![]() ![]() For months, Wright was reportedly doing all the tech support out of Braun’s apartment. While at a pizza party thrown by a mutual friend, Wright and Braun hit it off and later co-founded the Maxis software company, which released SimCity in 1989. Fortunately, Wright had a chance encounter in 1987 with Jeff Braun, an entrepreneur who made font software and wanted to get into the video game industry. They wanted to market games that people could win-games that featured helicopters launching missiles. Wright took the idea to Broderbund, the company that had released Raid on Bungeling Bay, but they weren’t interested. Occasionally, an unforeseen occurrence like an earthquake or meteorite shower disrupted things. If you had a rise in crime, for example, your population would go down. ![]() They could adjust over 100 variables, but those adjustments would each have a consequence. The game, which he called SimCity, allowed players to build roads, erect schools, and fret over crime rates. Wright was inspired by works like Urban Dynamics, a 1969 book by MIT professor Jay Wright Forrester that argued urban development would be better suited for artificial intelligence than humans so it wouldn’t be compromised by intuitive biases. That got him thinking about a simulator that would allow users to erect buildings and then entire cities, acting as a kind of virtual urban planner. While the airborne attacks were fun, he was much more interested in writing the code for the buildings that players would destroy. It was while programming all this mayhem that Wright discovered something about himself. It was a big hit, selling well in the PC gaming market and even moving over a million Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges, mostly in Japan. The result was Raid on Bungeling Bay, a helicopter simulation that tasked players with destroying enemy strongholds on an island. Coupled with his knowledge of economics and military history, Wright’s eclectic background was laying the groundwork for a singular career in gaming.Īfter getting married and moving to Oakland, California, Wright decided to try his hand at programming a game on his Commodore 64. A clever strategy, but one also quickly banned in competition. He entered robot fighting tournaments and won by having his robot wrap the other combatants in gauze, rendering them immobile. Wright started attending Louisiana State University at the age of 16, transferred to Louisiana Tech, dropped out, and eventually studied robotics at the New School in Manhattan. He was also fascinated by architecture and engineering. He didn’t just want to suit up for NASA, though-he wanted to colonize outer space to relieve overpopulation problems on Earth. It can be played on Macs through Apple Arcade.Growing up in Atlanta, Will Wright dreamed of becoming an astronaut. ![]() I'm really hopeful we'll eventually see it on PC because it looks just as funny and weird as the other "What The" games.Ĭorrection: Cityscapes: Sim Builder is "optimized for mobile," but isn't technically "mobile-only," as we said initially. Some related news, good if you do subscribe to Apple Arcade and bad if you don't and don't plan to: Triband, the creators of the excellent comedy golf game What the Golf? also have a new game out called What The Car? and it's an Apple Arcade exclusive, too. I'm not sure I want to subscribe to Apple Arcade-I'd really prefer to buy games individually, and like Tyler says in his thoughts about the current state of PC Game Pass, it's easy to spend more money on a monthly subscription than the games themselves are worth. I'll probably check it out at some point-I recently played a city builder called Pocket City 2 on my phone and not only is it great but I'd really love to see some of its features come to city builders on PC. ![]()
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