[SimHacker]

At Maxis, we didn't arrive at the totally obvious name The Sims until very late in development.

At first there was the secret development name, Project X, but everybody had a Project X, and we certainly couldn't ship with that.

Then there was Jamie's obvious name, Dollhouse, which was quite descriptive, but boys would hate it.

Then there was Will's quirky name, Super Happy Friends Home, which only the Japanese would love.

Then there was Jim's high minded name, Jefferson, for the pursuit of happiness, but it made everybody think of the sitcom The Jeffersons.

Then there was the legendary perfectly descriptive catchy epic name, that everyone on the team really loved, which we dreamed up together in a brainstorming session when we were all quite stoned, but by the next day we all forgot it, and nobody could ever remember what it was again, although we could all distinctly remember the warm glow of knowing that it was the best possible name in the world, which everyone would love. Those were good times! ;)

But for some reason, during all that time, despite racking our brains, nobody ever though of "The Sims", which is retrospect was a totally obvious name for a continuation of the SimCity franchise focusing on the people in the city. (The original SimCity manual referred to the people in the city as "the Sims," so there was a long standing precedent.)

I have no idea who eventually came up with the name The Sims, and I'm happy with it, but it definitely wasn't the perfect name that everybody forgot. It's lost in the sands of time...

[lifeisstillgood]

The perfect name reminds me of the Douglas Adams story somewhere in his third Hitchhiker book - about the Reason.

  And sometimes, after some of the worst of these outrages,   
  the Dwellers in the Forest would send a Messenger to 
  either the Leader of the Princes of the Plains or the 
  Leader of the Tribesmen of the Cold Hillsides and demand 
  to know the reason for this intolerable behavior.


  And the Leader, whichever one it was, would take the   
  Messenger aside and explain the reason to him, slowly and 
  carefully, and with great attention to the considerable 
  detail involved.

  And the terrible thing was, it was a very good one. It was 
  very clear, very rational and tough. The Messenger would 
  hang his head and feel sad and foolish that he had not 
  realized what a tough and complex place the real world 
  was, and what difficulties and paradoxes had to be 
  embraced if one was to live in it.

  "Now do you understand?" the Leader would say.

  The Messenger would nod dumbly.

  "And you see these battles have to take place?"

  Another dumb nod.

  "And why they have to take place in the Forest, and why it 
  is in everybody's best interest. the Forest Dwellers   
  included, that they should?"

  "Er ..."

  "In the long run."

  "Er, yes."

  And the Messenger did understand the reason, and he 
  returned to his people in the Forest. But as he approached   
  them, as he walked through the Forest and among the trees, 
  he found that all he could remember of the reason was how 
  terribly clear the argument had seemed. What it actually 
  was, he couldn't remember at all.

  And this, of course, was a great comfort when next the 
  Tribesmen and the Princes came hacking and burning their 
  way through the Forest, killing every Forest Dweller in 
  their way.

[loceng]

Understanding allows for calm, energies from the unknown are able to be placed, to settle. Great little excerpt.

[HornThisWay]

Were you going to call it "The Buds"? I don't think that's a very good name, but if I was high, I'd probably think it was perfect.

[SimHacker]

By god, that very well might be it! I will have to test that theory be recreating the circumstances as accurately as possible. To science!!!

[pstuart]

Perhaps "Best Buds"?

[rmathew]

For the benefit of the non-native English speakers here or for those not too familiar with American culture, can you explain the awesomeness of this name?

[gwillen]

"Bud" is an abbreviation of "buddy", an informal term for "friend."

"Bud" is also a slang term for marijuana (which is made from the buds of the cannabis plant.)

[heyitsnick]

I have no connection to this in any way. Yet i'm extremely confident that was exactly it.

[acheron]

I seem to remember hearing it was going to be called "SimHouse" at one point.

"Super Happy Friends Home" is excellent, but yeah, I think "The Sims" worked out for the best. :)

[SimHacker]

Oh yeah, that sounds familiar! But that DEFINITELY was not the legendary name we all forgot. SimHouse and a few names like that were floated around, but they were't very exciting or apt, since the focus evolved from the architecture to the people.

The big problem was that nobody had any idea what players would think of it, so we just kept developing it and playing it and changing the design, while wondering about what it was all about.

There was one terrible phase we went through, trying to frame it like a simulated situation comedy, complete with a laugh track. That resulted in the first characters being named Edith and Archie (and I named the visual programming tool "Edith" for Edit House).

