In a move likely to upset simulation fans everywhere, games publisher Electronic Arts has announced that it is shutting down Maxis Emeryville, the studio behind the classic SimCity game and its many successors.
Development on the SimCity series will continue at other studios, and its hugely popular spin-off, The Sims, is now being made elsewhere by a dedicated team – but the company that legendary designer Will Wright founded in 1987 is effectively gone.
Wright invented a new genre of game with SimCity, a sandbox urban planning simulation in which players are free to build and maintain their own metropolis. He left in 2009, and the latest instalment in his series, the 2013 reboot, SimCity, was not a success, suffering bugs and server issues and alienating fans by requiring a constant online connection.
But during its pomp in the nineties, Maxis pumped out an array of fascinating variations on the Sim dynamic. To commemorate the studio, here are six classic moments from the Sim series.
Your first monster attack in SimCity
You spend hours constructing a complex yet balanced city, with a flourishing economy, happy citizens and a well-maintained industrial sector – and then a Godzilla-like monster or alien invasion force turns up and smashes everything. Will Wright’s decision to add randomised disasters to his otherwise serious simulation was a masterstroke of game design, adding a constant tension to the thoughtful gameplay. But you probably switched them off right? You wuss.
Raiding the red ant nest in SimAnt
One of the first spin-offs from the original SimCity was this ant farm simulator (inspired by the work of Pulitzer-winning ant expert, EO Wilson), giving you control over a colony of black ants in a tiny backyard. The aim was to build a vast insect civilisation, killing and eating other bugs, and extending your subterranean home. But the climax involved raiding the competing red ant colony, slaughtering their soldiers and finally their queen in an act of mass territorial aggression.
The Sim Copter “himbo” hack
This otherwise unremarkable flight sim from 1989 was best known for a remarkable controversy in which one of the game’s coders secretly inserted an army of shirtless hunks (or “himbos”) into the game. On certain dates, the streets would fill with men in swimming trunks, kissing and hugging. It later transpired that the programmer Jacques Servin was paid to insert the prank by an anti-consumerist group named ®TMark. EA did not see the funny side – he was fired for “adding unauthorised content”.
Spore gives birth to a creationist controversy
Will Wright’s final game for Maxis was the ambitious but flawed oddity Spore, which allowed you to create a range of alien creatures and watch as they evolved to suit their habitat. Gamers were annoyed by the restrictive DRM that EA applied to the game disc, but that wasn’t the best controversy – the game also attracted the ire of creationist bloggers who saw the game as a calculated attack on their beliefs. Hence the website, Antispore, in which an enraged writer accused Will Wright of brainwashing and posted photos of Spore creatures in suggestive poses. Was it a parody or was it real? No one is certain. At one stage, though, the blog apparently considered employing notorious anti-games campaigner and attorney Jack Thompson to help build some sort of court case against EA. It didn’t work out. One post simply reads, “Turns out that Jack Thompson is a terrible lawyer.”
A strange way to complete a tower
Designed by Japanese studio Open Book, but published by Maxis, SimTower is perhaps the most under-rated title in the Sim series, a fascinating skyscraper design challenge in which you construct layer upon layer of your thriving vertical town, adding offices, restaurants and living accommodation while preparing for random terrorist attacks. But the only way to “complete” the game and earn the ultimate Tower rating, is to build an actual cathedral into the edifice and then wait for someone to get married there. Sadly this is not actually a feature of real-world high rise planning laws.
The Sims swimming pool cruelty
When Will Wright first envisaged his “living soap opera”, The Sims, he must surely have guessed what would happen. Give players control over a household of tiny people with authentic needs and emotions, and random acts of monstrous cruelty will doubtless follow. And they did. When the original game was released in 2000, many players realised that if their sims got into the pool for a swim, you could delete the pool ladder, thereby trapping the virtual victims until they inevitably drowned.
Pools were originally absent from the latest version of the game, Sims 4, angering sadistic fans of watery homicide. At the time, producer Ryan Vaughan explained to Polygon that this was because they needed more time to test the systems – and the possibility of accidental deaths. “We wanted killing Sims to be done by intention rather than something just happening,” he said. “We wanted you to have control over it.” Pools were later reinstated. Video games, everyone.
