GoKawiilThis article tells part of the story of Maxis Software.
I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring. — Will Wright
Gamers are both extremely dedicated to and really good at preserving the history of their hobby. Seldom has a month gone by in the fifteen years that I’ve been writing for this site that I haven’t had cause to feel grateful for their efforts. During the early years, I was most thankful for their lovingly curated archives of 8-bit disk images and the emulators to run them on our modern-day supercomputers; more recently, it’s initiatives like ScummVM and the welter of patches and fixes that make it easier to experiences games that are, for all that they may be infinitely more advanced than the ones I started out writing about, nevertheless decades old by this point, designed for versions of Microsoft Windows that fell out of support before some people who are old enough to vote today were even born. More recently still, projects like Wine and Lutris have allowed me to run these games on Linux, in many cases more easily than I could under Windows. And then of course there’s MobyGames, a site I have visited and will doubtless continue to visit almost every single day that I write about gaming history.
It therefore pains me just slightly to say that, for all the good they do, these same fans can create a somewhat distorted impression of the history they work so hard to preserve. The fact is that the version of our ludic past which you find chronicled on a site like MobyGames is often markedly at odds with the real facts on the ground from back in the day. The games which get most of the attention there, and garner multiple loving retrospectives in fan journals like Retro Gamer magazine, are seldom the ones that actually sold the best. Then as now, the best way to sell a lot of games was to make ones that appealed to people who don’t self-identify as gamers, who would have no idea how to even begin to interact with a DOOM or a Starcraft, to whom it would certainly never occur in a million years to visit a site like MobyGames. For these people, games are just a way of passing the time, not a passion or a lifestyle. And there are a lot more of them than there are of us, my friends. If you’re basing your understanding of which games were the most successful in their day on the ones that have the largest quantity of nostalgic reviews on MobyGames, Steam, and GOG.com, you’ve gone badly astray.
The canonical example of this disconnect is Myst. Widely dismissed by the hardcore set as nothing more than a slideshow of pretty pictures wired together with a handful of switch-flipping set-piece puzzles, Myst was the face of the multimedia revolution in personal computing in the eyes of Jack and Jill America during the 1990s. As a result, it became the best-selling single game of the decade. There’s a surprising number of other non-core-gaming successes of almost the same magnitude to be spotted if you only pause to look, most of them without the note of highbrow artsiness that has always elevated the discussion around Myst. The most successful game ever made by Dynamix — the studio behind such hardcore classics as Articfox, Red Baron, Betrayal at Krondor, and Aces of the Deep — was a far more populist offering called Trophy Bass, which as of this writing has precisely zero reviews on MobyGames. And don’t even get me started on Deer Hunter, the schlocky big-box-store sensation of the late 1990s, a punchline among hardcore gamers that just sold and sold and sold and sold.
A subtler example of the phenomenon — also one that gives a modicum more hope than Deer Hunter for the taste and intelligence of the proverbial unwashed masses, even as it cuts across some of the boundaries behind hardcore and casual play — is SimCity. Designed by Will Wright and published in early 1989 by a company he co-founded called Maxis Software, SimCity‘s combination of compulsive playability with the serious, adult-approved theme of urban planning famously inspired Time magazine to write its first computer-game review ever within mere weeks of its release. The sky was the limit from there. The rumpled, chain-smoking, mile-a-minute-talking Wright became a minor celebrity in his own right as magazines, newspapers, and even television shows piled in to cover this game and this man that conformed to none of their preconceived stereotypes. Reflecting on those heady days in 2013, Wright called SimCity “kind of the earliest example of a game that was leaning more to a mainstream audience. They were interesting people that were not necessarily into dragons or history or sports. And so they were into games that were more about reality than fantasy.” The only game of the time that gained as much traction among people who didn’t usually play games was Tetris. But there was only so much you could say about a game of falling blocks, whereas the literally-titled SimCity, a game which really did purport to simulate an entire city, opened up endless vistas of thoughtful exposition in middlebrow media.
This discourse was frequently self-contradictory. On the one hand, SimCity’s lack of explicit goals or winning states caused it to be deemed the harbinger of a new generation of “software toys,” a frivolous-sounding description which Will Wright nevertheless enthusiastically embraced. On the other hand, the same media was full of reports of university professors and city councils who claimed to take the software toy seriously enough as a simulation to apply it to their work. Wright was more ambivalent about this sort of thing, presumably because he knew all too well just how much SimCity was not based on anything real in any but the most abstract of senses. Still, he couldn’t quite find it in himself to say that these folks were full of it either. Not until years later did he feel he could come completely clean and admit that SimCity was really “a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model.”
Many people come to us and say, “You should do the professional version.” That really scares me because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared to reality. The last thing I want people to come away with is that we’re on the verge of being able to simulate the way that a city really develops, because we’re not.
At the time, though, few proved able to grasp this reality that, just because something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck on a computer screen, that doesn’t mean it is an accurate simulation of a duck. “When I was running Lower Gomorrah, something that looked like a city and felt like a city,” pondered tech journalist Steven Levy, “was I really manipulating anything that bore formal resemblance to a city? How relevant is the imitation of the real thing?” (The answers to these questions, for the record, are “not really” and “not very.”)
But whatever its shortcomings as a real, honest-to-God simulation of urban spaces, there can be no doubt that SimCity should be numbered among the most influential games of all time. In this respect, it makes a stark contrast to Myst, which proved to be something of an evolutionary dead end after the inevitable flurry of largely unsuccessful clones (and one almost as successful direct sequel) had exhausted themselves. SimCity spawned a new gaming sub-genre known as the city-builder, a niche category to be sure but one that proved far more popular and enduring than first-person slideshow adventure games. And yet this constitutes the merest beginning of SimCity’s actual influence. By showing how a real-time approach could benefit even a game that wasn’t particularly interested in testing its player’s reflexes, it revealed new possibilities to designers, who went on to implement real-time in a wide array of strategy games, from Railroad Tycoon to Europa Universalis. And in popularizing and legitimizing the notions of “builder games” and “software toys,” it likewise changed design aesthetics forever; after it, even games that did boast the campaigns and stories and goals that SimCity had so conspicuously lacked felt obliged to provide a “sandbox” or “free-play” mode to satisfy the appetites that Will Wright had inculcated. In all of these ways and more, SimCity’s influence extends astonishingly far afield. For example, Sid Meier has gone on record many times to say that Civilization would never have come to be absent SimCity. (He actually tried very, very hard to make the original Civilization run in real-time before finally accepting that it just wasn’t a good fit with the other parts of the design.) Whatever your favorite modern game happens to be, the odds are better than even that it bears a trace of SimCity somewhere in its DNA.
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