But fortunately the idea of simulating a TV show was eventually flushed down the toilet. It just took a few weeks to walk all the way to the bathroom. ;(

I was rooting for a weird name like "Perky Pat Layouts", based on Philip K Dick's book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which had an uncanny creepy plot about adults on drugs playing together with physical miniaturized doll houses in order to enter a shared virtual reality. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?bnum=577 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsN... But EA didn't like the idea of selling CAN-D...

I've put up some old design documents here: http://www.scribd.com/collections/4050497/The-Sims

This "Happy Friends Home" initial proposal from October 2 1996 is pretty funny, and captures the essence: http://www.scribd.com/doc/117483854/The-Sims-Happy-Friends-H...

[idm]

Those design documents are fantastic. I love peering into the creative design process.

[SimHacker]

It's interesting to look back over them and realize how many of those ideas we DIDN'T do! The hard but important part is cutting stuff that's not essential until you have something simple.

[marshray]

SimCity 2000 was one of my favorite games ever. The Sims was novel and fun. But every Sim-themed game my family has bought since has just not held interest for more than a couple hours at best.

Any thoughts on what happened to later Maxis games?

[SimHacker]

First I'll describe why I think that SimCity was so successful, and The Sims was even more successful:

Will gave a talk about designing user interface to simulation games back some time around '96, to Terry Winnograd's user interface design class at Stanford (at the time I worked with Terry at Interval Research), and I sat in on the class and took these notes:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/WillWright.html

He demonstrated an early version of The Sims, at the time called "Dollhouse", which he'd shown me an even earlier version of about a year before. At the time I was skeptical that he could get the AI to work, and I suggested he punt on the AI and just make an online multi player game. In retrospect, I sure was wrong!

In the talk, he discussed why previous Maxis games were successful, and gave a demo of "Dollhouse," describing what he thought would be interesting about that game, which eventually became The Sims. The key to the AI was putting the intelligence in the objects, instead of in the characters, and making it possible to plug in new objects with their own content and programming, to expand the game on an open-ended way.

The reason Will explained that SimCity was successful was that people already know a lot about the way cities work, so it's engaging, and it doesn't have to simulate details as much as just imply them, and let your imagination do the heavy lifting and colorful illustration. Computer games are much better at implicating than simulating, because any simulation is necessarily a vastly simplified caricature of reality, while your imagination is unlimited and has its own built-in "ai" and common sense knowledge base to draw on.

There are two important models involved in a simulation game: the sparse digital model in the computer, which stays the same, and the rich organic model in your brain, which grows and changes as you play and explore the behavior and limitations of the game. As you play the game, the computer is downloading the details of an organic model into your brain, which elaborates them based on what you already know, and links them into your global understanding.

It can be educational in that it makes you think about the issues you're dealing with, but you learn more by thinking about what you already know (and having your curiosity stimulated and being inspired to learn more), than it teaches you about what its simulation actually knows about. Instead of taking the simulation at face value as an accurate representation of reality, you explore and find the edges and limitations of the simulation, and compare them to reality. As you find the limitations of the game's model (in order to figure out how to take advantage of its limitations and cheat), you scoff at the game because you understand the world is much more complicated and nuanced than a computer game. But that's a good exercise to think about, and it stimulates you to discuss it with other people and learn more through other channels!

That is one aspect of what Seymour Papert and Alan Kay refer to as "Constructionist education": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theor...

Anyway, SimCity was successful because it was about a domain everybody knows a lot about. And The Sims was even more successful since it was even "closer to home", so to speak.

But most people don't know much about plate tectonics, ant colonies, evolution or galactic conquest, so while SimEarth, SimAnt and Spore might teach you something about those topics and stimulate your curiosity, they weren't able to engage people and play off of their vast existing knowledge as much as SimCity and The Sims did.

But independent of how engaging or commercially successful it was, I think Spore was a very interesting and successful experiment in several important aspects of game design, which had to be done.

When Will described the early concept to me, of an online game with multiple levels that moved at different time scales, the first obvious problem I saw was that it would be impossible to coordinate the independent timelines in a massively multiplayer online game, since at each level, time moved at a different speed, so different players would be traveling through time at different rates, and it would be impossible for them to interact with each other in real time.

But Spore solved that problem by being an "Massively Single Player Online Game", where players shared content asynchronously, but didn't directly interact together synchronously.

I think the idea of sharing user created content asynchronously online is a great one, and Spore performed it very successfully.

The other important concept that dovetails with that was tackling in-game content creation tools. And I think those were a wonderful success, and paved the way for other games to do similar things.

With games like The Sims, it has some easy-to-use in-game tools for building architecture, but you have to go outside of the game and use tools like Photoshop to make skins, 3D Studio Max to make meshes, Character Studio and Biped to make animations, etc.

