News Posts Categorised ‘The Sims’

Will Wright was inspired to create The Sims after he lost his home in the Oakland-Berkeley Firestorm:

The process of assessing his losses and material needs after his home burned down set Wright to thinking about the value of possessions and the promise they hold of fulfillment. Having always been passionate about architecture, he began to develop an idea for a game where players would simulate daily activities in a suburban household, including building a home from scratch: The Sims was born.

> “Inspired to make The Sims after losing a home” at Berkeleyside

Shortly after Will Wright’s departure from EA, Tristan Donovan conducted an interview with him for his book “Replay” – a history of the game industry. The interview has finally been published on the internet, and it has some quite fascinating information about how The Sims came to be:

I’ve read that home design software was the inspiration.

WW: I was always interested in architecture, and so one of the original things that was a really inspiration for The Sims was this book, A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander. He’s very much into trying to apply formula. He’s a physics guy that went into architecture and was frustrated because architecture wasn’t enough of a science. But at the same time, he’s got a very interesting humanist side. He felt all the principles of architecture should be clearly reducible back to fundamental principles, which is what he kind of tries to do in that book.

Read the interview from the beginning via the first link, or skip to the second question on page 4 via the second link if you want to go straight to the discussion of The Sims:
> “The Replay Interviews: Will Wright” at Gamasutra
> “The Replay Interviews: Will Wright” (Page 4) at Gamasutra

According to Joystiq, Will Wright has said that a previous game of his, Sim Ant, was a key inspiration for The Sims, and the basis of its gameplay:

“We decided to program Sim Ant as close to how real ants work as we could, which means that they’re actually responding to pheromone trails, and the intelligence is distributed environmentally,” Wright recalled when asked how The Sims came about. “We were able to get very complex behavior out of the ants just using these pheromone distributions. So I started to wonder how much of human behavior I could simulate the same way.” As it turns out, a lot.

 > “Will Wright explains what The Sims and an ant colony have in common” at Joystiq

CollegeHumor has posted another video featuring a Sim in the “real world” – this one’s a bit more popular than the Sim in their last video:

The stuff below the video player came with the embed code.

MCV has posted an interview with Rod Humble about the past and future of The Sims:

After the experience of The Sims Online, are there plans afoot to have another try at it with a new version, perhaps?

For us The Sims community is such a large and powerful force that we are constantly looking at ways to bring greater delight to our audience through social and online features. I certainly do not rule a new purely online experience.

A “five-second fact” at the end refers to The Sims 3 World Adventures as “forthcoming”, suggesting this interview appeared in the magazine about a year ago, although a mention of the PlayStation Move by Humble contradicts that, as that was only named in March. Whenever the interview took place though, it’s probably still worth a read.
 > “INTERVIEW: The Sims” at MCV

CollegeHumor has imagined what would happen if a doctor was a Sim – things don’t go well:

That stuff above came with the embed code for the video player.

A quite interesting article about the “Psychology behind Simming” has appeared on examiner.com:

It is fascinating to study the demographics of “God games”, simulation games, in particular, the Sims franchise. The player is in charge of everything from making sure his sim is fed, has enough rest, is kept comfortable and happy, so that his job performance doesn’t suffer. With Sims 2, the game took a huge leap forward, with the addition of memories and “aspirations” to give more depth to the characters in the game.

 > “The Psychology Behind Simming” at examiner.com

GamesRadar has posted a new feature going behind the scenes at The Sims Studio, with lots of photos including one of Grant Rodiek and his desk:

Above: Now this is what we call a workstation! Meet Grant Rodiek, associate producer for The Sims team and his amazing collection of neat stuff.

They were at the studio for an “early peek” at The Sims 3 Ambitions, but they can’t release their preview for another week – still, something to look forward to, right?
 > “Behind the scenes: The Sims studio” at GamesRadar

During his keynote address at this year’s DICE Summit, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has confirmed that he had the opportunity to purchase Maxis, but was put off by the troubled development of SimCity 2000 at the time. Here’s the quote from GameSpot’s transcript:

[12:06] An an example, Activision almost bought Maxis at a time when the studio was dealing with Sim City 2000′s troubled development.

[12:07] Will Wright invited him to check out a secret project called “Jefferson,” but he was so put off by Sim City 2000′s problems he passed.

[12:07] Yes, Jefferson was The Sims. Oops.

 > “Activision CEO on helming the industry’s ‘Death Star’” at GameSpot