All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (38 page)

Wright’s major videogame influence was Miyamoto’s Super
Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Ask any videogame designer that question, and Mario is probably one of the three answers he or she will give you. It’s de rigueur. Yet Wright’s reasoning was a bit different from the others. For Wright, it wasn’t Mario’s longing to save Princess Toadstool that captivated. Wright wasn’t thinking about the game’s simple objective: travel through eight crazy fantasy worlds and thirty-two levels to save the girl. He didn’t focus on the strange tools that Mario used, like flowers turned into weapons that would shoot fireballs. What rocked Wright was the way he could take his time to explore that mushroom- and monster-filled seriocomic universe as he encountered a variety of quirky characters. It all made him sit back and consider who the protagonist was and why fans could not turn away.

No matter how much he appreciated Miyamoto’s game design, Wright didn’t want to make platformers. He was more inspired by and attracted to an Electronic Arts game designed by Bill Budge called Pinball Construction Set. Wright loved pinball as much as any nerd anywhere. Playing pinball not only freed Wright’s mind, it made him wonder at the joys of physics and math, made him muse about the arcs and angles of the pinball itself. Budge’s Pinball was ideal for Wright. It opened a door that let him make a contraption in his very original way. More, it let him feel like he was a pioneer of sorts. For a nerd, Budge’s game was like what freshly cut logs were for a pioneer of the American West. You could make things from this software—not a cabin in the clearing, but what looked and worked like an electronic entertainment machine. You did it your way and it had your signature. You could say to your friends, “I made this. Can you beat it?” In real life, you probably couldn’t be a designer of pinball games—no matter how much you loved them. But with Budge’s game, you could live the dream, at least on your computer screen. For Wright, it was the ultimate model kit. Forget Godzilla and plastic hot rod cars.

Figuring out what to do with his life didn’t happen easily for Wright. He didn’t want to take on the family business, which was a dead end to him and entrapping. So his mother sold the company. He didn’t quite finish college, so being an astronaut was out of the question. But he did study urban planning at Louisiana State and at the New School in New York City. Part of him still wanted to get his hands dirty, to make those models real at a real world job, like an architect … maybe. And he wanted to make games … well, maybe. But then again, he liked robots, which he could control with the Apple II computer his mother bought for him. He also loved the idea of racing cars. With a pal, he tricked out a Mazda RX-7 with an extra tank, night vision, two radar detectors, a computer system, a radar jammer, and a refrigerator. He sped across the country and was stopped late at night in Indiana for speeding at 104 mph. The shy Wright’s heart pounded as he told a gullible cop in Indiana that he was a journalist test driving a souped-up car. The cop let him pass, and Wright and his partner sped from Long Island to Southern California to win a cross-country rally. But like many students, Will still could not for the life of him figure out precisely what he wanted to do with a young, somewhat scattered and haphazard existence that led him to go to college for five years and to leave without a degree.

For Will, setting up digs on the West Coast was like being reborn. The skinny, self-effacing intellectual was psyched when he moved to the Bay Area in California, a place where technology was treated as art or, at least, artful. Inspired by the new era of personal computer gaming, Wright began to design a kind of science fiction war game on his cheap Commodore 64 in which you piloted a helicopter to save a world of islands from treacherous science fiction marauders. As you flew, you bombed the bridges, power plants, and roads below you (along with protecting your aircraft carrier from bomb-dropping enemies). Broderbund, a company perhaps best known for its interactive software for children, published it. The
company let Wright know in no uncertain terms that any humans should be changed to aliens to eschew parental concerns about violence. The game became known as Raid on Bungeling Bay and featured the evil Bungelings that appeared in other Broderbund releases like Choplifter. It was not a remarkable game, nor did it push the envelope. Yet people bought more then 800,000 copies in Japan alone. Suddenly, Wright didn’t have to worry about money … for a while.

More salient, he felt he had found his calling in life. Because Wright enjoyed constructing the minimalist terrain and architecture in the game more than making the souped-up helicopter and its exploding weapons, the game made him realize his immediate future was in simulation games, not in games of destruction. He enjoyed devising his island environments so much that he wrote the code for a mini-program to help him in the building process. But what should he do next and how should he do it? He did not possess the marketing wizardry of Nolan Bushnell or Trip Hawkins. He wasn’t even as garrulous as the generally reticent Ralph Baer. How could this introvert break into the gaming industry?

