#will wright

Fun Fact: You can still buy Jeanettes Sim on her album single. She shipped it with a file of her simself on her "Run With Me" single which she also had a Sims 2 MV with.

An interesting episode from the early development of The Sims, related to American McGee’s time at Electronic Arts.

Before creating American McGee’s Alice, the developer spent about a year working as a creative director at Electronic Arts. His job involved visiting internal studios across the company, observing development progress, and deciding whether projects should continue or be shut down.

During that period, McGee frequently visited Maxis — the studio where The Sims was being developed. At the time, the project was viewed with skepticism by EA leadership and was considered for cancellation multiple times. McGee attended meetings and contributed ideas for the game’s development — some of them quite provocative.

In one interview, he recalled:

I was only at Maxis there at Redwood Shores for... I don't know if it was even a full year. That was the period when they were working on The Sims, so I was going to quite a few meetings for The Sims. I don't know if it was only my suggestion, but I know that one of my suggestions was that the Sims could pee on themselves. I had some darkness injected into that.

Interestingly, this “dark” idea from McGee eventually became one of the core mechanics: in the final version of The Sims, characters have a bladder need, and if the player ignores it, Sims can wet themselves, leading to hygiene loss and discomfort.

McGee also took part in discussions about ambitious but ultimately unreleased projects, such as Sim Mars:

I remember we had a meeting for Sim Mars, which was going to be a Mars-colonization game that I don't think ever went anywhere. I remember being in the room and suggesting that, 'Well, if the death of the colonists was going to reduce the efficiency and happiness of the remaining colonists, why can't I have those colonists drive a tractor out far away from the colony, dig a hole for themselves, and get in it?' I was disinvited from design meetings for that project after that.

But his time at Maxis wasn’t defined only by controversial ideas. McGee also shared impressions of working with Will Wright and his unique approach to game design:

When I came out of id, I think I'd been [in a bubble]. There weren't a lot of rules both within the organization and in my own life, I think as a result of hanging out with rock stars. Meeting Will Wright, he was interesting to me because he was like John Carmack in terms of smarts, but with this laidback, California-hippie, pot-smoking, very personable personality. If you can imagine a [precise and detail-oriented] personality combined with somebody who smokes pot, you have Will—quite different, but at the same time quite similar to John Carmack. I would spend time going to lunch with Will, talking about game design and method.

A lot of it his leading by example: seeing how he interacted with his team, seeing how he worked through design. He had an emphasis on design instead of technology. I took inspiration from the idea that a person could have a role within a development organization which was purely focused on storytelling, gameplay mechanics, presentation, and challenge to the player, sort of getting into the player's mind in a more strategic way as opposed to what we [at id] were doing with first-person shooters, which were all about action and adrenaline.

Sources:

Based on this post: