Talk:Maxis

Th Sims (2000) is no longer the best selling PC game.

I think that bit of information is outdated. Has been for a while. Games like Minecraft and PUBG have surpassed it by at least four fold years ago. The cited article is from 2002. World of Warcraft, Diablo III, PUBG and Minecraft have all surpassed The Sims in sales according to List of best selling PC games

Will Wright's focus on The Sims and SimCity 3000

The following sentence is not accurate:

Over 1998 Maxis was allowed to finish SimCity 3000 on its own time; following this, Wright's efforts were thrown into The Sims, [...] (the rest is accurate).

I started working on The Sims at Maxis in January 1997, and continued through the EA acquisition and worked on The Sims for EA until after the release of the game in March 2000. At the time I was hired, Will Wright's main focus was on The Sims, and he was only tangentially involved with SimCity 3000, which was being developed by another team at Maxis. He had been working on The Sims as an experimental side project for several years before 1997 (although it was called "Dollhouse", not "The Sims", and I was hired at the time Maxis finally decided to develop it into a product and focus Will's attention on it. The first time I saw a version of Dollhouse when it was just a side-project was when Will dropped by my office at Kaleida Labs with his hard disk drive, and ran it on my Mac, in 1994.

I don't think the wording "Maxis was allowed to finish SimCity 3000 on its own time" is particularly accurate, in a couple of ways. EA certainly compelled Maxis to finish SimCity 3000, and changed the design from the originally announced 3D version of the game (which was overly ambitious for the hardware of the time, and would never have been finished or work well enough to ship at the rate Maxis was originally developing it before EA bought them), to be a 2D sprite based game that was eventually released.

"Allowed" is not the right word to describe the motivations of EA and Maxis to develop SimCity, since both EA and Maxis were quite compelled to release that flagship product on a timely schedule, and it was not a matter of Maxis wanting to but EA being ambivalent, or of EA reluctantly giving them permission, as "allowed" implies. And Maxis did not "take their own time" to release it: they were on a tight schedule, driven by EA, they were not "allowed" to take as much time as they felt like with little or no pressure to release.

Secondly, Will Wright was not closely involved with SimCity 3000, neither while the 3D version of it was being developed at Maxis before EA acquired them, nor after the 2D version was developed and shipped at EA after the acquisition. His main efforts were focused on developing The Sims from the time I was hired (January 1997) until it was shipped. He occasionally consulted with the SimCity 3000 team of course, but he did not attend regular meeting or participate in the design. He had written the original design for SimCity 3000, which was an incremental improvement over SimCity 2000, before I was hired, and handed it over to the SimCity 3000 team, who basically threw it away and redesigned their own overly ambitious 3D game from scratch, which after the acquisition, EA eventually cut back and redirected into a 2D game more like what Will had originally designed.

This is from personal first hand experience, and I don't know off the top of my head any references to back it up, but much of it has been discussed in various interviews and SimCity and Sims post-morta, so I'm sure some of it could be substantiated with a bit of googling. But in the mean time, I don't see any citations that support the above sentence that I quoted. Perhaps that should be marked "citation needed" or rewritten to not make unsubstantiated claims about EA "allowing" Maxis to complete SimCity "on their own time" and Will not being focused on The Sims until after the SimCity release.

Here is one citation to a summary I wrote of Will Wright's 1996 talk to Terry Winnograd's user interface design class at Stanford, which provides some background information.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d

Xardox (talk) 19:30, 2 October 2019 (UTC)