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Will Wright

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Publicity photo of Will Wright and a character from The Sims
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Publicity photo of Will Wright and a character from The Sims
Will Wright (born January 20, 1960) is an American computer game designer and co-founder of the game development company, Maxis. He is best known as the original designer of the two groundbreaking computer games SimCity and The Sims.

Contents

Biography

William Ralph Wright was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1960, where he lived until the age of nine, when his father died. His mother moved the family to her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. After graduating from high school at 16, he enrolled in Louisiana State University, later transferring to Louisiana Tech and then The New School. Beginning with a start at an architecture degree, followed by mechanical engineering, he fell into computers and robotics. After five years of college, Wright did not attain a degree.

During a summer break from college, he met his future wife Joell Jones, an artist who was visiting Louisiana from California. In an interview published in February 2003, Will claims that games were absorbing so much of his time, he decided that perhaps making games was the way to go. Wright's first game was the helicopter action game Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984) for the Commodore 64.

Wright found that he had more fun creating levels with his level editor for Raid on Bungeling Bay than he had while actually playing the game. He created a new game that would later evolve into SimCity, but he had trouble finding a publisher. The structuralist dynamics of the game were in part inspired by the work of two architectural and urban theorists, Christopher Alexander and Jay Forrester.

"I'm interested in the process and strategies for design. The architect Christopher Alexander, in his book Pattern Language formalized a lot of spatial relationships into a grammar for design. I'd really like to work toward a grammar for complex systems and present someone with tools for designing complex things." From an interview with Wired magazine, 1994. (see link below)

In 1986, he met Jeff Braun, an investor interested in entering the computer game industry, at what Wright calls "the world's most important pizza party." Together they formed Maxis the next year in Walnut Creek, California. SimCity (1989) was a hit and has been credited as one of the most influential computer games ever made.

Following on the success of SimCity, Wright designed SimEarth (1990) and SimAnt (1991). He co-designed SimCity 2000 (1993) with Fred Haslam and in the meantime Maxis produced other "Sim" games. Wright's next game was SimCopter (1996). Although none of these games were as successful as SimCity, they further cemented Wright's reputation as a designer of "software toys" — games that cannot be won or lost. In 1992, Wright and his family moved to Orinda, California near the San Pablo Reservoir.

Maxis went public in 1995 with revenue of USD$38 million. The stock reached $50 a share and then dropped as Maxis posted a loss. Electronic Arts bought Maxis in June 1997. Wright had been thinking about making a virtual doll house ever since the early 90s, similar to SimCity but focused on individual people. Originally conceived of as an architectural design game called Home Tactics, Wright's idea changed when someone suggested the player should be rated on the quality of life experience by the homeowners. It was a difficult idea to sell to EA, because already 40% of Maxis's employees had been laid off.

EA published The Sims in February 2000 and it became Wright's biggest success yet. It eventually surpassed Myst as the best-selling computer game of all time and spawned numerous expansion packs and other games. He designed a massively multiplayer version of the game called The Sims Online, which was not as popular as the original.

Wright was given a "Lifetime Achievement Award" at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001. In 2002, he became the fifth person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Hall of Fame. As of 2005, he is the only person to have been honored this way by both of these industry organizations.

He has been called one of the most important people in gaming, technology, and entertainment by publications such as Entertainment Weekly, Time, PC Gamer, and GameSpy. For bringing simulations to the mass market, Wright was awarded the PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award in January 2005.

In a presentation at the Game Developers Conference on March 11, 2005, he announced his latest game Spore [link]. He used the current work on this game to demonstrate methods that can be used to reduce the amount of content that needs to be created by the game developers.

Wright hopes to inspire others to take risks in game creation. In his spare time, he collects leftovers from the Soviet space program, and also builds competitive robots for BattleBots with his daughter.

Games designed by Wright

Games credited

Games which Wright received some credit for, but may not have exclusively designed.

References

External links

Audio/Video

The Sim Universe and Maxis
City games
SimCity > SimCity 2000 | SimCity 3000 | SimCity 4
The Sims
The Sims > The Sims 2 | The Sims Online
Other Sim games
SimEarth > SimAnt | SimLife | SimFarm | SimTower | SimHealth | SimIsle | SimCopter | SimGolf | Streets of SimCity
Youth Sim games
SimTown > SimPark | SimSafari | SimTunes
Sim related
A-Train > El-Fish | Sid Meier's SimGolf | Spore | Widget Workshop
Cancelled Sim games
SimMars > Simsville

 

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