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Will Wright is everywhere! Check out what he had to say about The Sims on DailyRadar.com.

DailyRadar.com Interview

Exclusive Will Wright Interview

How difficult was it to create The Sims?

Daily Radar has been playing more of The Sims than is probably healthy, but torturing those little guys is just too much fun. In an effort to understand the twisted minds behind such an insidiously addictive game, Daily Radar went over to Will Wright's house, ate his food, fell in love with his wife and moved in just to see how he likes it. While we were lounging in our boxers on his sofa, we got a chance to ask him a few questions about his latest piece of work.

Daily Radar: How difficult or easy was it to create The Sims compared to previous projects?
Will Wright: Basically, it was the hardest one by far. Kind of [for two reasons], technically trying to recreate human behavior and then trying to sell the concept to everybody. I had an amazing amount of resistance to the idea for a long time.

DR: Even after the success of SimCity?
WW: Yeah. It's just that it does sound kind of crazy, doing a game about regular life. It just doesn't sound that compelling. It wasn't until I had actually gotten a prototype up and running, where you could actually interact with people and move them around and do things that people, I think, started to get a sense of how interesting it would be.
On the technical side, we really wanted the behavior to be expandable after we shipped the game. We really wanted it to be as open-ended as we could possibly make it. And that really put some heavy loads on the behavior engine, so engineering the simulation was the biggest technical hurdle.
There's the how much do we try to simulate [problem], and then there's the how deep do we go with that [problem]. And whenever you give the user design tools, like designing the house, you have to really think hard about all the weird stuff they are going to try to do. Because the first thing people like to do in a simulation is explore the boundaries of it. So they'll sit there and push it in every weird direction they can think of just to see where it breaks down. That's the real difficulty with simulations. You have to really think about what are going to be the boundaries of that simulation, and then decide what's going to happen when you hit those boundaries.

DR: Back in the Apple II and C64 days, David Crane at Activision made a game called Little Computer People. Did you ever play it?
WW: Yeah, I had a friend who had it, and he sent it to me. Actually I got to know one of the producers on that, a guy named Rich Gold; he saw some early version of The Sims. And we talked about simulators quite a bit. I thought it was a really cute idea. Back at that point in time, just about half the games developed were really creative. All the genres weren't done to death already. It was really refreshing.
The interesting thing about [Little Computer People] was how much people empathized with this little character on the screen. I know a lot of people that got really upset when they didn't feed him and he would die. It didn't have much in the way of simulation. I think you hit the boundaries of that way too soon. But then again, with the computers that were around, it really was a great piece of work.

We really wanted it to be as open-ended as we could possibly make it.

DR: OK. To get back to The Sims, there have been some interesting gameplay decisions, but the one that a lot of people around the office have been asking is why are there no weekends in the sim-suburbs?
WW: Well, if we had done weekends, all of a sudden you would have wanted a calendar, and you would have been focused on calendar time. And as soon as we did that, you would start realizing that there are no seasons and no holidays. It would start bring up a lot of issues that we kind of dealt with, but at the expense of things we did instead. So, rather than have people focus on calendar time, I really wanted people focusing on daily time.
We structured that game such that if you have a job, you can take a day off at any time, and you just don't get paid. So you can basically structure your own weekends in the game, as you need them. You can take every other day off if you want to, but if you take two days off, you lose your job. So we wanted to keep the game more immediate.

What's the deal with all the bisexuality?

DR: Some of us have noticed that the politics of The Sims is a little...uh, liberal. For example, the characters are functionally bisexual and polygamy is a viable option. Are all you guys at Maxis really that progressive?
WW: [laughs] Well...there was one thing that we had as a design goal all along, and that was that anybody should be able to model their family. So we had long, involved discussions on how far we would go on issues of sexual orientation and violence. Those are the two big issues.
So there are a couple things we decided we didn't want to allow, like child abuse for instance. For domestic violence, we kind of have different levels of it. In other words, the men can really get into fistfights, and the woman can too. There are slap animations where you can have them slap each other. And then men can really slap each other hard, but the women have the more polite kind of "British Army" slap. So there were a lot of things where we kind of [walking] this thin line or walking though a mine field, and we were just trying to take the most prudent path through this mine field.
And the sexual orientation thing was similar. They won't exhibit gay relationships autonomously, whereas they can exhibit heterosexual relationships autonomously. But you can drive them to gay relationships, if that's what you are trying for.

