#reddit ama

In case you missed it, Joel Emery, writer and co-producer of the show, did an AMA over on reddit. He spent close to two hours answering every question! Below are screenshots of each question and his answer.

Enjoy!

And depending on your criteria, my favorite Sim would have to be Goopy Gilscarbo from Sims 2. He's not my favorite because he's an awesome, attractive, lovable Sim (obviously). He's my favorite because of how he came to be. The townies in Sims 2 (random Sims that wander by your house and can form relationships but who don't live in houses in the neighborhood) are expensive to generate. So we couldn't just generate all of the townies in the “townie pool” at runtime when you launch the game. What we did instead was that we generated them once in-game on someone's machine just running the Sims 2 build, and then we saved them out. Then when you install the game you get the same set of townies in that pool that everyone else does. However, we (Maxis) didn’t explicitly make them, and it’s possible we didn’t even really look at them closely.

We definitely didn't hand edit them in most cases. So that outfit, the way he looks, his personality, everything else, those were just randomly generated. I think most people know that his name is a random combination of first/last names of team members (Goopy Rossi and Gabe Gilscarbo in his case), but just the combination of those particularly unique names and the alliteration is just funny in its own right? And the fact that he was such a horrible character who was also a romance SIM was extra hilarious.

So he's my favorite Sim because he was completely randomly generated, but because he was consistent for everyone, he became a “shared experience” for players and the community turned him into a thing that people still talk about now.

And all of that makes me smile :)

Screenshot:

I’m Tom Hiddleston and I am taking a journey back in time in my new series ‘Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston’ on National Geographic. 

The ancient world has compelled my imagination and curiosity for as long as I can remember: I’ve been fascinated by it all my life. Classical Antiquity is the foundation and cornerstone of Western and European culture. To visit Pompeii is to feel the distance of the 2,000 years between now and then compress. The past becomes the present, the past feels so close. Our relationship with the past is alive — studying who we were in order to understand who we are. Pompeii is a gateway for that conversation. 

This new series presents an innovative investigation into the cities last hours and will transport the audience to Ancient Rome in the hours before and during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius guided by archaeologists, historians, geologists and disaster experts.  

We'll be back on Thursday July 16th at 8PM BST to answer your questions

Find Tom on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/twhiddleston/

Find National Geographic on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natgeouk/