We made some simplified tools for The Sims (like Transmogrifier) that let you make objects by exporting and importing bitmaps and editing them with 2D tools like Photoshop instead of requiring 3D tools like Max, which opened up content creation to a lot of people, but making 3D objects still remained a very tough problem, and we never released the tools we developed internally to do that, since they were very hard to use and had a lot of environmental dependencies (like requiring expensive commercial products).

Building 3D editing tools into the game the way Spore did was very ambitious, and I think it worked extremely well. The user interface was very easy and fun to use in and of itself, and it gave players a huge amount of freedom to make everything from walking penises to hopping penises to flying penises to crawling penises, and even penis huts, penis houses, penis towers, penis planes, penis trains, and penis mobiles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFOVYx90Ni8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv-NjbyhXFo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puv6pwG_AZo

Spore had some great and successfully executed ideas about building and sharing user created content in it, but since it was an amalgam of several different games, and each sub-game was kind of like a tribute to an existing classic game, those games in themselves were not any better than the existing games, and they were not very well integrated.

Here are some notes I took from Will's talk at GDC, which I had him review for accuracy at the time:

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/35

You can compare it to what Spore actually delivered, and see the differences. There was a big gap between the ideal design as he articulated at that time, and what they were able to finally deliver. Of course that was inevitable, when working for a big company like EA, even with the freedom they gave him.

There was an overall high concept that the stack of sub-games was a ladder you would climb to get to the higher level storytelling based game, and that you would then swoop down into the sub-games to perform scenes of the story. (The "T shaped game".) But the sub-games were never consequentially integrated enough for that to work. So I don't think the storytelling game was ever fully realized.

That gap between the original design and the final product was of course because of the harsh constraints of reality and the necessity to ship something. They had to simplify it a lot, of course. And different people had ownership of each level, and the design decisions that one person would make at a lower level would spill over to the next levels as constraints and limitations they had to work within.

I think the essential problem of how can each level consequentially effect the other levels in a way you can make a high level storytelling game around is a very hard one.

The high level storytelling missions don't really require you to go back to the previous levels you climbed to get up to the galactic conquest level, and I have a hard time imagining how they could even do that. ("Go down to the protozoa level and conquer the evil amoeba who is about to sabotage the delicate diplomatic negotiations, by making the president throw up in the prime minister's lap!")

[marshray]

What a great reply! Yes, we actually have gotten quite engaged with Spore.

You should consider pasting this into a blog post or somewhere that's slightly less ephemeral than an HN thread.

[bonobo]

> Then there was the legendary perfectly descriptive catchy epic name, that everyone on the team really loved, which we dreamed up together in a brainstorming session when we were all quite stoned

Have you considered it only seemed legendary because you were all stoned? When I'm drunk every idea seems a good idea...

I wonder if the name would still seem legendary if you guys had remembered it.

[SimHacker]

Why I never ... Uuuhh ... Hmmm ... It's hard to tell, you know. Well, maybe. Or maybe not. No way of telling, really. ;)

[bonobo]

I think we will never know. Just in case, if you ever wake up in the middle of the night with that (supposedly) legendary name back in your mind, could you please tell us? :)

[switz]

It's only 6 am, but this is my favorite story that I will read on the internet today. Thank you.

[SimHacker]

Maxis is "Six AM" spelled backwards!

[carlisle_]

You are a god walking amongst mere mortals.

[SimHacker]

Naw, I was just lucky to be hyperactive, and in the right place at the right time, plus I benefited from a lot of nice people who helped me get there.

There are a lot of great people lurking around here, but the really godly ones don't have time to surf the internet! The thing you realize by meeting such people is that there is really no limit on how much you can learn and what you can do. And it's a lot easier now to pick new stuff up, what with the internets and all those tubes. Just keep improving yourself all the time, and keep yourself open to luck.

And of course Will Wright has some great advice: Don't give up on your big dreams -- save and hone and cultivate them for later, when the time is right (and your skills and the technology have improved): "He encouraged designers with ideas for games that are far outside the box not to give up on those ideas, but instead to cultivate them and revisit them later, when the time, the team, and the technology might be right." http://www.gamespot.com/news/will-wright-wows-gdc-with-new-s...

[neumann_alfred]

hen there was Will's quirky name, Super Happy Friends Home, which only the Japanese would love.

?

I just saw a talk by him yesterday where he confirmed what you can read (and see) here, http://www.will-wright.com/willshistory7.php

Not that it has anything to do with your point, but still :P

[SimHacker]

Oh right, I totally forgot about the name "TDS", which stood for "Tactical Domestic Simulator" and survives in the name of some of the tools like TDSBuild: http://www.scribd.com/doc/117493077/The-Sims-TDSB