The Digital Antiquarian - 17 Jul 2026

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Sadly, SimIsle was not rewarded for its uniqueness. It was no more commercially successful than SimTown, being written off by most gamers as just more of the same, from a publisher that had become rather too much of a known quantity. From the perspective of the marketplace, the bloom had come off the Sim rose just as the post-IPO firm was supposed to be taking flight.

SimGolf wasn't a bad effort as golf simulations went, but it never had a prayer against the Links juggernaut.

So, by 1996, the Sim line was flailing, casting about for the right combination of familiarity and freshness that could make it feel relevant again. There were no fewer than five new Sim-branded games that year, and they were well and truly all over the place. SimPark was a simulation of a wildlife park, but with the kid-friendly branding and simplifications that had made their dubious debut in SimTown. SimTunes was a visual music-making system that could have been released under any of a dozen educational-software imprints. And SimGolf was nothing more nor less than a straightforward golf simulator, dumped onto a market that was already full to bursting with the things. One of the most distinctive brands in the industry just a couple of years earlier, the Sim line was now being diluted to the point of meaninglessness. Was it for adults or children? Was it games or educational software? Was it products in the mold of SimCity or just anything upon which you could conceivably slap the label of "simulation?" Maxis seemed to want the answer to all of these questions to be "Yes," full stop. The result was just confusion.

Even the stuff that ought to have been in their wheelhouse didn't quite pan out. SimCity 2000: Network Edition added online-multiplayer functionality to the venerable city-builder; rumors of this product were presumably the reason that Newsweek had buzzed about Jeff Braun "moving his world of fantastic simulations to the Internet." But the sales of the finished product weren't anything like Maxis had hoped. This may have been because they did nothing to update the graphics or interface, leaving the Network Edition looking like exactly the three-year-old game it otherwise was. But more likely, it was down to the questionable value proposition of a multiplayer SimCity. How was such a thing supposed to work, given that competition was so conspicuously absent from the franchise's DNA? Maxis's approach was to let you divide a city into different zones, then place one person in charge of each of them, to compete or cooperate as they chose. It felt more forced than exciting.

You may have noticed that the name of Will Wright has appeared in this article much less than it did in the one before it. There's a reason for that: after completing (the non-networked) SimCity 2000, he had stepped back from day-to-day game development to work on various "research projects." One of these tried to make a reality out of the idea he had presented at the 1990 Game Developers Conference, for a new ecosystem of interoperable games. He was no longer so bold - or naive? - as to imagine the entire industry joining him in this effort right away, but he did think it could be a very good thing for Maxis games at least to learn to talk to other Maxis games, as summarized in Game Developer magazine:

Most Maxis games occupied some of the same intellectual real estate, which made them natural candidates to extend into each other. For example, one of the central strategies a player can use in SimCity is to develop a mass-transit system to help the city grow. In A-Train, a game Maxis imported from the Japanese company Artdink, the goal is to help a community expand using a commuter rail line. In the same vein, the monster towers of the future in SimCity 2000 are similar in nature to those players build in another Japanese game imported by Maxis, SimTower.

Thus the SimWorld project was born. The goal of this project was twofold. It would allow Maxis to create future games with the capability to extend and merge into other preexisting and future games. And it would leverage SimCity and the millions of hours of playtime that people have invested in SimCity saved games into new markets.

The most intriguing Sim title of 1996 was also the first concrete manifestation of all this. SimCopter was a helicopter simulator, marking the brand's first foray into first-person vehicular simulators of any sort and Maxis's first foray into 3D graphics. But this was a helicopter simulator with a difference. You could take a city you'd built in SimCity 2000, load it into SimCopter, and fly around looking at your handiwork close-up. No one could say it wasn't a cool gimmick.

SimCopter did have other things to enjoy as well once you got past the gimmick. The flight simulator itself was pleasantly forgiving, making it stand out in a genre that usually wanted to make games only for the hardcore of the hardcore. Best of all, SimCopter took a lesson from SimIsle in structuring the time you spent with it more than did your typical Maxis game. If you play in "career" mode, you take the role of an urban helicopter pilot tasked with putting out fires - mostly figuratively, occasionally literally. In addition to extinguishing the literal conflagrations, your assignments can involve traffic jams, rooftop rescues, crowd control, police chases, medical evacuations, and VIP taxi flights. If you do well, you earn money and points and advance to better helicopters, bigger cities, and more difficult (and profitable) missions.

It's surprisingly engaging, although it can leave you wanting more in the longer term. The reality that there are less than ten types of mission in all, procedurally generated over and over, sets in well before the campaign is over. "We could not miss Christmas, which meant we really couldn't aim too high," admits Will Wright. "Had we had another six to eight months to work on it, I think it would have turned out much, much better." (How many times has a game developer said this?)

