The Digital Antiquarian - 17 Jul 2026

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Would you trust these two men with your investment? Jeff Braun and Will Wright shortly before Maxis's IPO.

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software.

Maxis came into 1994 riding high on the wings of SimCity 2000, the hit of the previous holiday season. They followed up that success with... SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation. This may sound like satire, but it was all too real.

To be clear, SimHealth was not, say, a playful look at the life of a hospital, with eccentric doctors and bizarre made-up diseases. It wasn't even an earnest simulation of performing surgery. No, this was exactly what it said on the tin, a simulation of healthcare in the most macro sense. It was, to put it another way, literally a simulation of government bureaucracy. If you were getting bored with saving fantasy worlds from evil wizards and fighting the Second World War over and over, said Maxis, you could buy this game and engage with some truly exciting dilemmas. "Who gets health insurance? What does it cover? Who pays for it? How do you control costs? How will your plan affect business, physicians, specialists, insurance companies, lawyers, medical research, and the average citizen?" Hours and hours of fun for the whole family, am I right? Um... am I right?

Ironically, this most defiantly esoteric Maxis game ever arose from the same set of circumstances that gave birth to the multi-million-selling SimCity 2000. The venture capitalists at Warburg Pincus Ventures, who had traded $10 million in cash for 30 percent of Maxis's equity and a seat on its board in 1992, thought that the company could find a profitable sideline - or possibly even a mainline - in making simulations for Corporate America to use for internal training and planning. The sticking point was that neither Will Wright nor any of the other idealists around him had much interest in such things. Jeff Braun's solution was to buy a little software house called Delta Logic, built around a couple of refugees from the wreckage of Digital Research, the firm that had made the most popular business-oriented personal-computer operating system in the world until Bill Gates and Microsoft came along. Since then, John Hiles, Greg Rossi, and their colleagues at Delta Logic had been tinkering with social simulations of various stripes. They were now to be rebranded Maxis Business Simulations, given a lot more money than they had ever had before, and set loose to realize the venture capitalists' dreams. "There's the potential for this new business to be bigger than the games business," enthused Braun dutifully.

That didn't happen, although a surprising number of projects came and went during the less than two years that Maxis Business Simulations was a going concern. There were a simulation of an oil refinery for Chevron, a simulation of the power grid for the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, a simulation of a telephone network for a communications consultancy, a simulation of pollution management for the Environmental Protection Agency, and a simulation of the closure of a military base (?) for the new Maxis subsidiary's hometown of Monterey, California. With the exception of a prototype version of SimRefinery, none of the actual software that resulted from these initiatives has been preserved, to whatever extent it came to exist at all. Constant churn was a fact of life at Maxis Business Simulations. It seems safe to say that the idea of doing corporate or civic planning via interactive simulations was one of those that looked better on paper than it tended to turn out on the computer screen.

SimHealth's origin story isn't that different from most of the other Maxis Business Simulations projects. It began when the Markle Foundation, a bedrock of old-school American philanthropy, requested a simulation to illuminate one of the hottest political debates of the 1990s, as it seems to be of every decade: what, if anything, to do about the uniquely strange and byzantine American healthcare system. President Bill Clinton, who in January of 1993 became the first Democrat to occupy the Oval Office in twelve years, made reforming healthcare on a more efficient, equitable basis the flagship issue of his first term. So far, so good. But then he decided to place the project under the stewardship of his unelected wife Hillary Clinton, who was already at this early date a lightning rod for Republicans and no small percentage of independents. It turned into an epic fiasco, burning up most of the president's political capital without benefiting anyone and setting the stage for a brutal midterm shellacking at the hands of the Republicans. Indeed, many political scientists argue that the current, hyper-partisan era of American politics dates from those 1994 midterms, when Republicans under their future Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich first learned to characterize their Democratic opponents as not just misguided about means but evil in intent.

Is this the weirdest game ever to be reviewed in Computer Gaming World?

If this is the case, then SimHealth stands today as an oddly touching artifact of the Before Times, when there was still more than lip service paid to the notion of politics as a good-faith quest for the policies that yield the most good for the most people. In that spirit, the Markle Foundation decided to make SimHealth available to everyone as a boxed... well, I suppose the word "game" is the only one to use, considering that it was sold in the games section of those stores who were willing to sell it at all, and considering that it was given a two-page review by Computer Gaming World magazine, alongside the likes of Wing of Glory, Alone in the Dark 2, Carriers at War II, Ravenloft, and Aces of the Deep. (One of these things was not like the others...)

SimHealth even played like a game, albeit one with unusually sober - not to say boring - subject matter; in some ways, it was actually more of a game than Maxis's earlier SimEarth or SimLife. You start out with your political party having just won an election, and have to try to maintain your mandate and with it your chosen approach to healthcare through the elections that follow. Everything about it is incongruous. Once it was decided to release SimHealth publicly, the main Maxis office pitched in with art drawn in the house style; inevitably, it brings to mind nothing so much as good old SimCity. All told, SimHealth stands today as one of the more bizarre games ever to be put in a box and sold. One doesn't know whether to hail it for its chutzpah or laugh at it. Whatever else you can say about it, it certainly didn't embrace the then-prevalent gaming mono-culture of sci-fi, fantasy, and war.

