William Ralph "Will" Wright is an American video game designer and
co-founder of the former game development company Maxis, and then part
of Electronic Arts. In April 2009, he left EA to run "Stupid Fun Club Camp",
an entertainment think tank in which Wright and EA are principal
shareholders. The first computer game Wright designed
was Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984, but it was SimCity that brought him to
prominence. The game was released by Maxis, a company Wright formed with Jeff
Braun, and he built upon the game's theme of computer simulation with
numerous other titles including SimEarth and SimAnt.
Wright's greatest success to date comes from being the original designer for The
Sims. The game spawned multiple sequels like The Sims 2, The Sims 3, and The
Sims 4 and expansions packs, and Wright has earned many awards for his work. His
latest work, Spore, was released in September 2008 and features gameplay
based upon the model of evolution and scientific advancement. The game sold
406,000 copies within three weeks of its release.
Early life and education After graduating at 16 from Episcopal
High School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he enrolled in Louisiana State
University, transferring two years later to Louisiana Tech. Beginning with a
start at an architecture degree, followed by mechanical engineering, he
fell into computers and robotics. He excelled in subjects he was interested
in—architecture, economics, mechanical engineering, military history, and
language arts. His earlier dream of space colonization remained, and was
joined by a love for robotics. After another two years at Louisiana
Tech, in the fall of 1980, Wright moved on to The New School in Manhattan. He
lived in an apartment over Balducci’s, in Greenwich Village, and spent much of
his spare time searching for spare parts in local electronics surplus stores.
After one year at the New School, Wright returned to Baton Rouge without his
degree, concluding five years of collegiate study.
Career Wright's first game was the helicopter
action game Raid on Bungeling Bay for the Commodore 64.
Wright found that he had more fun creating levels with his level editor
for Raid on Bungeling Bay than he had while actually playing the game. He
created a new game that would later evolve into SimCity, but he had trouble
finding a publisher. The structuralist dynamics of the game were in part
inspired by the work of two architectural and urban theorists,
Christopher Alexander and Jay Forrester. Wright, in an interview with The Times,
expressed belief that computers extend the imagination, and posits the
emergence of the "metabrain", stating: = Game designer=
In 1986, Wright met Jeff Braun, an investor interested in entering the
computer game industry, at what Wright has called "the world's most important
pizza party." Together they formed Maxis the next year in Orinda, California.
SimCity was a hit and has been credited as one of the most influential computer
games ever made. Wright himself has been widely featured in several computer
magazines—particularly PC Gamer, which has listed Wright in its annual 'Game
Gods' feature, alongside such notables as Roberta Williams and Peter Molyneux.
Following the success of SimCity, Wright designed SimEarth and SimAnt. He
co-designed SimCity 2000 with Fred Haslam and in the meantime Maxis
produced other "Sim" games. Wright's next game was SimCopter. Although none
of these games were as successful as SimCity, they further cemented Wright's
reputation as a designer of "software toys"—games that cannot be won or lost.
In 1992, Wright moved to Orinda, California.
Wright has a great interest in complex adaptive systems and most of his games
have been based around them or books that describe them) Wright’s role in the
development of the concepts from simulations to games is to empower the
players by creating what he dubs “possibility spaces”, or simple rules
and game elements that add up to a very complex design. All Maxis, and later
games that Wright had a hand in designing, adhere to these design
principles. Maxis went public in 1995 with revenue
of US$38 million. The stock reached $50 a share and then dropped as Maxis posted
a loss. EA bought Maxis in June 1997. Wright had been thinking about making a
virtual doll house ever since the early 1990s, similar to SimCity but focused on
individual people; after losing his home during the Oakland firestorm of 1991, he
was inspired to turn his experiences of rebuilding his life into a game. Sims
would be based on Wright's focus on building homes, which came from
inspiration he found first-hand. Wright, was even sure to include many fires in
the game, which were extra difficult for the player to extinguish. Themes like
carpentry, home construction, and bare ground in need of landscaping, are
common throughout the game. Originally conceived of as an architectural design
game called Home Tactics, Wright's idea changed when someone suggested the
player should be rated on the quality of life experience by the homeowners. It
was a difficult idea to sell to EA, because already 40% of Maxis's employees
had been laid off. When Wright took his idea to the Maxis
board of directors, Jeff Braun said, “The board looked at The Sims and said,
‘What is this? He wants to do an interactive doll house? The guy is out
of his mind. Doll houses were for girls, and girls didn’t play video games.'"
Maxis gave little support or financing for the game. However, EA was more
enthusiastic. Steven Levy wrote: "Wright’s games were so different from
EA’s other releases that it was hard to imagine the two being united in the same
enterprise." However, the success of SimCity had already established Sim as a
strong brand, and EA, which by then, fifteen years after its founding, was
becoming a Procter & Gamble-style brand-management company, foresaw the
possibility of building a Sim franchise. EA published The Sims in February 2000
and it became Wright's biggest success at the time. It eventually surpassed
Myst as the best-selling computer game of all time and spawned numerous
expansion packs and other games. He designed a massively multiplayer version
of the game called The Sims Online, which was not as popular as the
original. By November 2006, The Sims franchise had earned EA more than a
billion dollars. In a presentation at the Game Developers
Conference on March 11, 2005, Wright announced his latest game Spore. He used
the current work on this game to demonstrate methods that can be used to
reduce the amount of content that needs to be created by the game developers.
