Maxis canceled The Sims in the '90s, but it was saved by an unlikely hero: Electronic Arts
A world without The Sims is hard to imagine: countless virtual homes unbuilt, countless bizarre challenges unplayed, countless Sims untrapped in swimming pools without ladders. What kind of path would my life have taken if I hadn't been able to pack the first game full of mods so I could watch Batman and Gandalf be roommates? It's unthinkable, but it was nearly the world we got. In the late '90s, Maxis almost axed The Sims—not once, but multiple times.
The story comes from Spore designer Chaim Gingold's book Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, published last week by MIT Press. Through chronicling the design and creation of the gold standard city builder, Gingold charts the history of simulation games, and of the company that brought SimCity to the world. And in the late '90s, Gingold writes, Maxis had canceled the project that would eventually become The Sims, nearly spelling an early death for the studio's now-beloved series.
Building SimCity author Chaim Gingold is a designer and theorist whose work has been featured in Wired, CNN, and the New York Times. He worked closely with Will Wright on Spore and designed the Spore Creature Creator.
Shortly after the release of SimAnt, Will Wright—the famed Maxis designer—lost his house to the 1991 Oakland Hills wildfire. As his family rebuilt their life and home in the aftermath, Wright found himself fascinated with the material and psychological motivations of daily domestic life as a basis for simulating human behavior. «The right set of motivations and objects,» Gingold writes, would be the foundation for a new project that Wright hoped would «simulate people as elegantly as SimAnt simulated ants.» Wright called the project «Dollhouse.» We'd eventually know it as The Sims.
Dollhouse wasn't well-loved by Maxis management, however—in part thanks to the studio's gearing up for going public. Poorly-performing software releases and an industry that was ever-more expensive to compete in made Maxis averse to
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