Will Wright kindly requests that admirers stop describing him as a god.
“I don’t think God would concern himself with taking out the trash and cleaning the toilet,” he quipped while chain-smoking cigarettes. Besides, he’s an atheist.
But what is better shorthand to describe the man who created The Sims? The influential video game allowed players to act like gods themselves, building virtual neighborhoods populated by virtual families who pay virtual bills and complete virtual chores.
Players could improve the lives of their Sims by constructing McMansions filled with plush couches and flat-screen televisions. Or they could become vengeful, directing Sims to light fireworks indoors and paddle to exhaustion in a swimming pool with no exit.
Twenty-five years later, players are continuing to push the boundaries. Sure, there are glitzy houses and happy families in The Sims 4. But by modifying the game’s code, players have created a health care system as byzantine as the real American one and taught Sims how to wield pistols and knives. The game’s official expansion packs offer their own weirdness. Sims can become vampires and witches. They can even play The Sims.
“I never really thought of The Sims as inherently optimistic,” Wright, 65, said. “I always thought of The Sims as slightly sarcastically nostalgic for a past that never really existed.”
The Sims was a sandbox for the American dream when it was released on Feb. 4, 2000, with Wright pulling inspiration from biology, architecture, comics and psychology to dictate the rules of his virtual dollhouse. It was an unusual proposal at a time when most games were goal-oriented and linear, and a predecessor to create-your-own-adventure games like Minecraft that give players a pick axe and carte blanche.
Although more than 500 million people have played games in the Sims franchise, which is particularly popular with women, it was originally seen as a risk. Executives at the game studio Maxis had urged Wright to focus instead on the SimCity franchise, his urban-planning simulator from 1989 that had put the company at the forefront of American game design. “Everyone in the room hated the idea of The Sims,” Wright recalled.
The outlook initially worsened after Electronic Arts acquired Maxis in 1997. Some managers wanted the game to be less realistic; others wanted to prevent it from being released at all.
But other leaders saw promise in Wright’s vision. “We wanted to make SimCity bigger,” said Luc Barthelet, who was then an Electronic Arts executive and brought in key resources for The Sims’s development team. “But we also needed to invest in designers like Will who were extremely talented and doing things that were different.”
Claire Curtin, who helped invent Simlish, a gibberish language spoken by the game’s characters, said developers refined its social system by imbuing the Sims with needs like hunger, comfort and hygiene. Neglecting those needs could lead to starvation, anxiety attacks and bladder problems.
“When I joined there wasn’t really any social game between the Sims,” she said. “There was no love; there certainly was no woohoo,” she said, using an in-game euphemism for sex.
The final product included the hierarchy of needs — and a lot of shopping.
The Sims was a satirical take on American consumerism. Wright echoed the grandiose claims of postwar advertising in the game’s furniture catalog, which offered Sims toasters and chairs that promised to change their lives. There was often a correlation between the price paid for an item and how much it would improve a Sim’s mood.
“You buy all these things,” he explained. “Fridges and TVs. And all these things promise to make you happy. But at some point they all start breaking down. They become hidden time bombs.”
The Sims were poorly equipped to handle those catastrophes. When a stove caught fire, the entire family would run into the kitchen to scream in terror. They would often allow themselves to be engulfed in flames instead of reaching for an extinguisher. And once the Grim Reaper arrived to replace their bodies with urns, the game had essentially ended.
Each disaster was carefully engineered. “In early versions of the game, the autonomy was too good,” Wright said. “Almost anything the player did was worse than the Sims running on autopilot.” So he infused his simulation with a little chaos to make players feel like anything could happen. Even guinea pigs, introduced as low-maintenance pets, might accidentally bite a character and leave them with a deadly disease.
Wright wanted players to feel like they were gods controlling stupid ants when, in reality, they were actually ants pretending to be gods. Even the cheat codes that could change the moods of Sims or instantly increase funds were intentionally included by developers to make players feel like they were breaking the game.
