I’m currently reading the book “Game On!” About video game history, and had to verify.
When initially designing The Sims, Wright spent a great deal of time researching the fan community of the hugely successful Quake and Quake 2. “I was amazed at the time people were pouring into making their own custom levels,” he told Wired. “So with The Sims, we wanted to make it possible to modify everything. Players could use it as a storytelling platform.”
https://www.shortlist.com/news/15-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-the-sims-4
This is awesome. He said indeed also that he had himself a lot of fun designing levels and places for video games, so he though making a video game out of the very process of designing a level would be cool.
A project from Will Wright that always fascinated me is SimAnt, a game from 1991 where you build an ant colony.
Building a world was quite novel back then.
Subjectively at least - and this might be rose-tinted glasses influencing my judgment - it feels like it was more common, that certain genres were almost expected to come with an accessible level/map editor. I think I spent more time with the one from Age of Empires than the actual game.
Farcry and farcry 2 were my map editors of choice
That level editor was awesome in AoE, especially when errr…the nukeboys came out.
All I’m saying is… BIGDADDY.
I remember finally getting my hands on the editor for the Build engine after a few years of making maps in Doom and Heretic and had thought 3D level design was only something super geniuses could do… Until Hammer showed it was just the garbage UI/UX of Build lol
Oh man I remember how incredible Hammer was.
I built my college campus! (And never showed anybody because this was during the Columbine era)
I’m glad that when I made my high school for Counter-Strike, it was back in 1.6 and not more recently. Heard about a kid who did the same for CSGO just a few years ago and he got expelled and I think he was arrested because they saw it like “terrorist planning” or some bullshit…
Yeah, apparently SimCity itself was the result of Will Wright working on an helicopter shoot’m up and realising he had fun making maps for it.
That’s an interesting starting point for codifying a whole genre of games.
Sim ant was so awesome at the time, holy shit.
I lost entire weeks of my childhood playing at being an ant.
Now that I’ve typed that out,
bugbig chunks of my childhood suddenly make more sense.Edit: dammit. I’m leaving that typo because it’s perfect.
Me: I wonder what Will Wright is up to these days?
Wikipedia:
At GalaVerse on December 11, 2021, Wright announced a new project, in partnership with Gala Games, called VoxVerse. Wright said VoxVerse will be a blockchain game, where players will be able to create areas to explore and interact with and share these with other players of the game, incentivizing creators through the ability to trade or sell their works as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) using cryptocurrency. Wright stated that the use of blockchain and NFTs are mechanisms needed to support the vision he has, but has no interest in selling NFTs directly to players as other blockchain games or NFT schemes have had done in the past.
Me: oh.
once got interviewed by a guy who used to be lead dev on the classic F1 games (pre EA) and nowadays he just runs a team that makes horse racing simulations for casinos.
😭
If I had a nickel for every time a 90s-2000s developer is now into Blockchain…
Do I have two nickels or three?
I searched “Peter Molyneux NFT” because my first thought was, if any of them are on the NFT grift it’ll be him.
Also I understand his house burnt down in the late 20th century, and the joy of rebuilding/furnishing was another motivation for the game.
Yep! That was the story in the book. He grabbed his wife and neighbor, and when they returned, everything was burned to the ground!
He originally wanted it to be about a game where people interacted with furniture to feel things, and it was called Dollhouse. But play testers found watching their Sims more fun.
