" The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 2: SimWorld The Digital Antiquarian
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The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 2: SimWorld
17<br>Jul
Would you trust these two men with your investment? Jeff Braun and Will Wright shortly before Maxis’s IPO.
This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software.
Maxis came into 1994 riding high on the wings of SimCity 2000, the hit of the previous holiday season. They followed up that success with… SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation. This may sound like satire, but it was all too real.
To be clear, SimHealth was not, say, a playful look at the life of a hospital, with eccentric doctors and bizarre made-up diseases. It wasn’t even an earnest simulation of performing surgery. No, this was exactly what it said on the tin, a simulation of healthcare in the most macro sense. It was, to put it another way, literally a simulation of government bureaucracy. If you were getting bored with saving fantasy worlds from evil wizards and fighting the Second World War over and over, said Maxis, you could buy this game and engage with some truly exciting dilemmas. "Who gets health insurance? What does it cover? Who pays for it? How do you control costs? How will your plan affect business, physicians, specialists, insurance companies, lawyers, medical research, and the average citizen?" Hours and hours of fun for the whole family, am I right? Um… am I right?
Ironically, this most defiantly esoteric Maxis game ever arose from the same set of circumstances that gave birth to the multi-million-selling SimCity 2000. The venture capitalists at Warburg Pincus Ventures, who had traded $10 million in cash for 30 percent of Maxis’s equity and a seat on its board in 1992, thought that the company could find a profitable sideline — or possibly even a mainline — in making simulations for Corporate America to use for internal training and planning. The sticking point was that neither Will Wright nor any of the other idealists around him had much interest in such things. Jeff Braun’s solution was to buy a little software house called Delta Logic, built around a couple of refugees from the wreckage of Digital Research, the firm that had made the most popular business-oriented personal-computer operating system in the world until Bill Gates and Microsoft came along. Since then, John Hiles, Greg Rossi, and their colleagues at Delta Logic had been tinkering with social simulations of various stripes. They were now to be rebranded Maxis Business Simulations, given a lot more money than they had ever had before, and set loose to realize the venture capitalists’ dreams. "There’s the potential for this new business to be bigger than the games business," enthused Braun dutifully.
That didn’t happen, although a surprising number of projects came and went during the less than two years that Maxis Business Simulations was a going concern. There were a simulation of an oil refinery for Chevron, a simulation of the power grid for the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, a simulation of a telephone network for a communications consultancy, a simulation of pollution management for the Environmental Protection Agency, and a simulation of the closure of a military base (?) for the new Maxis subsidiary’s hometown of Monterey, California. With the exception of a prototype version of SimRefinery, none of the actual software that resulted from these initiatives has been preserved, to whatever extent it came to exist at all. Constant churn was a fact of life at Maxis Business Simulations. It seems safe to say that the idea of doing corporate or civic planning via interactive simulations was one of those that looked better on paper than it tended to turn out on the computer screen.
SimHealth‘s origin story isn’t that different from most of the other Maxis Business Simulations projects. It began when the Markle Foundation, a bedrock of old-school American philanthropy, requested a simulation to illuminate one of the hottest political debates of the 1990s, as it seems to be of every decade: what, if anything, to do about the uniquely strange and byzantine American healthcare system. President Bill Clinton, who in January of 1993 became the first Democrat to occupy the Oval Office in twelve years, made reforming healthcare on a more efficient, equitable basis the flagship issue of his first term. So far, so good. But then he decided to place the project under the stewardship of his unelected wife Hillary Clinton, who was already at this early date a lightning rod for Republicans and no small percentage of independents. It turned into an epic fiasco, burning up most of the president’s political capital without benefiting anyone and setting the stage for a brutal midterm shellacking at the hands of the Republicans. Indeed,...