Maxis didn’t want to make professional simulation games. The last thing I want people to come away with is that we’re on the verge of being able to simulate the way that a city really develops, because we’re not.” 5 “That really scares me because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared to reality. “Many people come to us and say, ‘You should do the professional version,'” he continued. Will Wright didn’t believe that was even possible. 5 But that didn’t stop companies from believing Maxis could design realistic simulations. “I think if we tried to make it realistic, we would be doing something that we wouldn’t want to do,” Wright said in an interview in 1999. SimCity was always meant to be a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model of the way a city works.” 4 But we’ve kind of caricatured our systems. “I realized early on, because of chaos theory and a lot of other things,” said designer Will Wright, “that it’s kind of hopeless to approach simulations like that, as predictive endeavors. The game was inspired by research on real-world urban planning concepts, 2,3 and although it was created as a way for players to experiment with running a city, the goal was to be fun rather than accurate. SimCity wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. Thumbnail of the SimRefinery title screen.