The discussion that sprang up around SimHealth was, to the extent it sprang up at all, dogged by the same fallacies that swirled around SimCity. For all that SimHealth presented itself as an early example of a "serious game" with something to say about the real world, there was no reason to believe that this purported "simulation," created by a few harried programmers in well under a year, could possibly be modeling anything as complicated as a national healthcare system for one of the more populous and diffuse countries in the world with any sort of accuracy. Approaching it as a gamer would - because how else was he supposed to approach it? - Computer Gaming World's Keith Schlesinger quickly found a winning strategy.

All you have to do is adopt an extreme libertarian ideology, eliminate all federal healthcare (including Medicare!), and cut other government services by $100-300 billion per year. The polls never sink below 57 percent favorable, and the behavior point total is almost a perfect 400. You can set the game to "Run to the End" and breeze to victory while hardly touching the mouse or keyboard. Institutions wax and wane, but the "invisible hand" of the free market keeps everything pretty much in line.

There is one catch: the entire private insurance industry goes bankrupt in the first three months of the game! That means no one has any protection even from catastrophic disease and injury. One wonders what people are doing about this. Why aren't [they] rioting and burning down Main Street?

Once they're through celebrating this endorsement of their views, even the extreme libertarians among us may, if they're being honest with themselves, feel a twinge of concern at the pernicious idea that simulations like this one are somehow modeling abstract truths instead of being a morass of oversimplifications, biases, and highly questionable judgment calls on the part of their designers. I do suspect that the anecdote above arose by accident rather than out of any deliberate attempt to instill an ideological slant into the software. In fact, to their credit I suppose, the designers of SimHealth included an "Assumptions" menu which lets players tinker with the most fundamental rules of the simulation itself. But it does rather raise the question of what the point of it all is. What am I meant to learn from SimHealth if even the designers aren't sure what the rules should be? The whole project was noble and well-meaning - and also kind of useless.

Unlike SimCity, though, SimHealth came and went quickly enough that the debate around it hardly got started. By the time it was released to retail in early 1994, Maxis was already in the process of divesting themselves of their brief-lived Business Simulations division. "The gap between building simulations for entertainment and simulations for businesses was too great," said an older and wiser Jeff Braun. "One was a product, the other was a service." The former Maxis Business Simulations would soldier on independently for a while as Thinking Tools before closing up shop for good.

In his (excellent) article on this side quest, Phil Salvador of The Obscuritory states that Maxis sold about 50,000 copies of SimHealth. I find that number extremely surprising, assuming it's correct - not because it's so low but because it's so high. My guess would have been more in the range of 5000 copies - and that's if I was feeling generous.

Regardless of the exact numbers that SimHealth did, we can say with confidence that Maxis's second and last Sim title of 1994 sold far more. SimTower: The Vertical Empire still stands today as the best-remembered Sim game of the 1990s that isn't a SimCity. That said, this particular apple didn't fall that far from the SimCity tree. Your task in SimTower as well is that of building a functioning community - but here you're to do it all inside a single skyscraper. It feels only appropriate that the game was conceived and coded in Japan, where people have long been in the habit of living small and vertically.

Yoot Saito, the mastermind of SimTower, was once memorably described by Jeff Braun as "a rock-star groupie who became a rock star himself." He fell in love with SimCity not long after its release: "I didn't leave the Macintosh for almost 24 hours. I so much admired the creator of this genius and crazy software." He chased Will Wright into a hotel lobby during a MacWorld exhibition like a screaming girl from A Hard Day's Night. He then proceeded to tell his cornered hero about his idea for a SimCity inside a single building. One thing led to another, and in late 1994 Maxis brought his SimTower to the West.

Your goal in SimTower - and yes, you do have a goal - is to eventually erect a five-star building, meaning one that has at least 100 floors and at least 10,000 more or less happy residents, with a cathedral as the cherry on top of the imposing sundae. How you do this is entirely up to you. Your biggest challenge, the direct equivalent to SimCity's need for efficient roadways and subways, is your elevator system; get this wrong and your gleaming utopian tower will soon collapse into impatience and discord. As Yoot Saito would be the first to tell you, the rest of the game was really born out of his odd fascination with elevator systems.

Late one night, I was waiting in my building's lobby for an elevator. There are two cars in my building's shaft. I pushed the button, but instead of the closest car coming to my floor, the farthest car arrived first. In my usual questioning way, I asked myself, "What happened here? How are these cars logically synchronized?" That was the beginning of SimTower.

Yoot Saito was truly a man after Will Wright's heart.

SimTower has many of the cute, juicy touches that lent personality to the Japanese ports of SimCity. Add a restaurant to your tower, and a food critic will stop in to eat and pass judgment. Play the game on Christmas, and Santa Claus will fly overhead. SimTower isn't as deep or complex as SimCity 2000, but this was probably more of a plus than a minus for the nascent casual-gaming market of the mid-1990s. It became a surprise hit for Maxis, giving them their second holiday season in a row with a new game near the top of the bestseller charts. Suddenly the bottom line was looking pretty darn good.

