The Digital Antiquarian - 07 Aug 2026

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This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software.

I don't think people realize how much tactical and strategic forethought goes into their daily lives. There's a whole subconscious time-efficiency layer in our lives. In essence, real-time strategy is our lives.

- Will Wright

On the morning of October 19, 1991, two weeks after writing his last bit of code for SimAnt, Will Wright climbed out of bed and smelled smoke. Looking out the window of his home in the Oakland Hills of California he saw a dense black cloud blowing in from the east. He called emergency services, who informed him that the culprit was a grass fire that was under control.

But after his morning shower, the smoke was worse than ever; great acrid plumes of the stuff were engulfing the house and seeping past the window frames, making it hard to breathe. The emergency-services number now yielded only a busy signal.

Wright gathered up his wife Joell and their five-year-old daughter Cassidy and bundled them into the family car along with a neighbor couple. They shot down the road under a rain of ashes and cinder, choking on smoke so thick that it was all Wright could do to keep the car's tires on the pavement. Finally, they burst out of the maelstrom into blessedly clear air. Wright continued holding the accelerator down until they were well away. He guesses that, had they been five minutes slower getting away, their names would all have been added to the list of 25 victims of the Oakland Firestorm of 1991.

A week passed before the family could return to the charred remnants of their house, still smouldering there under a glowering autumn sky. There was virtually nothing left - except for the ants, that is. (Wright was rather primed to notice them...) "The interesting part was to find that I wasn't really attached to much," Wright says. "I started assessing my material needs: a toothbrush, underwear, a car, a house... I was surprised how I didn't miss stuff. The fact [that] we got out and none of our family was hurt seemed much more important."

Wright found himself asking,

What is life made of? Rarely do you do that in your real life. When something like this happens you get a big picture. Where do I want to live? What sort of things do I need to buy? You see your life almost as a project in process. When you're embedded in your day-to-day life, you don't get that perspective. I started to wonder about all the things we have and how we purchased them for a reason. Why do we need X or Y or Z? Why do we think something will make [us] happier? It almost comes down to Maslow's Pyramid of Needs.

A period of reassessment like this might end for some people in a decision to climb a mountain, walk a camino, quit a job, write a novel, join a charity, or move into a monastery. But Will Wright wasn't that sort of man; he was someone who thought in systems and algorithms. He wondered if there was a game - no, a simulation, or maybe just a software toy - lurking in the prospect he was now facing in the real world, that of assembling the material components of day-to-day life from scratch. Back at work at Maxis, he sat down in front of his computer to find out. His first three games since co-founding the company - SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt - had been simulations of complex systems with thousands of incidental living actors. Could you simulate the spaces and clutter of individual lives instead?

It would take him eight and a half years to answer that question affirmatively. The belated result of his close encounter with the Oakland Firestorm would be The Sims, the best-selling line of boxed computer games in history. Some would celebrate the series for offering a whole new vision of what games could do and the subject matter they could tackle, drawing in tens of millions of new players who would never have given SimCity - much less Diablo or Starcraft or any of the other hardcore standard bearers - a second glance. Some would condemn it for being just another empty monument to conspicuous consumption and shallow egotism, of a piece with the "reality" shows that were suddenly inescapable on American television screens. In the final reckoning, of course, it was a little of both.

Stories of how The Sims came to be have a tendency to fall into some well-worn patterns. We are told how Will Wright, the brave and pioneering creator, had to fight for his dream against the unimaginative suits who surrounded him for the better part of a decade, until he finally got to enjoy sweet validation as he watched it turn into the biggest game ever. There is something to this telling of the tale, but it's missing a lot of nuance. First and foremost, it commits the fallacy of assuming that the version of The Sims which Wright conceived in late 1991 was essentially the same as the game which was released in early 2000. In truth, it went through a protracted process of evolution, from which it emerged with a radically different focus. Along the way, several other people became almost as instrumental as Wright himself in shaping it into a game with such extraordinary mass appeal. This is not, in other words, another case of a single genius auteur imagining and implementing something unprecedented, as Wright did when he made the original SimCity. The creation of The Sims was a more organic, at times almost accidental process. For Wright specialized in systems, not in people. To make an appealing simulation of the latter, he had to draw on folks whose strengths were very different from his own.

But all of that was still in the future when Wright was contemplating the altered nature of his existence in the wake of the Oakland Firestorm. At that time, it was accurate enough to say that no one else at Maxis knew quite what to make of his new hobby horse. That he could so thoroughly flummox even this bunch, the makers and publishers of some of the most esoteric games in the world, really says something. Indeed, it may very well say that he himself wasn't entirely sure what he was doing. Some game designers are like military strategists, speccing out every element of a campaign beforehand. Some are more like mad scientists, mixing a bit of this with a bit of that to see what turns into a useful synergy and what just blows up in their face. Wright is the poster child for the mad-scientist school.