Immediately after its release, SimCopter and Maxis were embroiled in an unwelcome but kind of hilarious controversy, when it was discovered that the virtual citizens over whom the helicopter flew included crowds of strapping young men in Speedos who enjoyed kissing one another. The source of the transgression proved to be a gay Maxis artist named Jacques Servin, who wished to make a statement about the "aggressive heterosexuality" of game culture: "I've always wanted to be an activist, but activism is so moribund now. Do you think these heads of corporations are going to walk into an art gallery and say, 'Oh, wow, I was wrong?' Symbols are so much more powerful where you don't expect them." Servin was fired by Maxis after his handiwork hit the press - not, the company was careful to say, for being gay, but for inserting unapproved content into its game. Nonetheless, a brouhaha with the gay advocacy group ACT UP followed, despite Servin's own statement that his former employer was actually "very enlightened" about sexual orientation. This was publicity that Maxis emphatically didn't need, managing to cast them in an unfavorable light with the accepting and the bigoted alike. It became one more data point to contribute to the growing impression of a company for which absolutely nothing was going right anymore.

I never saw any men in Speedos during my time with SimCopter; Maxis patched them out of the game just as quickly as they could. But never fear, the Internet preserves all.

Just eighteen months after the IPO, Maxis was looking like a hot mess. From a high of $50, the stock price was down to barely $10. None of their Sim games since SimTower had done very well, nor any of the grab bag of non-Sim oddities they had published on behalf of other studios. Meanwhile the excitement over educational software that had done so much to fuel the IPO was starting to look misplaced, for the same reason that the buzz over non-game multimedia CD-ROMs was fizzling out: the World Wide Web was eating those offline software markets alive.

Development had begun on a new SimCity, traditionally the company's savior, but that wasn't going well either, having gotten bogged down in a bid to make the game fully 3D. A free-floating 3D camera, noted Will Wright,

takes what used to be a very simple, Lego-like thing and turns it into AutoCAD. "What am I looking at? Oh, I see, I'm facing the building two inches away." It becomes that kind of experience. So that was part of it. The other part was the technology. Without going with really severe restrictions on what you could build, we just couldn't have a decent frame rate and have the level of detail that we could have in an isometric viewpoint.

Both of these issues were exaggerated by the need to cater to the casual players who made up so much of the SimCity base, who were neither comfortable with the latest generation of 3D games nor had computers that were up to running them all that well.

Maxis's investors pronounced themselves "concerned" by the direction of the company, which was on track to lose more than $2 million in 1996. What revenues there were were mostly still being generated by SimCity 2000, now a steady-selling staple of the world's budget bins. But even that wouldn't last forever.

Jeff Braun was forced out of the company he had co-founded by his own board of directors in August of 1996. His replacement in the CEO's chair was one Sam Poole, a former Disney executive who had joined up as sales manager at the time of the IPO. His marching orders from the board were clear: find a buyer before the ship of Maxis went under.

In June of 1997, Electronic Arts stepped up. No cash changed hands, only stock, worth $125 million on paper. "I entered the deal with a lot of trepidation," says Will Wright. "I knew there were going to be layoffs, but not doing the deal would have meant even more layoffs down the road." For its part, EA made it clear that it was buying Maxis for just one reason: to get its hands on the SimCity brand, the one item in the Maxis portfolio that it considered to be worth anything at all. Whatever was left of the old dream of SimEverything died the moment the contract was signed. As far as EA was concerned, Maxis was a one-product studio.

The last couple of shambling embodiments of the old spirit, in the form of products that had been a little too far along in the pipeline to cancel, came out in the months just after the acquisition. Streets of SimCity operated on the same principle as SimCopter, letting you drive instead of fly around your handmade city. But for some reason - one has to suspect the intervention of someone at EA, looking jealously at Activision's hit Interstate '76 - your car had guns to shoot the other cars on the road with. The whole thing was as ineptly implemented as it was abjectly tone-deaf. Had EA actually understood the brand it was buying? You know, the one that was always described as not being violent in the way of all those other videogames?

SimSafari was more defensible, if not ultimately all that much more compelling. It was another game in the mold of SimTown and SimPark, a "kid-friendly," simplified version of the SimCity approach. But one might be excused for asking how big a difference there really was between building a "wildlife" park, as in SimPark, and a "safari" park, as in SimSafari.

Meanwhile back at the Maxis ranch, major if fairly predictable changes were afoot. Relieving Sam Poole of his duties, EA parachuted in a manager named Luc Barthelet to fix whatever ailed its acquisition and to get that all-important third SimCity back on track. In a report back to the mother ship that surprised absolutely no one, Barthelet bemoaned a lack of "focus" and "structure." He set out to re-instill these qualities. "I told people from day one: we are going to be a PC studio that does top-ten products, and if we did that we'd stay in business," he says. "A lot of people weren't interested in this. They wanted to do their own little projects, and didn't care if they would sell. Those people left."