But you can drive them to gay relatioships, if that's what you are trying for.

DR: Do you have any multiplayer plans for the future of The Sims?
WW: Actually I'm spending most of my time right now studying just that. I'm trying all the multiplayer games I can. But with a lot of the multiplayer games out there, I'm not exactly compelled to have social interaction with the other players. I don't mind blowing them up, hacking monsters side by side, but I don't really want to talk to these people.
I need to figure that out first. To me that's the primary thing. I need to figure out why I would want to go online and interact with total strangers.

DR: Why can't SIMS do things like go to the market or go to the movies or even something as simple as go over to another SIM's house?
WW: That goes back to defining the boundaries of the simulation. We could have put in something where you actually went and saw their work. But we would have to do a lot of the stuff that we do currently but at a much lower level. In other words, we would have to lose a lot of features. So we made a decision that we were going to do the domestic side of the house really well and leave the rest of it offstage.
In terms of visiting each other's house, you can, but only by running the other family and then inviting them over. We thought about that quite seriously, but we decided this wasn't as fun as being the host and having much more control options. So it really comes down to there is only so much we could do, and we had to pick and choose our fights.

DR: Sure. But what about the graphic engine? It has the very familiar SimCity 2D, sprite-based engine. But was there any temptation to got to 3D engine or would that limit expandability too much?
WW: It doesn't really limit expandability. It has a lot more to do with editing and user-interface. We really wanted the editing of the house to be simple and intuitive, very much like SimCity. As soon as you start having to move a free roaming camera around, that gets very hard to do.
Also, there were a lot of technical and user-interface issues. The camera you have right now has three levels of zoom and four rotations, so there are a small number of options. If you could move the camera around wherever you want to, you get into all a lot of issues of situation awareness.
One of things I did a while back was that I went out and bought most of the decent home-design programs that were on the market. And I spent a lot of time playing with those, and it's interesting because even the easiest to use of those is quite difficult to edit. There seems to be a very firm relationship between ease-of-use and resolution. So, if I have a design package that lets me place things down to an inch resolution, it's much more difficult to use than something that lets me place things down to a foot or a meter.
So if you try to recreate your house with something like Broderbund's 3D Home Architect, you can do it more accurately than you can in The Sims, but it will take you over ten times longer. It is interesting, because I think a lot of people are buying those programs for fun, because if you look at how many they sell, it's tremendous amounts. And I know not that many people are designing their own homes. So I think a lot of people are buying those as toys, but those programs are designed to take a lot of fun out of it.

So, how cruel are you to your SIMs?

DR: The Sims has been very popular with everyone in the office but especially with women. Was this a conscious effort on your part, or did you design a game that you were interested in and hope that it would have broad appeal?
WW: I would say the [latter]. Although, all along, I was hoping this would appeal more to women than a lot of games. I don't think that the game is geared to women, but that it is a little more balanced compared to most games. One of the things about it is that there are a lot of different activities you can engage in. Some people totally get into the [SIMs] and that's all they care about. Other people, like little boys, will spend the whole time designing the house, and they almost never go into live mode. Other people are totally into the shopping. I think it's more than just about having a game with a broad range of approaches.

DR: Well, as a follow up, do you think the industry as a whole has done enough to reach out to women, or is it too focused on male-centered games?
WW: I think it's too centered on testosterone games. But I enjoy those too; I loved Half-Life, and I play Tribes a lot. But there are so many people doing those so well, and there are so many other potential genres that no one is even touching, that I love to see some of that talent exploring other types of games.
I really enjoy first-person shooters, but there are obviously several groups out there that really know how to build those things well. So I would see that we have a surplus of expertise in that area and a deficit of expertise in a lot of other areas that could be just as cool.

Well, there is one thing I have a lot of fun with...