For a long time, he called his idea Dollhouse. As the name would imply, it was all about architecture and interior design. He had become enamored with a book called A Pattern Language, written in 1977 by a Berkeley architecture professor named Christopher Alexander and several colleagues. It can be read as an attempt to define a Western version of the ancient Chinese concept of feng shui, explaining how our living spaces can be arranged so as to bring a sense of peace and harmony to our lives. It defines everything from the amount of green space a city should have to how many floors a building should contain to how high a windowsill should be, all based on universal and eternal "archetypes" that are "deeply rooted in the nature of things." "You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family," wrote Alexander. "You can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building."

Wright wanted to use it to design a computer game, one that would bring Alexander's theories to the masses, in the same way that his earlier games had promoted those of Jay Wright Forrester, James Lovelock, and E.O. Wilson. As in those games, the dolls in this dollhouse would be purely supporting players to the real star of the show, the physical environment itself. Their reaction to the spaces you put them in would provide a way of "scoring" how well your layout conformed to the principles of Christopher Alexander. This was their one important function.

Jeff Braun couldn't have been thrilled at seeing his partner going down this rabbit hole, an abstruse one even by Maxis's usual standards; SimCity this was not. But as always, he did his best to support Wright, whom he unabashedly regarded as a "genius." He arranged for Wright to explain his concept to a focus group, just to gauge their reaction. Setting something called Dollhouse in front of a bunch of self-identified gamers circa 1992 was always destined to be a fraught endeavor, but Wright and Braun were nonetheless taken aback by the vehemence of the rejection. "This was probably the most negative focus-group experience I have ever seen," says Wright. "It was actually quite remarkable. They universally hated it."

Soon after, Braun wheedled his partner into agreeing to lead the development of SimCity 2000, pulling him away from his living-spaces simulation for a year. After that, the concept got muddled up with SimWorld, this attempt to make all of Maxis's games interoperable so that they were all essentially one big game in the end. So, you would be able to pick a building in a SimCity city and zoom in to tinker with the fine details of its exterior and interior using Dollhouse. Part of the reason that Wright was so enamored with Yoot Saito's SimTower was that it was already blurring some of the lines between SimCity and Dollhouse. (The Sony PlayStation port of SimTower even let you explore your skyscraper from a crudely implemented first-person perspective.)

That said, the people around Wright still didn't entirely get what he was trying to do with Dollhouse. "It just felt kind of peculiar, you know?" says the Maxis researcher, writer, and producer Chris Trottier, whose first assignment as a new hire was to travel to real tropical islands and take pictures for SimIsle. (Nice work if you can get it...) "Will's goal for it was that it was about efficiency and architectural layout and that the people were just there as a byproduct. The people were what measured your success in setting things up efficiently."

But in trying to model the behavior of the people well enough to measure the quality of the player's architectural and interior-design efforts, Wright would wind up inadvertently discovering a whole different, more immediately appealing game.

It began in 1995, when Jeff Braun agreed to bring on a bright young Stanford graduate named Jamie Doornbos to help program the dolls in Wright's dollhouse. Doing that well enough to properly grade the player's layouts proved to be far more difficult, complex, and time-consuming than Wright and Doornbos had thought it would be. Luckily, it was also more fascinating than they had ever imagined. Together they realized that the fun of the game may not be where Wright had thought it was. Wright:

We were trying to figure out how we could simulate an open-ended system where the behaviors [of the people] were expandable and they had the level of intelligence that we would require for the game, so that they could basically live out their whole home life and we could simulate it reasonably. So Jamie and I spent about a year and a half just working on the behavior model, as a little research project. At some point it just started really working out, and really looking pretty good.

It turned out that controlling the little people was actually more interesting. It was still fun designing houses for them, but controlling their lives actually turned out to be far more compelling, so the whole project took a turn toward the people. I kept the architecture tools in there, but then I just really started focusing more on the people and objects and their behaviors and relationships - all that sort of stuff.

Thus the stars of Dollhouse became the dolls, with their houses as supporting players, instead of the other way around.

