Will Wright and Inspiration and Conception of SimCity

Will Wright was born in 1960. He liked self creating and had many an unrestrained and vigorous style that brims with talent. Besides, Will Wright had announced that he appreciated teaching philosophies of Montessori School, which are creativity, problem solving ability and self motivation. Those philosophy concepts became his important inspiration when he was going to create games.

Will Wright created his own company called “Stupid Fun Club”. After he threw himself to the game design field, he designed a game named “Raid on Bungling Bay”, which was a shooting game. “Raid on Bungling Bay” was developed and published by Nintendo and released in 1985. However, during the developing process, he found that he preferred building constructions on island to bombing buildings. So Will Wright started to design a game which was aiming to build constructions or to build a city.

Will Wright was inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s short story “The Seventh Sally”. The story is about that an anthropomorphic and very vain robot named Trurl designs a miniature kingdom as a gift to an exiled, despotic king. As it was written in the story “Trurl also carefully set into this kingdom a fabulous capital, all in marble and alabaster, and assembled a council of hoary sages, and winter palaces and summer villas, plots, conspirators, false witnesses, nurses, informers, teams of magnificent steeds, and plumes waving crimson in the wind”“My purpose was simply to fashion a simulator of statehood, a model cybernetically perfect, nothing more!”. Combining those two points of views, a prototype of the game which aimed to create a city using computer simulation technology was created. However, the company refused to release such a game because they thought “Players will never be interested in a game which is not able to win”. Fortunately, Will met a young businessman Jeff Braun, who is willing to invest into game industry. Jeff thought Will’s idea was brilliant and the game would be popular among players who liked to control the world. Therefore, Jeff and Will created Maxis together.

Maxis

Maxis Software was established in 1987 and the creators were Will Wright and Jeff Braun. The headquarter of this firm was set in California USA. The company mainly dealt with business related to game software development and software coding. Moreover, the company developed the most popular computer game ever in the history and all products were named as SIM, which was called as Sim series. Before then, the game was only available on a limited basis on the Commodore 64 due to few publishers showing any interest in porting it. The reason for this is because SimCity wasn't a traditional game that had definite "win" and "lose" conditions. The title went on to become, statistically, one of the most popular and successful video games of all time. Maxis’ name was derived from a formula suggested by Jeff Braun’s father: the name of a game company should contain two syllables and one “X”. The “X” means all which are unknown, representing a theory of Sim games which was that no fixed pattern in Sim games and everything in the game needed to be created by players themselves. In 1998, Maxis was purchased by EA and became one affiliated company of EA. In 2009, Will Wright left Maxis and created his new studio called “Stupid Fun Club”.

SimCity

SimCity was an extremely innovative game developed by Maxis. It had totally changed the limitation of previous games. In SimCity, there were no victories or loses. Besides, the basic configuration of computer was reasonably acceptable, which includes Windows 3.x or DOS operating systems, CPU 286 MHz, EGA 640*350 16 and it would occupy only 2MB in disk space. In this game, players were supposed to be a mayor and what he should do was to turn wasteland into successful cities. This game was suitable for diverse types of people and manipulation of this game was easy. In addition, there were some appropriate reminders or warnings in this game to make it much more user friendly.

When we started a game, there were three windows; the largest one was call SimCity of Windows, a smaller one with a Edit tool was our establish map and the smallest window City Form with a Map tool. There are 3 types of terrain: Clear Land, Trees and Water. Most of your building is done on Clear Land, although you can build bridges and run power lines across the water. The Maps Window Tools give different views of your city. An "S" indicates a ship. An" R" indicates a railroad train. An "A" shows the location of an airplane. At the beginning, the system would allocate $20,000. We should build a Nuclear reactor ($5,000) first, which was the core of all other buildings. Then we should build some other buildings around it such as Residential ($100), Commercial ($100) and Industrial ($100). Commercial would help you get money. It is necessary to build Road ($10) around all buildings and use Power lines ($5) to connect Nuclear reactor to make them work properly. Players could also build Police Station ($500), Fire station ($500), Stadium ($3000), Seaport ($5000) and Airport ($10000) in appropriate locations. Moreover, if you liked you could also build Park ($10) or Railroad ($20). Meanwhile, players could use Bulldoze ($1) to get rid of all buildings which you disliked. There were windows popped up sometimes, among which some were called Fiscal Budget and they were about Tax Rate and some were called SimCity for Windows which would encourage you for your population growth or remind you what should do next. Please do not look down upon this game, which was a huge success when it just came out.

Some game fans pointed out, “many years ago, a small game which only needed a few floppy disks made numerous fans keep playing day and night to learn how to become an excellent mayor.” No one would forget those days, game fans build up one and another cities belonging to themselves in those grid maps. Undeniably, as one of the ten most influent games, it was true that SimCity offered a chance for all players to build up their own city.