Barthelet may not have been an overly cuddly or sentimental sort, but his tough love was probably just what the moribund next-generation SimCity needed. He could see no reason why that game needed to be 3D. Stop screwing around, go back to the tried-and-true isometric view, and just get it done, he said. Ocean Quigly, the project's art director, compares his early days on it to "running through the fog not knowing where we were going." The fog was now lifted and a compass provided.

SimCity 3000 would prove another picture-perfect sequel. By some metrics, it expanded dramatically on its predecessor, with the possibility to construct 400 instead of just 100 different types of buildings in a city up to four times as big, all with sharper graphics and a cleaner interface. But it was still the SimCity that its fans and the media knew and loved, exuding a "don't fix what isn't broke" philosophy from its every pixel. The additions were largely commonsensical and cosmetic. The larger selection of buildings let you give your city a distinctive American or European aesthetic; the likes of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower were waiting for you right there in the menu. Borrowing a page from Civilization II, a franchise it had partially inspired (have I mentioned that game design is always a dialog?), SimCity 3000 had a panel of municipal department heads to offer their advice to mayors who happened to be in doubt. (Also like in Civilization II, some of their advice was wise, some of it self-servingly parochial.) The biggest conceptual leap was to turn your city from an isolated specimen under glass into a part of a larger nation, complete with other towns with which you could trade electricity, water, or sewage services and enter into other sorts of business arrangements. There was still no structure beyond abstract building for its own sake, no campaign or thread of narrative, placing it at odds with some other city-builders, such as the historical ones made by Impressions Games. That said, a substantial percentage of SimCity players probably wouldn't want it any other way. This SimCity product was as in harmony with its brand as Streets of SimCity had been off-key.

Maxis learned some of the advantages of hooking up with a deeper-pocketed parent when the time came to demonstrate the game publicly for the first time at the 1998 E3 trade show: EA flew former New York City Mayor Ed Koch in to promote SimCity 3000 in person. Sure, as a spokesman Koch was better primed to entice the mainstream media than the E3 gamer crowd - but then, that was kind of the point, wasn't it? EA knew well where its SimCity bread would be buttered.

The original targeted release date was the Christmas of 1998, but Maxis couldn't quite get it done to their satisfaction. Rather than let this make-or-break game out in a less than ideal state, Luc Barthelet convinced the EA brass to let them hold onto it a few months more. SimCity 3000 finally shipped in February of 1999, whereupon it became clear that the franchise's winning streak would continue, as it became Maxis's first really successful game since SimTower four and a half years earlier. In fact, it became the best-selling single computer game of 1999. (Admittedly, its release date so early in the year did give it a longer runway than almost all of the competition.) Luc Barthelet had his top-ten game and then some; the old SimCity magic of mixing casual with hardcore appeal still worked. This was a game that your Starcraft-playing buddies could enjoy as much as your middle-aged dad. By the end of 1999, Maxis could boast of having sold more than 7 million copies of its three SimCity games over the past decade. In comparison to this figure, the sales of all of their other games combined constituted little more than a rounding error.

There was one thing that did separate SimCity 3000 from its two predecessors: Will Wright contributed practically nothing to it. "It was a running joke around Maxis that whenever the SimCity team would come to ask me for advice I would go running," he says. "They finally gave up. You know, the day they shipped SimCity 3000 was one of the happiest days of my life. They proved that we have a team within Maxis that knows how to build a SimCity without my involvement."

Yet Will Wright was still employed at Maxis. So, just what was he doing, wondered plenty of people at the time. The answer to that question would soon turn the games industry on its head, making all of SimCity's success look like the merest prelude to this, the mad scientist's main act.

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Sources: The books Games That Sell! by Mark H. Walker; Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold; Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd ed.) by Richard Rouse III; SimIsle: The Official Strategy Guide by Douglas R. Brumley, Phil Powell, and Selby Bateman; The Secret History of Mac Gaming (expanded edition) by Richard Moss. Computer Gaming World of June 1994, April 1995, December 1995, March 1997, and May 1999; Retro Gamer 115; The American Prospect of March/April 1994 and March/April 1997.

Online sources include the collection of Maxis articles by Phil Salvador at The Obscuritory, Tristan Donovan's interview with Will Wright for the old Gamasutra site, and "SIMply Divine: The Story of Maxis Software" by Geoff Keighley for GameSpot.

Where to Get Them: Of the Maxis games described in this article, only SimCity 3000 is currently available as a digital purchase.

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