As they did so, the simulation came more and more to resemble an oddity from the previous decade called Little Computer People. Created by Rich Gold and David Crane, Little Computer People was published by Activision in 1985 in the midst of that company's artsy-fartsy period, when the warehouse full of cash it had collected on the pre-crash Atari VCS market gave it the luxury of venturing down a number of such avant-garde, high-concept alleyways. The "game," if that's what you chose to call it, was a bit like the Maxis-published El-Fish aquarium simulator, but with a human in the fishbowl. A little man lives in a little house inside your computer, and you can watch as he and his dog go about their day on a realistic albeit compressed schedule, with 24 hours inside the computer passing for every six outside of it. Depending on the time of day and his personality and mood, the fellow might prefer to relax with a book in his favorite armchair, make music on his piano, exercise, chat on the phone, wrestle with his dog, watch television, listen to his record collection, or play a game of cards with you - when he isn't sleeping, brushing his teeth, or showering, that is. You can try to get him to do your bidding via a parser interface, but if you aren't polite enough about it or if he's just feeling cranky the answer is likely to be a big fat "No!"

Little Computer People.

The most unique aspect of Little Computer People was that all of the little people were, well, unique. Each floppy disk that shipped had a different personality magnetically encoded on its sectors. You might wind up with a sluggard or an athlete, a Pigpen or a neat freak, according to the luck of the draw. Rich Gold envisioned Little Computer People becoming merely the beginning of a whole product ecosystem which would let you watch and nudge your little people in all sorts of different environments: at school, at work, during a night on the town, etc. Maybe you could even put your little person together with someone else's to see how they got on! All of those plans were scrapped when sales were not up to snuff - but they were an uncanny reflection of the direction that Will Wright's game would later go.

This was probably not completely coincidental. Wright has stated that he himself played Little Computer People in the mid-1980s; thus his early habit of referring to the characters in his own game as "little people." During an online chat hosted by CNN in 2001, he said that "I've since gotten to know several who were involved with that project, and many of them gave valuable feedback, especially Rich Gold." The most obvious differences between the two projects had to do with resources. Whereas Little Computer People had to run on an 8-bit Commodore 64, Dollhouse was implemented for a 32-bit Mac or Windows machine with a thousand times the storage and processing power. And whereas Little Computer People was made by two men in a handful of months, Wright had the privilege of tinkering for years, and would have a team of several dozen at his disposal before all was said and done.

For right now and quite some time to come, though, it was just Wright and Doornbos. They rechristened Dollhouse "Project X," reflecting the reality that its goals were becoming more open-ended rather than less so, even more of a "little research project" than a coherent game. Which isn't to say that the tech wasn't cool and innovative. At bottom, Wright and Doornbos strove to create a simulation of the psychologist Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. This was a huge leap into the wild blue yonder for a project that had begun as a simulation of architecture and interior design. "I spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the behavior of these people very robust, interesting, and plausible, no matter what kind of environment you put them in," says Wright. Chaim Gingold described the approach in his (highly recommended) 2024 book Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine.

Wright crafted a simulation of a person's needs. A simple prototype showed [how] a person's hunger, bladder, and other needs evolve over time. If the person peed in their pants or fell asleep, a dialog box popped up. Doornbos incorporated this "motive engine," a concise set of equations and coefficients, into a new Project X prototype focused on imbuing the people and things of this dollhouse world with behaviors.

"SimAntics," as the language came to be known, went through many iterations, but from the start it had a graphical editor inspired by the diagrams Wright drew to explain how people would do things like go to the bathroom, brush their teeth, and make breakfast. These behavior scripts, which were compiled into a compact bytecode, told people and objects how to do things like select activities, walk around, animate, and, in the case of insensate objects like appliances, break. As in SimAnt, intelligence emerged from the coupling between agent and environment. Objects broadcast advertisements that claimed to service a person's changing motives. A toilet, for instance, would advertise its ability to relieve the bladder motive. Crucially, the custom language scaffolded the design conversation between Doornbos and Wright, who could discuss its limitations. As a result, SimAntics was highly extensible; new objects could easily plug into Project X's dollhouse world and describe both why and how a person might use them.

In a sense, then, the system worked by inverting the expected order of things, by making the people dumb and the objects smart. "This all happens behind the scenes," Will Wright said, "but basically the fridge yells at [a person], 'I can satisfy Hunger Five!' and the chair says, 'But I'm all about Comfort Four!' and the bath says, 'Hygiene Seven right here!'" This approach was rather brilliant in that it meant that you could add new objects without touching the core "needs" simulation, and have the inhabitants of the world respond believably. As we will see, this modularity, and the nearly infinite extendibility it brought with it, would be key to what Project X would become; stated in terms of filthy lucre, it was capable of turning one product into a potentially limitless line of same. In the meanwhile, notes Chaim, "Doornbos wasn't sure if Project X would be fun, but he loved working for Wright."

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Original: https://www.filfre.net/2026/08/the-life-and-times-of-maxis-part-3-the-sims/