Ants are a poignant metaphor for Wright, who pulled The Sims through a grueling seven-year development process after the Oakland-Berkeley firestorm in 1991 destroyed most of his belongings.
“When I returned to the ashes of my house, I noticed that the only things still alive were ants,” said Wright, whose insect simulator SimAnt was published that year. “They had burrowed deep into the ground to survive the fire and were living off the dead carcasses of what they could forage.”
Ants use pheromones to communicate with one another, leaving their intelligence across the environment to mark areas filled with food or predators. Wright wondered: Could human intelligence be distributed in a similar way? Instead of pheromones, The Sims uses objects as behavioral markers (a hungry Sim might be automatically drawn to the fridge). It was a modular approach that allowed designers to expand the game — and its revenue.
“A long time ago, I decided that game design is applied psychology,” Wright said.
Even before The Sims was released, developers invited people to create custom content, providing basic programming tools for the invention of in-game furniture. As more players adopted the software, content creators opened websites and offered subscription platforms that provided a steady income.
“The people who were really invested in the game weren’t even playing The Sims,” Wright said. “They were maintaining websites for the community.”
It was the beginning of a community-driven phenomenon that continued with The Sims Online in 2002. “A noble failure,” Wright said of the Wild West iteration where players could interact with one another. Users developed new personas, fueling a national debate about the limits of free expression online. Some players operated digital bordellos; others formed mafias.
“We figured out who the godfather was,” Wright attested as he grabbed his red lighter to fire up another cigarette. “It was the lead homemaker of the Bellagio in Las Vegas.”
A die-hard community of players have learned to create new rules within the game’s code that go far beyond what Wright imagined. They are largely broken into two factions: the realists and the extremists.
The realists started with the creation of a financial system that enabled players to apply for debit cards and take bank loans; later modifications included lawn mowing and funeral services. Extremists introduced madcap violence, allowing innocent Sims to be drop-kicked into lightning bolts. Others had their bloody corpses secured behind police tape as journalist Sims described the scene.
“As much as we have set out to carve spaces particularly for custom content, players will always find some way around,” said Lyndsay Pearson, who was a quality assurance tester on the pets expansion of the original game and now oversees the franchise’s creative design.
Electronic Arts has indicated that there is no plan for The Sims 5 and that The Sims 4, which was released in 2014 and became free to play in 2022, will continue to be supported with the sale of expansion packs. Recent expansions have allowed Sims to become landlords, horseback riders and cottagecore enthusiasts.
“We are committed to reinvent what it means to play with life,” Pearson said. “The world keeps changing but there is always something for the Sims to do.”
Wright left The Sims shortly after its sequel started development, envisioning that the game would evolve into a version of “The Truman Show,” where “the boundaries are as far out as we can make them.” One joke among current players is to create a secret basement of “painting goblins” who are locked into small rooms. Their basic needs are met while they create piles of paintings to sell for the Sims who live above them.
Wright had since built other universes like Spore, an evolution game where players helped a civilization grow from microbes into galactic emperors, and “Bar Karma,” a television series where viewers pitched the story ideas. His current game project, Proxi, is about transforming personal memories into lifelike characters using artificial intelligence.
“I never really liked the idea of working on sequels,” Wright said of The Sims. “But I’m happy to see the franchise survive and grow in different directions.”
The Sims 2, released in 2004, leaned further into narrative. Players could engineer detailed stories for their Sims, who were equipped with aspirations, desires and fears. Neighborhoods were customizable and spun with a spider web of social entanglements that echoed the desperate housewives and cheating husbands seen on reality television.
One Sim named Don Lothario had a romantic entanglement with multiple women, including Nina and Dina Caliente, two sisters who lived together. Lothario was also planning to marry the daughter of a wealthy family whose matriarch, Bella Goth, had mysteriously disappeared. Players might later discover that Bella was abducted by aliens and deposited in a desert village called Strangetown.
Zooming into this desert pit stop, gamers might discover an odd Stonehenge on the neighborhood’s outskirts. There among the rocks is a Mount Rushmore-size dedication to Wright, sculpted with glasses so he can watch over players’ creations.