DR: Here at Daily Radar, our favorite way to be cruel to the SIMs is to build an enormous hedge maze and then put the fridge at the end of that maze just to watch them pass out from exhaustion. What's your favorite way to inflict suffering on your SIMs?
WW: [laughs] Well, there is one thing that I have a lot of fun with. I use the pool tool to design a Pac-Man maze. Then I put one man and two women in the pool and then I take the ladders away so they couldn't get out. I would then make both the women madly in love with the guy, then I would only drive the guy, and I wouldn't control the women. So I had to keep him away because as soon as one of them caught him and kissed him, I would lose. It did an amazing job of recreating Pac-Man. I actually copied down a Pac-Man maze, and their routing is pretty good. So they'd be zeroing in on the guy and I'd be trying to drive him with the "go here" clicks. It was just like playing Pac-Man!

DR: Now that The Sims is on the shelves, what games are your trying to get caught up on?
WW: Well, like I said, I'm checking out a lot of the multiplayer games right now. I've been playing Everquest, Tribes and will probably try Quake III soon. And I am really looking forward to Team Fortress 2.

DR: Cool. Thanks for the time Will.
WW: No problem.

Check out the All Games Network for a video demo of The Sims. Maxis' PR Manager Patrick Buechner will explain it all!

All Games Network Demo

Ever think about Sim cloning yourself? Our new comic has a character who does just that.

Go to Comics

Jason was excited to get the new computer game, The Sims.

He was even more excited about being able to choose the Sims' faces and personalities.

What excited him most was that he could create Sims just like him...

...and put them in a house just like his own.

Of course, making Sims in your own image does have consequences.

Sometimes the consequences were a little more serious.

And sometimes they were downright deadly.

Jason found it a bit weird to see the Sims mourning their -- and his -- clone.

He went back to the drawing board and created a new Sim family.

Of course, he couldn't resist making some Sims that were a lot like his old ones

After all, he was comfortable with their habits...

...and they were very comfortable with their new housemate.

Did you miss the Chat with Will on CNN.com? See what Will had to say... "We're spending most of our efforts right now on making cool downloadable tools for the Sims."

CNN.com Transcripts

A chat about the "The Sims" and "SimCity"

January 20, 2000
Web posted at: 8:20 p.m. EDT

(CNN) -- Will Wright, chief game designer for Maxis, creators of "SimCity", joined the chat room on January 20, 2000, to discuss his new game, "The Sims." "The Sims" allows players to create and computer simulated control people. Wright joined the CNN chat room from California. The following is an edited transcript of the chat.

Chat Moderator: Thank you for joining us today, Will Wright, and welcome to chat.
Will Wright: Hi, everyone.

Chat Moderator: Please tell us a little bit about your background.
Will Wright: I've be making games for about 18 years. I usually make games about real stuff and try to make it fun, but it doesn't always work out.

Chat Moderator: What was your inspiration for "The Sims?" Did it come from the Tomagotchi craze?
Will Wright: It really started more as a game about architecture. But I started going down that path, and I realized that we needed to simulate people living in the house to determine how cool the houses were. At that point the people became the focus of the game because they were so much more compelling.

Chat Moderator: How big is the world you can explore in The Sims?
Will Wright: Well the game occurs in a neighborhood of 10 houses. Some of the lots are large, some small. Each house can have up to eight people living in it and a web of relationships is developed between all of these people.

Question from Enphagy: Will, since the core of your games are based on simulation, do you think any work you have done, or eventually will do, will have any real world applications? Or do you think you will stick with games? Do you foresee some part of your game logic being used by real city planners?
Will Wright: We actually had a division of Maxis which did these types of simulations. We did a project for Chevron to simulate one of their refineries. It was called SimRefinery.
We did a few others, but eventually decided to get out of that business. We were spending more time negotiating contracts with these clients than developing the software.
Anyway, I think the educational aspects of the games that we do will have a bigger impact on society in the long term anyway.

Question from SimSusie: Is The Sims compatible with SimCity and other Sim software?
Will Wright: We thought about that for a while, but since the time scales are so different, we decided to keep them separate for now. But at some point I can foresee The Sims and SimCity merging into one product.

Question from TimDoyle: What about multiplayer? I'd love to see virtual worlds colonized by real users, along the lines of Ultima Online or EverQuest.
Will Wright: I'm spending most of my time right now trying to figure out the best way to do that with The Sims. We also have a few other major projects here at Maxis along those lines. I can't really say much more than that right now though.