Wright hopes to inspire others to take risks in game creation.
As for his theories on interactive design, Wright has said the following:
Wright has said that he believes that simulations, as games, can be used to
improve education by teaching children how to learn. In his own words:
= Stupid Fun Club= After building his reputation as one of
the most important game designers in the world, Wright left Maxis in 2009. His
first post-EA venture was the Stupid Fun Club.
= Television producer= In October 2010, Current TV announced
that Will Wright will produce a new show for the network. The program, entitled
Bar Karma, began airing in February 2011.
= Linden Lab= In October 2011, Will Wright became a
member of the Board of Directors of Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life.
= Awards= Wright was given a "Lifetime Achievement
Award" at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001. In 2002, he became the
fifth person to be inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and
Sciences' Hall of Fame. Until 2006, he was the only person to have been honored
this way by both of these industry organizations. In 2007 the British
Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded him a fellowship, the first
given to a game designer. He has been called one of the most
important people in gaming, technology, and entertainment by publications such
as Entertainment Weekly, Time, PC Gamer, Discover and GameSpy. Wright was also
awarded the PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award in January 2005. Later
that year, Will earned the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Progress and Service
awarded by the Georgia Institute of Technology. He delivered a forward
looking acceptance speech entitled Stealth Communities.
= Personal life= In 1980, along with co-driver and race
organizer Rick Doherty, Wright participated in the U.S. Express, a
cross-country race that was the successor to The Cannonball Run. Wright
and Doherty drove a specially outfitted Mazda RX-7 from Brooklyn, New York to
Santa Monica, California in 33:39, winning the illegal race. Wright only
competed once in the race, which continued until 1983. Wright had a
daughter, Cassidy, in 1986, which motivated him greatly over the next five
years to hone his craft. Since 2003, in his spare time, Wright
has collected leftovers from the Soviet space program, "including a 100-pound
hatch from a space shuttle, a seat from a Soyuz... control panels from the Mir",
and the control console of the Soyuz 23, as well as dolls, dice, and fossils.
During E3 2004 he passed off an old lapel pin commemorating the Soviet space
program to a reporter. He once built competitive robots for
BattleBots with his daughter, but no longer does so. As of November 2006,
Wright still had remnant bits of machined metal left over from his
BattleBots days strewn about the garage of his home. Wright was a former Robot
Wars champion in the Berkeley-based robotics workshop, the Stupid Fun Club.
One of Wright's bots, designed with the help of Wright's daughter, Cassidy,
"Kitty Puff Puff", fought against its opponents by sticking a roll of gauze
onto its armature and circling around them, encapsulating them and denying
them movement. The technique, "cocooning", was eventually banned.
Following his work in BattleBots, he has taken steps into the field of
human-robot interactions. Wright currently lives in Oakland,
California with his wife, Anya, and their three sons.
Gameography References
Further reading Cifaldi, Frank. "E3 Report: The Path to
Creating AAA Games". Gamasutra. Retrieved May 26, 2007.
"Lifetime Achievement". PC Magazine. December 22, 2004. Retrieved May 26,
2007. Huck, James; Remo, Chris. "Will Wright –
Video Games Close To 'Cambrian Explosion' Of Possibilities". Gamasutra.
Retrieved June 9, 2008. Lobo, Chris; Schooler, Larry. "Playing
With Urban Life: How Simcity Influences Planning Culture". Archived from the
original on December 11, 2004. Retrieved May 26, 2007.
Remo, Chris. "Will Wright Feature Interview". Shacknews. Archived from the
original on October 17, 2006. Retrieved May 26, 2007.
Wright, Will. "Dream Machines". Wired. Retrieved May 26, 2007.
"Will Wright: Celebrate Failure". The New York Times. June 14, 2009.
External links Will Wright at MobyGames
Will Wright on Facebook = Audio/Video=
Presentation at SDForum, Lessons from Game Design, November 20, 2003
Presentation at Accelerating Change 2004, Sculpting Possibility Space,
November 7, 2004 Keynote at the Game Developers
Conference, August 31, 2005 Interview with the BBC, User-generated
future for gaming, May 19, 2006 Presentation at the Long Now Foundation
with Brian Eno, Play With Time, June 26, 2006
Interview on the Colbert Report, talking about Spore, December 5, 2006
Presentation at TED, Spore, birth of a game, March 2007
Presentation at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Annual Video
Games Lecture, October 23, 2007 Presentation at the Inventing the Future
of Games Symposium, Reality, Perception, and Culture, April 15, 2011