GameSpy has posted an interesting interview with Will Wright. It's not to much about The Sims, but more about the man himself. Besides telling how much he worked with Sid Meier on SimGolf, The Sims on GBA and the collaboration with Nintendo's Miyamoto on that. But there's also a bit about a secret project:
[Update 23:30] In the "Read more" bit (or below if you can see that already) you can read more about the audio interview posted a couple of days ago.
In that audio interview, Will Wright talks with GameSpy for 22 minutes. The first thing they discuss is the history of the Sim series, which apparantly goes back to 1985 (not 1989 as many think, including the interviewer). That's when the first SimCity game was made (on the good old Commodore64), although the 'second generation' version, published in 1989 became very popular on the Mac. He also mentions the GBA version of the Sims, but then they talk about TSO. Will Wright says the expectations were set way too high, but that with the current 100,000 players they're making a profit. Will also says there's some "way unusual stuff" going on in TSO, which is being studied by Maxis, and they're putting in new stuff every week. Next thing he mentions is that SimAnt is one of his favourite Sim-games. Basically the models for SimAnt and The Sims are somewhat similar (the name SimAntics for the scripting language used in The Sims is probably taken from that). He's of course also happy with what happened with The Sims community, which resulted in sites like these and hundreds of others. A bit later he says Bustin' Out apparantly isn't an expansion pack for the Sims on the console, but a new standalone game. That means you probably don't need the original The Sims to play it.GameSpy: "I don't suppose you want to talk about the secret project."Now if we go back into our news archive, our visitors who came here over a year ago might remember the name of SimUniverse. Although we haven't heard anything about that for a long time, it might still be true. Check out this newspost and this one for what we posted about SimUniverse last year. Oh, and to read the GameSpy interview: click here.
Will Wright: "Not yet. The problem is that when I work on a game it takes about four years. If I start talking about it now, people will have heard about it for three years when it comes out. They'll be sick of hearing about it. I need to be kind of careful. I think that the optimum is that your game goes to E3 once, not twice or three times. I wish I could do a game in two years."
[Update 23:30] In the "Read more" bit (or below if you can see that already) you can read more about the audio interview posted a couple of days ago.
He also says it's hard to cope with the guilt-trip: everyone praises Will Wright for making The Sims while it were about 40 people making it. Later they also ask questions from a chatroom, and the first question is if there will be a the Sims for the X-Box, which obviously already exists (and a new one is in the make). The second one is about The Sims 2, and Will mentions some of the features. He also says it's more important to how the Sims behave rather than have them looking realistic. Next he says Maxis will expand The Sims further, possibly even after The Sims 2 is out. The Sims 2 will also take much of your system, and it won't run on a low-end system. That means it won't run on any machine, and so it will take maybe 3 years before the mass-market audience will be able to play the game properly. They also talk a bit about the Edith tool, and the decision not to release it (it'd crash user's systems because it's too advanced). After some other things, he also says there will probably be more expansions for SimCity 4 after Rush Hour.
There's a lot more that Will Wright mentions, but I've only mentioned some of the highlights. Also, part of this 22 minute interview's audio is garbled and hard to understand. Nevertheless, it's definately worth it, and if you get the chance to you should download it. You can find it right here at FilePlanet.
Written at 01:06 on Wednesday, 21 May 2003 by ChEeTaH.