Question from HUGESimfan: When will a demo be out to download?
Will Wright: We're spending most of our efforts right now on making cool downloadable tools for the Sims. I'm not sure when we'll get around to making a game demo. Some of the tools we're making are so cool and fun to play with it almost seems ashamed to stop work on them to go and make a demo for the game. The tools will be free to all and on our site.

Chat Moderator: What do you think is still lacking in the SimCity series? What would you like to model next?
Will Wright: That's really hard to say. There are so many subjects out there that are really quite fascinating once you get past the arcane language and the typical academic approaches.
I've got about three subjects that I've been researching in the background. One of my favorites is the life in the universe question. Are we unique or are aliens really out there? What's cool about that is it forces us to really come to grips with what life is and who we are.

Question from Hiya: Have you ever made a "Sim" of yourself in the game to see what happens? Boy, I can hardly wait to try that.
Will Wright: All the time. That's been my benchmark test in The Sims during most of the development phase. I would run my family, then later inform my wife of what happened in the game.
"We broke up today," or "you had affair with the neighbor" or "we had 2 more kids."

Question from JasonWilson: Is Maxis even considering a Mac version of the Sims?
Will Wright: Yes, we're considering it. We want to make sure it's done well if we do it. The really the hard part, right now, has to do with our free tools. I don't think we can afford to convert them all to the Mac, but if we don't the Mac users will get upset.
We're seeing this right now with the BAT tool for SimCity. It would almost upset them less if we didn't release it at all for the Mac.

Question from Fred: I wanna know if there will be a patch to have a dog or a cat ?
Will Wright: We can make new objects that can be easily downloaded into the game. A cat or dog would be downloadable just like anything else. I'm sure we'll get around to it eventually.

Question from Craig: Is there a new version of SimCity in the works?
Will Wright: Yes, several in fact. I'm afraid that's about all I can divulge right now, though.

Question from TimDoyle: Were you ever reluctant to make the game TOO real? I notice you censor nudity and impose some limits on what people can do.
Will Wright: Yes, there were several things we decided to avoid. We wanted to keep the game appropriate for children, for the most part, so certain topics we punted on (child abuse, etc.).

Question from Simfreak: When is the game Sims due out.
Will Wright: It should be in most stores by Feb. 4. We're doing a simultaneous release in 14 languages, which means it should be available in most countries around then, give or take a couple of weeks.

Question from Hi: Can you sim a real society with "real-people?" I meant there are different personalities or different groups of people. I think it would be fun "Sim-Society."
Will Wright: That sounds like The Sims with just more people. Perhaps you're envisioning something more like a SimCulture, where the cultural beliefs become the focus of the game. That would be cool.

Question from BethN: How long did 'The Sims' take from start to finish, and about how many people worked on it?
Will Wright: That's a long story. I first started on this in 1993. I worked on it for a while and then got pulled into SimCity2000, which distracted me for about one and a half years. Then I got back into The Sims, only to be distracted once again by SimCopter.
To make a long story short, I probably worked on the Sims about four and a half years. Over than time, over 50 people have been involved on the project. I'm really just a small part of the entire team.

Question from Marsh: Anything (un)official on a Linux port for sc3k or The Sims?
Will Wright: You know, I have no idea on that one. I thought I did hear something about a Linux 3K but I know there's nothing on The Sims at this point. The SimCity fans probably know more about this than I do. I did download the PalmPilot SimCity though, it's cute.

Question from Triptych: Any possibility of TV show tie-ins like a "Friends" or "ER" set of skins?
Will Wright: We're checking that out right now, actually. It's probably going to be more likely with older syndicated series. But the fans can always create their own.
There are several great fan sites for The Sims that already have large libraries of skins, wallpapers, floors, and other stuff.

Question from Sim18: How is the family photo album gonna work?
Will Wright: We saw early on that players were naturally weaving these elaborate stories as they played the game. Creating funny, tragic, dramatic and twisted stories are really what this game is all about. Each game you play spins off into a different direction.
We want to make it very easy for players to create their own stories and share them/compete with them on our website. So we added a feature allowing the players to record the things that happen to their families, and then, post them onto our website to share with other players.

