" The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything The Digital Antiquarian
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The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything
03<br>Jul
This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software.
I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring.
— Will Wright
Gamers are both extremely dedicated to and really good at preserving the history of their hobby. Seldom has a month gone by in the fifteen years that I’ve been writing for this site that I haven’t had cause to feel grateful for their efforts. During the early years, I was most thankful for their lovingly curated archives of 8-bit disk images and the emulators to run them on our modern-day supercomputers; more recently, it’s initiatives like ScummVM and the welter of patches and fixes that make it easier to experiences games that are, for all that they may be infinitely more advanced than the ones I started out writing about, nevertheless decades old by this point, designed for versions of Microsoft Windows that fell out of support before some people who are old enough to vote today were even born. More recently still, projects like Wine and Lutris have allowed me to run these games on Linux, in many cases more easily than I could under Windows. And then of course there’s MobyGames, a site I have visited and will doubtless continue to visit almost every single day that I write about gaming history.
It therefore pains me just slightly to say that, for all the good they do, these same fans can create a somewhat distorted impression of the history they work so hard to preserve. The fact is that the version of our ludic past which you find chronicled on a site like MobyGames is often markedly at odds with the real facts on the ground from back in the day. The games which get most of the attention there, and garner multiple loving retrospectives in fan journals like Retro Gamer magazine, are seldom the ones that actually sold the best. Then as now, the best way to sell a lot of games was to make ones that appealed to people who don’t self-identify as gamers, who would have no idea how to even begin to interact with a DOOM or a Starcraft, to whom it would certainly never occur in a million years to visit a site like MobyGames. For these people, games are just a way of passing the time, not a passion or a lifestyle. And there are a lot more of them than there are of us, my friends. If you’re basing your understanding of which games were the most successful in their day on the ones that have the largest quantity of nostalgic reviews on MobyGames, Steam, and GOG.com, you’ve gone badly astray.
The canonical example of this disconnect is Myst. Widely dismissed by the hardcore set as nothing more than a slideshow of pretty pictures wired together with a handful of switch-flipping set-piece puzzles, Myst was the face of the multimedia revolution in personal computing in the eyes of Jack and Jill America during the 1990s. As a result, it became the best-selling single game of the decade. There’s a surprising number of other non-core-gaming successes of almost the same magnitude to be spotted if you only pause to look, most of them without the note of highbrow artsiness that has always elevated the discussion around Myst. The most successful game ever made by Dynamix — the studio behind such hardcore classics as Articfox, Red Baron, Betrayal at Krondor, and Aces of the Deep — was a far more populist offering called Trophy Bass, which as of this writing has precisely zero reviews on MobyGames. And don’t even get me started on Deer Hunter, the schlocky big-box-store sensation of the late 1990s, a punchline among hardcore gamers that just sold and sold and sold and sold.
A subtler example of the phenomenon — also one that gives a modicum more hope than Deer Hunter for the taste and intelligence of the proverbial unwashed masses, even as it cuts across some of the boundaries behind hardcore and casual play — is SimCity. Designed by Will Wright and published in early 1989 by a company he co-founded called Maxis Software, SimCity‘s combination of compulsive playability with the serious, adult-approved theme of urban planning famously inspired Time magazine to write its first computer-game review ever within mere weeks of its release. The sky was the limit from there. The rumpled, chain-smoking, mile-a-minute-talking Wright became a minor celebrity in his own right as magazines, newspapers, and even television shows piled in to cover this game and this man that conformed to none of their preconceived stereotypes. Reflecting on those heady days in 2013, Wright called SimCity "kind of the earliest example of a game that was leaning more to a mainstream audience. They were interesting people...