great variety of game play. Conversely, the most memorable playtime experiences are “generative”: They can take us through the looking glass to a nearly endless variety of stories.

Like life in the best of times, The Sims is an exercise in balancing material needs with social needs. Yet it includes the full range of human emotions. Most games address base feelings like fear, aggression, and violence very well. But it’s in Wright’s (and Peter Molyneaux’s) games that you get a sense of human compassion, empathy, even reflection. Partly, this is due to Simlish, the gibberish that the Sims use to talk. Simlish is never understandable, so the player ends up interpreting what the characters are saying. That projected story can be the subject of endless speculation. The danger, of course, is that some people take better care of their Sims, their virtual selves, than they do their real life selves.

To The Sims, Wright also added what he distilled from some of his favorite fiction, like Philip K. Dick’s
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
, in which the pioneering inhabitants of a planet used Barbie-ish toys called Perky Pats and a drug called Can-D to make themselves believe they lived the sex- and love-filled lives of dolls. Wright wasn’t exactly saying that his game was love and that love was the drug, although he wasn’t denying it. He was saying that “in a lot of ways, that’s what we do in games, allow people to project themselves into these worlds.”

Wright’s next signature game, Spore, was on the other hand criticized as overly ambitious. For six years, Wright oversaw an ever-growing design team that was trying to make a simulation, a real-time strategy game, and a first person game that led to a kind of massively multiplayer experience. Every creature you created in this game of evolution had its own animation, and the combination of parts made each character move with its own personality. While it took a seemingly endless half hour to install on your computer,
the first experience as a young cell under the sea was peaceful and sublime … and harrowing when another cell tried to eat you. But when you find your girlfriend cell and hearts bubble up around you, you’re hooked by the cuteness. Adding a poison puff appendage to your cell, you could survive, even thrive, and swim happily to land. Spore was an enticing look at evolution that you controlled. You become master or mistress of your own planet and then move into the galaxy to conquer parts unknown. Then you upload the experience that amazed you to the Spore website, to share it with the like-minded online. And you can choose tens of thousands of other people’s planets to download and play in. It seemed that you needed a completely extra or separate existence to live in this game world. But it was not the blockbuster that Electronic Arts had hoped it would be after the long years of production. Sales of the collector’s edition, with a making-of DVD and an art book, were lackluster; the price went from $80 to $40 to $20. Nonetheless, the game without the extraneous extras sold more than two million copies and spawned various expansion packs along with a kids’ series called Spore Heroes, a far more mainstream version with easier, more traditional game play.

As a designer, Wright succeeded because he didn’t copy other games and because he didn’t go with the trends. He was not an imitator. He was an innovator, in part because he had interests beyond videogames, compulsive interests. He was able to take these multifaceted tenets from other disciplines, streamline them, and make them accessible to the public at large. Like Spielberg in film, Miyamoto in games, or David Foster Wallace in books, he knew humans better than we know ourselves.

Wright didn’t think of such things as he stepped into his car and sped away from the Emeryville offices. He didn’t have that kind of ego. Instead, Will Wright just left. The game world would never be the same. The greatest living American game designer had left the building.

He wasn’t idle for long. Even as Wright was preparing to leave EA, he was thinking of the next, new thing. In his start-up company, Stupid Fun Club, Wright took two people from EA with him to a five-thousand-square-foot space so a small, intimate group could work on the convergence of movies, games, TV, and social networks. While he was secretive about the exact content, he made a deal with the Science Channel to work on TV programs that would have online and game aspects. Another deal, with Al Gore’s Current TV, the Creation Project, was a fascinating idea that had the Web community creating plotlines for a show. It seems clear that Wright has set his sights on merging games with TV. His challenge now is greater than ever: to pull it off in the old medium where structures for shows like sitcoms haven’t changed in forty years. TV is a place where they don’t understand Simlish, just old-guard gibberish. But who knows? In five years maybe Will Wright will become as well known as J. J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, or David Chase in television circles.

But there was a greater, more wide-ranging concern to be reckoned with when Wright left EA. In a videogame world where it’s becoming more and more difficult and financially hazardous to do something that’s big
and
new, a young, brilliant game maker will rarely (if ever) get the chance that Will Wright got, to make something newfangled that tens of millions will play. If a young version of Will Wright approached a big company today with the fascinating idea of making a game that you couldn’t win, it just wouldn’t get the green light. In fact, he probably would be laughed at. That is indeed sad, far more affecting and depressing than having your computer crash and your Sim wiped out of his or her virtual existence.