Question from Grizzly: How "dysfunctional" can a family of Sims get?
Will Wright: Quite. Depends on which direction.
They can end up hating each other, in which case, they'll fight frequently and can end up kicking members out of the family (disowning them).
They can let their house pile up with trash. The plants can all die, as well as the fish.
They can die from hunger, or perhaps burn down the kitchen.

Question from SimPlistic: Will, I know you have a mean streak in you, how many ways can we kill off our Sims?
Will Wright: We have about four obvious ones, but there are others hidden deeper in certain interactions. A few are very rare. I won't mention them here because I want to see how long it takes for the players to find them.
Besides, it's best if you never quite know, and the possibility is always lurking somewhere. Also we can imbed new ways in the innocent objects that we will have for download on our site in the future.

Question from Rpgamer: Can Sims gain skills?
Will Wright: Yes, that's critical for their job advancement. The skills are cooking, mechanical, charisma, body, logic, and several others

Question from Fordpj: How easy will it be to have a Sim who uses a wheelchair?
Will Wright: That would be quite hard because of technical reasons. The routing code, which allows them to walk around, was some of the hardest code in the game. We tried to allow as much diversity as possible though aside from that.

Question from Dan: Can Sims express their sexuality?
Will Wright: To a degree. We have different levels of romantic involvement. At the highest you see very passionate kissing, sharing of the hot tub naked, sharing a bed together, and sharing of the bathrooms with no modesty.
But as I said we wanted to keep the game accessible to kids. The Sims make babies by very passionate kissing.

Question from MaxSteele: Will, did you ever play "Little Computer People Research Project" from Activision, and did it influence you at all?
Will Wright: Yes, a long time ago. I've since gotten to know several people who were involved with that project, and many of them gave valuable feedback on The Sims, especially Rich Gold.

Question from SimJob: Does it surprise you that people would rather spend all their free time in a simulated world rather than doing "real life" activities?

Will Wright: Well, as a species we engage in play for reason. The reason play evolved as a behavior was as a learning mechanism where we could experiment with real-life problems in a safe, hypothetical environment.
The Sims is all about experimenting with the crucial balances of life. The balances between work and family, how to spend free time between friends, skills and personal space.
So I see The Sims as just a caricature of real-life in order to bring these time and balance issues more into the forefront of your conscious thoughts in the same way that SimCity brought many aspects of urban design, which people were unconsciously aware of, into a more obvious light.

Question from Pinky: Is homosexuality addressed in the Sims?
Will Wright: We wanted players to be able to roughly model their own family structures whenever possible. So we allow the players to develop homosexual relationships in the game, though they won't happen automatically unless the player is directing it in that direction.

Question from Cibo: How do you feel about the state of the gaming industry as a whole? Overall sales seem to be down and many games are delayed or out right cancelled. Also, there have been a few mergers/buyouts recently that have affected the industry.
Will Wright: What concerns me the most is that most large companies seem a bit too risk adverse when it comes to developing new ideas outside of the mainstream.
Everyone is getting very good at milking their cash-cow sequels but very few are putting substantial investments into developing new genres, or taking bold risks. That still comes mainly from the smaller developers.

Question from What: What are the bare minimum system requirements for this awesome looking game?
Will Wright: Our stated spec is a P233 32 Meg RAM. It will actually run on a lower platform, if you don't try to have any large parties at your house. If you do, the game just runs at a lower frame rate.

Question from JasonWilson: Are there any future games, you or Maxis are considering developing?
Will Wright: Of course. We're always thinking about three years ahead, which is about how long it typically takes to bring a game to market. The hard part is deciding what will be state-of-the-art three years from now, especially with the Internet becoming a larger component of our industry. That is quite a tricky bit of prediction.

Question from Yur: How fast does the game go? In other words, to which time period is one day of human's life mapped?
Will Wright: In typical play, one Sim day goes by in about 15-20 minutes. If you crank up the game speed and let the characters behave autonomously, then you could probably do a day in less than five minutes.

Chat Moderator: Any final thoughts you want to share with us?
Will Wright: Well, in my mind, this game is about creativity. Rather than imposing a pre-scripted story on the players, we're trying to hand that task over to everyone.
Our website will be set up to share these stories and families. I can't wait to see what everyone does with it!

Chat Moderator: Thank you for chatting with us today!
Will Wright: Bye all, thanks for showing up.