Submitted 1 day ago by ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to gaming@beehaw.org
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.”
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.
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, bug chunks of my childhood suddenly make more sense.
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 editor. I think I spent more time with the one from Age of Empires than the actual game.
I remember finally getting my hands on the editor for the Build engine after 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
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.
CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 15 hours ago
Me: I wonder what Will Wright is up to these days?
Wikipedia:
Me: oh.
merthyr1831@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
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.
ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 12 hours ago
😭
If I had a nickel for every time a 90s-2000s developer is now into Blockchain…
Do I have two nickels or three?
CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
I searched “Peter Molyneux NFT” because my first thought was, if any of them are on the NFT grift it’ll be him.
First result lol.