(Choose Level)

（3 Different Windowns）

(Fiscal Budget)

(Nuclear reactor& Easy Building)

(From City From to see the game progress)

(Simcity for Windows)

(Vivienne’s City)

（Vivienne’s City’Tax Rate）

Comparison between SimCity and other games in the corresponding time period

During ten years from the late 1980s to early 1990s, many large game companies released a number of popular and classical masterpieces of games. In 1991, Japanese company Capcom released FTG_Streetfighter2. In 1993, ID Software released a game called FPSG_Doom which ran on DOS systems. In 1994, “Warcraft: Orcs&Human” was released by Blizzard Entertainment. Moreover, in 1996, Civilization 2 was released and its producer was Sidney K Meier and its publisher was Micro Pose. In the same year, first 3D edition of Mario was released in Japan, which was called Supermario 64.

Among those games, Streetfighter could be regarded as the earliest ancestor of fighting game. In 1987, Capcom Company released Streetfighter 1 which was mainly about Arcade Game, received good comments among young people. However, in the Streetfighter 2, released in 1991, the main characters were still Ryu and Ken and some other characters from many different countries around the world. The mode of the game was 2 people’s battle. Player’s left hand controls the direction of the character by using joystick while the right hand takes charge of four buttons controlling jump, block, punch and leg. The most amazing part of the game was that different characters have various ultra combos according to diverse background stories of all characters. I personally like Ryu and his ultra like - Metsu Hadoken - ↓ down-right → ↓ down-right → + Punch x3. As games in the corresponding period of time, SimCity and Streetfighter had many differences in both game contents and game modes. Every character had his or her hit point (HP). Streetfighter asked players to K.O. the opponent and players gained satisfaction from beating other players. However, the main goal of SimCity was to build up a city by using computer simulation. There were no so-called winners or losers between players. All players gained satisfaction by planning how to build up a city. In other words, players would achieve the goal of the game by appropriate mapping out a well-developed city. Moreover, the operating system of SimCity was much simple and SimCity was a game suited much more different types of people.

In 1993, ID Software released Doom which was published by John Carmack and John Romero. This was a milestone of the First Personal Shooting Game (FPS), supporting DOS system. It was widely accepted that Doom had pioneer position. In Doom, 3D technologies were used and it also supported many players mode. At that time, Doom used the way of shareware to disseminate. The amount of downloads achieved 10000 with two years so that in late 1990s FPS games were all called Doom_like. There were the similarity place in both SimCity and Doom. In Doom, players could stretch games WAD framework and use WAD files to create levelstage by themselves or make the game much changeable. This flexibility made Doom another successful game. However, there were also different between these two games. Doom allowed players to create MOD modular, and even some game designer made MOD of Doom because of their interests. The most famous designer should be Tim Willis, who became the first designer in ID Software.

Blizzard Entertainment released Warcraft: Orcs and Human in 1994, which was a very famous and popular Real-Time Strategy Game (RTS). Players could choose on favourite race and used peons to gather resources such as gold and wood. When there was enough gold, players could also build their houses just like SimCity. But there were many differences between these two games. All constructions built in Warcraft could be used to train many units. Players could also manipulate various military forces to rush your opponent at a early stage or to fight epic battles in a late game. After all, Warcraft and SimCity had different purpose; in Warcraft players have to beat their opponents while players will only be a good leader to build up a city in SimCity.

The most classical SLG game should be Civilization produced by Sidney K Meier and published in 1996. Scenes in this game were made spectacular. Besides, there were also plenty of balance settings, which made it popular among mass game fans. As its designers said, “At that time, I felt like being crushed by the success of Civilization 2 and had no idea what to do next.” Civilization 2 was really a huge success then. However, there was the same death wood for these two games, which was that both of them did not support for multi-players mode. However, these two games believed “Explore, Expand and Exploit”. Layouts for both games were simply sidebar mode which simplified manipulations of players. Players could understand the process of the game much more straightforward. However, in SimCity, rivers and oceans were only useless while they were also useful resources and battle scenes in Civilization 2. Moreover, Civilization 2 introduced computer AI systems such as an assistant help modular. Players could consult with experts in different fields though this help modular. In SimCity, it was all about how to build up a city. However, in Civilization 2, it was not only about building up constructions, developing cities and managing cities, but also including gathering resources, establishing diplomacy and even wars to achieve global unity to winner the game. These were quite different from SimCity.

Summary

This report mainly discuss about a game called SimCity by introducing the development and types of the game. Publishing company, producer, game content, manipulations are thoroughly analyzed throughout this report with some screen shots. Moreover, compare and comparisons are made among several games in the corresponding period of time, illustrating similarities and differences among those famous games.

References

The Seventh Sally or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good ­—Stanislaw Lem

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