As a result, Jeff Braun made a fateful decision, one that he would later deem "a big mistake." He took Maxis public on May 25, 1995. It "was just sort of the thing to do, and it just felt right," he says. This year would prove the first of the dot.com boom, highlighted by Netscape's $3 billion public bow in August. Maxis's own $35 million IPO may have been a vastly more modest affair on the face of it, but the cachet of SimCity and SimTower were enough to get Jeff Braun and Will Wright mentioned in some of the same conversations as Netscape's dynamic duo of Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark. In December of 1995, Braun showed up alongside Andreeseen in Newsweek's list of "The Net 50," despite the fact that Maxis had yet to release a game that connected to the Internet in any sort of way. Newsweek was blissfully unfazed: "Look for Braun to start moving his world of fantastic simulations to the Internet sometime next year." Maxis took out a lease on the glass-enclosed sixth floor of a glitzy high-rise in Walnut Creek, California.

In addition to the generalized furor over all things tech, the Maxis IPO was fueled by the excitement surrounding educational and edutational software. These categories were widely considered to have a very lucrative future in the offing, as school administrators bought the new generation of multimedia computers and looked for things to do with them in classrooms at the same time that parents were doing the same at home. If Maxis perhaps wasn't quite of the category, their games' non-violent nature and engagement with real-world topics placed them solidly adjacent to it. Their new Sim games of 1995 reflected a desire to align themselves still more closely.

SimTown was a kid-friendly, simplified version of SimCity, wrapped in a bright, cartoony aesthetic. "This town is run by kids!" screamed the back of the box. Unfortunately for Maxis, children tend to require less simplification than many adults think they do, even as they can smell adult condescension from a mile away. SimTown wasn't a big seller.

SimIsle: Missions in the Rainforest was a worthier effort with a lot more heart and soul put into it, so much so that I'm prepared to call it the hidden gem in the 1990s Maxis catalog. Developed in collaboration with a British house called Intelligent Games, it plunks you down in a tropical archipelago of 30 islands. But instead of settling for being just another "SimCity except somewhere else," SimIsle brings some fresh ideas to the table. Each of the islands constitutes a set-piece scenario, complete with a set victory condition and a defined endpoint. As Computer Gaming World wrote in its review, SimIsle has "a lot of good old SimCity charm with a bit more game than is customary in the series." It replaces the usual Sim abstractions with a distinctive and compelling sense of place, fed by digitized photographs and an evocative soundtrack. At times, it feels less like a Maxis Sim game than it does an early version of Tropico.

Some of the islands are to be developed for tourism, some for resource extraction or industry, some as wildlife preserves. There's an environmental message to SimIsle, but you're never beaten over the head with it in that way that can make some other Maxis games feel so simultaneously noble and dull. "If you want to explore what happens when you tarmac an entire island, that's your affair," said lead designer Matthew Stibbe. "Alternatively, you can see if it is possible to marry economic growth, with all its benefits, to ecological safety." The game succeeds in making you want to preserve and conserve as much as possible, by making its archipelago an interesting and even exciting place to explore. Finding a new species of flora or fauna or an unsuspected ancient ruin is a genuine thrill. Destroying such things can be devastating, but sometimes you feel like you have no choice if you want to satisfy a scenario's goals. You often have to settle for preserving what you can. These agonizing tradeoffs convey a different sort of realism than most Maxis games, showing the world to be a messy place where exploitation and conservation are less binary choices than a precarious balancing act.

In keeping with this Sim game being not only about nature, science, and other such abstract forces, it features, for the first time ever - outside of the SNES SimCity, that is - individual people. You can accomplish things on your island only by directing "agents," each with a picture, a capsule biography, a personality profile, and a unique set of skills and abilities, from "flora and forestry" to "construction," "negotiation" to "local ecology." You can even find agents with underworld connections, if that's your bag; setting up a drug trade is a possibility for the unscrupulous player. Your agents can improve their skills with experience and training, further tightening the bond between you and them. The lack of just such a personal touch is one of the reasons that most Maxis Sim games leave this player feeling kind of cold. Everybody is different, of course, but I have to say that SimIsle is the direction that I wish Maxis had begun to take much earlier and had stuck to thereafter.

The agents system of SimIsle smacks oddly of Sir-tech's cult classic Jagged Alliance, which came out the very same year.

Indeed, the places where SimIsle disappoints me most are the ones where it misses opportunities to take its freshly "game-like" approach still further. The archipelago itself positively begs for a larger campaign to structure your play. As it is, though, SimIsle maintains no memory of what you've done before as you go from island to island; nor can you take the same team of agents with you. But this failing isn't enough to keep it from becoming my personal favorite Maxis game. I first played it shortly after its release, played it again more briefly for this article, and really wish I had the time to play it some more. I highly recommend it to anyone who is left a little cold by the rest of Maxis's catalog for any or all of the same reasons that I am.

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Original: https://www.filfre.net/2026/07/the-life-and-times-of-maxis-part-2-simworld/