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(Image credit: 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.
Chaim GingoldSocial Links NavigationAuthor, former Maxis designerBuilding 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.
Chaim GingoldSocial Links NavigationAuthor, former Maxis designerBuilding 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.
Chaim GingoldSocial Links NavigationAuthor, former Maxis designer
Chaim GingoldSocial Links Navigation
Social Links Navigation
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.
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.
“Doubt and hostility to Dollhouse was pervasive,” Gingold writes. Jeff Braun, Maxis’s then-CEO and a primary source for Gingold’s book, summarized the sentiment studio management held at the time: “A dollhouse? That’s for little girls.” The ’90s game industry was still firmly in the era of assuming that only dudes bought games, and from what Maxis could tell, dudes did not want Dollhouse. The studio’s marketing focus tests pitched the concept to teenage boys, Gingold writes, “and found that they hated it.”
(Image credit: Maxis, Electronic Arts)
“In retrospect, it seems totally insane because it expanded the market,” Gingold said in an interview with PC Gamer, “but I think that’s the benefit of hindsight.” While Dollhouse’s potential seems obvious in 2024, Maxis could only see it as a failure for their target audience. Still, Dollhouse endured, thanks in part to Wright rebranding it internally as a “Tactical Domestic Simulator” called “Project X” to evade the lasting sense of focus-tested doom.
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Also responsible for The Sims' eventual success were Claire Curtin and Roxy Wolosenko, Maxis designers who were shifted to work as co-designers alongside Wright from canceled projects following the EA acquisition. And even Wright’s daughter, Cassidy, had a hand in shaping the game: According to Gingold, she’d played early prototypes, and like Martin and Greene had helped convince Wright to abandon an early emphasis on architectural efficiency.
Finding new support at EA, the project would release in 2000 as The Sims. Turns out, it did pretty well. Gingold writes that “as of 2020, the franchise has earned EA over $5 billion.”
Recent updatesThe original version of this article quotes Building SimCity as stating that Maxis artists Jenny Martin and Suzie Greene invented the Sims' distinctive look, which is not a claim made in the book. The article originally called Robin Harper Maxis' vice president—Robin Harper was Maxis' vice president of marketing. The article has been updated to address those inaccuracies.
Recent updatesThe original version of this article quotes Building SimCity as stating that Maxis artists Jenny Martin and Suzie Greene invented the Sims' distinctive look, which is not a claim made in the book. The article originally called Robin Harper Maxis' vice president—Robin Harper was Maxis' vice president of marketing. The article has been updated to address those inaccuracies.
Recent updates
The original version of this article quotes Building SimCity as stating that Maxis artists Jenny Martin and Suzie Greene invented the Sims' distinctive look, which is not a claim made in the book. The article originally called Robin Harper Maxis' vice president—Robin Harper was Maxis' vice president of marketing. The article has been updated to address those inaccuracies.
More about the simsThe Sims designer Will Wright says a ‘Britney Spears-level’ pop star loved her ‘mundane’ life in The Sims: ‘It is so boring, it’s wonderful’I just found out you can become a car thief in The Sims 3 and somehow it led to love at first sight with the man who burgled my homeLatestIs the new RTX 5070 really as fast as Nvidia’s previous flagship RTX 4090 GPU? Turns out the answer is yes. Kinda.See more latest►
More about the simsThe Sims designer Will Wright says a ‘Britney Spears-level’ pop star loved her ‘mundane’ life in The Sims: ‘It is so boring, it’s wonderful’I just found out you can become a car thief in The Sims 3 and somehow it led to love at first sight with the man who burgled my homeLatestIs the new RTX 5070 really as fast as Nvidia’s previous flagship RTX 4090 GPU? Turns out the answer is yes. Kinda.See more latest►
More about the simsThe Sims designer Will Wright says a ‘Britney Spears-level’ pop star loved her ‘mundane’ life in The Sims: ‘It is so boring, it’s wonderful’I just found out you can become a car thief in The Sims 3 and somehow it led to love at first sight with the man who burgled my home
More about the sims
The Sims designer Will Wright says a ‘Britney Spears-level’ pop star loved her ‘mundane’ life in The Sims: ‘It is so boring, it’s wonderful’I just found out you can become a car thief in The Sims 3 and somehow it led to love at first sight with the man who burgled my home
The Sims designer Will Wright says a ‘Britney Spears-level’ pop star loved her ‘mundane’ life in The Sims: ‘It is so boring, it’s wonderful’
The Sims designer Will Wright says a ‘Britney Spears-level’ pop star loved her ‘mundane’ life in The Sims: ‘It is so boring, it’s wonderful’
I just found out you can become a car thief in The Sims 3 and somehow it led to love at first sight with the man who burgled my home
I just found out you can become a car thief in The Sims 3 and somehow it led to love at first sight with the man who burgled my home
LatestIs the new RTX 5070 really as fast as Nvidia’s previous flagship RTX 4090 GPU? Turns out the answer is yes. Kinda.See more latest►
Latest
Is the new RTX 5070 really as fast as Nvidia’s previous flagship RTX 4090 GPU? Turns out the answer is yes. Kinda.
Is the new RTX 5070 really as fast as Nvidia’s previous flagship RTX 4090 GPU? Turns out the answer is yes. Kinda.
Is the new RTX 5070 really as fast as Nvidia’s previous flagship RTX 4090 GPU? Turns out the answer is yes. Kinda.
See more latest►
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This Jinx-inspired gaming PC is my favorite of CES 2025 and I’m head over heels for the hardware
Harrowing report alleges years of horrific abuse at Brandoville Studios, an Indonesian support studio that worked on Assassin’s Creed Shadows and The Last of Us Remake
Tencent says it’s not a Chinese military company and is willing to sue the US Department of Defense if it isn’t removed from a blacklist
All Zenless Zone Zero 1.5 livestream codes
Asus reveals three new Slash Travel Bags for carting around your ROG Ally—however, none of them are particularly fashion forward
Today’s Wordle answer for Friday, January 10
We may not have a roadmap or balance patch just yet, but at least Path of Exile 2’s bugfix patch notes are funny
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It seems like Square’s finally consistently taking the PC ports of Final Fantasy seriously
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