Wright faced another obstacle in his quest to make sim games: The videogame industry, still in its infancy in the middle 1980s, had some rules from which CEOs and designers would rarely stray, perhaps because they believed their audience was primarily young and male. Games were often still viewed as nothing more than toys. So there was a child-influenced golden rule in games: They had to be about winning. In this atmosphere, Wright’s City Planner 1.0, which asked you to develop a detailed city and its accompanying infrastructure, stuck out like a sore thumb. Wright had been inspired to create the game when his neighbor, an Oakland city planner, suggested that Wright read a stack of books on city planning theory. Broderbund ordered a prototype of the game—without any pay for Wright. That was the way it worked for many freelancers back in the day. You worked primarily for royalties down the line, with nothing upfront.

But when they saw the actual game in action (if you could call it action), the decision makers at Broderbund were perplexed.

“How can we market this?” wondered cofounder Doug Carlston. “There’s no proper end to it. And there’s no way to win.”

Wright countered, “It shouldn’t have to be about winning. It’s about making things. People like to make things. It’s about society, how people make communities and live in them.” He went on for some time with lucid, logical arguments. He brought up the success of LEGO and Lincoln Logs in the toy industry as analogies. Kids and adults alike loved to build. But he could not convince Broderbund.

Carlston didn’t like to reject any designer, but he looked down and shook his head. “We don’t want to experiment this way. We don’t think people will buy it. So we can’t buy it. And we can’t put money into it.” Wright understood and appreciated the way Carlston made him feel like part of the Broderbund family even as he was rejecting his work. But, after so much time invested, he was crestfallen. He knew he owed a huge debt to Doug and Gary Carlston for giving him his big break, not to mention a direction in life. Yet he wished they shared his vision. Maybe he needed a better name for his game. City Planner 1.0 seemed too much like a college course, as dry to the uninitiated as the dozen or so city planning tomes he’d been reading. Micropolis, his other idea for the title, was already taken.

Perhaps Wright had gotten too complex while stating his case in those meetings at Broderbund. He’d brought up a book that inspired him, MIT professor Jay Wright Forrester’s 1969 tome,
Urban Dynamics
. Forrester put forth an engineering theory that led him to create computer models to simulate the way cities behaved. Forrester was intrigued by information feedback, which happens “whenever the environment leads to a decision that results in action which affects the environment and thereby influences future decisions.” In other words, the many assessments that have to be made by a city can be converted into variables so city planners can simulate what might
happen in everything from the economy to low income housing as a city grows or contracts. In the seventies, Forrester’s theories of system dynamics became a pop culture trend, so much so that they were even employed to predict worldwide economic havoc, mainly due to starvation, that would happen in 1981.

Yet even after Broderbund’s rejection, Wright was hooked. He couldn’t stop thinking about his game. Luckily, at the same time in the mid-1980s, an aggressive young go-getter named Jeff Braun had had a taste of success in making and selling Calligrapher, the first color computer font program, for the Amiga. Braun wanted more. Like many before him, he had played SpaceWar!, the Asteroids predecessor, on a giant mainframe computer at UCLA and felt that the game industry was no fad. With the money he’d made from Calligrapher, Braun decided to court game developers by helping to host a series of beer and pizza parties at a friend’s apartment in Alameda. Will Wright didn’t want to go to the techie mixer, but a young neighbor goaded him into it. Once there, he sat in a corner by himself, looking uncomfortable. Braun worked the room and eventually came upon Wright. Braun brimmed with enthusiasm about fonts, so much so that Wright thought he was trying to sell him something. At the end of the oration, Wright mentioned, “I have a game that I really want to do. But nobody wants to do it. And I don’t blame them. It doesn’t fit the mold.”

“Why’s that?” asked Braun.

“Because there’s nothing to win. You don’t become the hero. You don’t save the world. You probably wouldn’t like it either.”

Braun was intrigued and invited himself over to Wright’s house in Piedmont. As Wright led him into the basement to see his small tech setup, which featured a Commodore 64, he said again, “I’m pretty sure you’re not going to like this.” At first Braun watched a demonstration of another game Wright was working on, ProBots, to which he took an instant dislike. While Wright saw ProBots as
an homage to graphic artist M. C. Escher and was working hard on its artificial intelligence, Braun thought it was just a run-of-the-mill matching game and “pretty ridiculous.” On the other hand, Jeff saw limitless possibilities in the city planning game. He couldn’t contain his ebullience. He wasn’t talking fonts anymore; he was talking games to anyone who would lend an ear.

Everything looked brighter then. Just as Henk Rogers envisioned the unlimited potential in Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris, Braun saw the potential in SimCity (the game’s new name). He and Wright went on to retrieve the rights from Broderbund and to raise $50,000 to start their new venture. To name their company, Braun decided to hold a contest, asking friends and family for a two-syllable name that meant nothing (like Kodak or Sony), but sounded good when you said it. Braun’s father won after coming up with Maxis. Wright and Braun liked the word’s techie “X” sound, and Braun loved that it really was shorthand for his mother and sister, Ma and Sis. While Wright had amassed some money from Bungeling Bay royalties, the four years it took to find a publisher took their toll; every company he and Braun met with agreed with Broderbund. Yet, in 1989, it was actually Broderbund that agreed to copublish SimCity with Maxis. Broderbund had just launched an experimental affiliate program that allowed Wright and Braun to keep 80 percent of the profits, instead of just 15 percent of the royalties, and was eager for guinea pigs. Every game would be given on consignment to Broderbund, which would distribute SimCity. Maxis would do the rest of the work, including boxing the game and manufacturing the disks.

Initially, Wright and Maxis sold the game themselves at Bay Area computer fairs at which they also passed out flyers. Sales were so slow that Wright himself easily handled all technical support. But then, the media came to the rescue in the form of
Newsweek
. Writer Bill Barol said glowingly that experiencing SimCity was “thrilling,” that it gave you “the exhilarating ability to change your
environment.” When
Newsweek
’s photographer found Maxis to be housed in Braun’s condo, with just a few computers around a furnished apartment, he shook his head and apologized, thinking he was at the wrong address. Then he snapped a shot of the game on Braun’s computer monitor and left the fledgling operation posthaste. The publication of the full-page article was one of the first instances in which a videogame was reviewed by a major newsweekly (the first two were reviews of the interactive text adventures Zork and A Mind Forever Wandering in 1985). The SimCity review was a sign that games were slowly going mainstream and legit.

Suddenly, Wright was the “it” designer, and SimCity became the Game of the Year. It had earned approximately $3 million by the time Christmas rolled around. As the PC version sold 500,000 copies and the Nintendo version added sales of 1.3 million more, the phone rang off the hook with requests for Wright to work on simulations. Entities as diverse as the CIA and Chevron wanted sims for their own agencies and companies. Maxis bought a small company called Delta Logic to deal with these contracts so Wright could concentrate on game making. (The business contacts didn’t amount to huge money and the deals took a long time to wangle, but SimRefinery for Chevron eventually brought in $75,000 to the coffers.)

The hits just kept on coming for Wright. Thoughtful hits. Yes, there were SimCity sequels, which were Maxis’s bread and butter. But there was also SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony, based on the studies of the Pulitzer Prize–winning myrmecologist Edward O. Wilson. While the box featured a cute, Disney-esque ant with soulful black eyes, in the game, the player got graphically primitive ants to work together in centralized societies in an almost socialist way. By mobilizing workers, soldiers, and queen ants, you fought off the oncoming hordes of red ants and occasional arachnids. To the danceable strains of some bass-heavy funk music, you took over the yard as if it were a raging battlefield. Sometimes your ant “writhes in
burning agony” when bitten by a spider. Eventually, you took over a suburban house, driving out the annoyed human owners.

There were inevitable growing pains at Maxis, which in 1994 was readying to go public. They had $1 million in venture capital from William Janeway at Warburg Pincus, primarily because Janeway wanted to seem hip to his son who played computer games. With the money, Maxis expanded quickly, cobbling together a staff full of the inexperienced. For instance, a secretary was promoted to be head of human resources, but she didn’t have the proper training and wasn’t up to the huge challenge of managing personnel at a company in the throes of an IPO. Braun and Wright spent months and months courting venture capitalists—instead of making games. Like Landeros and Devine’s Trilobyte, Maxis incurred pressure from investors to diversify its lineup and earn big money. Along those lines, Wright worked on a game that explored the various ideas behind the
Hindenburg
’s tragic explosion. But the game never was released.