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Codesigner Chris Trottier has been one of the best-kept secrets about The Sims Online. |
"I remember the first company meeting [in 2000] where Will stood up and said, 'Look, I only want to take The Sims online if it's going to be a real quick, supereasy project we can do in under a year,'" recalls Chris Trottier, the soft-spoken female codesigner who is Wright's collaborator on The Sims Online. No matter what, Wright was sure that he didn't want The Sims Online to be a persistent-state world like EverQuest or Ultima Online. After all, while Maxis never announced the project, there was already a massively multiplayer Sim game under development at the studio: SimCity Online. For The Sims Online, Wright and his team came up with a simpler idea that could be executed in a matter of months: Why not release a Sims expansion pack that would let you place your house online?
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Will Wright sits in his office and recalls his original vision for the game. |
"Originally, our idea was that you'd set up your house and it would act as a server," recalls Wright. In essence, you would build your house offline and then open it up for online players to come and visit. "It was going to be a lot like the matchmaking service on [Blizzard's] Battle.net," says Wright. In other words, to visit someone else's house you'd actually connect directly to that player's computer. The idea seemed like a good compromise: It would be quick to develop, but it would also give the game online functionality.
A few months later, however, those plans would change. With Ultima Online already raking in tens of millions of dollars a year for EA.com, the executive team at EA and Maxis came up with an idea: Why not charge a subscription fee to play The Sims Online? "If you are going to charge people a subscription, you have to guarantee that your game will be a reliable experience," says Eric Todd, the game's development director. That wasn't going to be possible if players were connecting to another user's computer as opposed to a centrally controlled Maxis server.
At the same time, Wright admits he began to realize that the online expansion pack idea wasn't going to fully capture his vision for an online Sims game. "If we were just letting people set up houses as servers, there would be no macro level--no real economy in the world or the concept of neighbors," he explains. "I guess I realized that my vision for the game was about half Sims Online and half SimCity Online."
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Wright remembers talking to Snowcrash author Neal Stephenson about his idea for The Sims Online. |
It turns out that vision had been percolating in Wright's head for nearly a decade. Back in 1994, Wright told Wired magazine something that sounds downright prophetic in retrospect: "In 15 years...I can design a house that's so much fun I can charge people to visit it online, and I'll make a living sitting there and elaborating on it every day," he said. In many ways, a massively multiplayer Sims Online would fulfill that prediction. Wright further refined his ideas during a 1995 conversation with author Neal Stephenson, who is credited with creating the idea of the metaverse--a virtual community of avatars not unlike today's massively multiplayer games--in his novel Snowcrash. "In many ways I wanted The Sims Online to be like Snowcrash, where the players would create the world," Wright explains. "In fact, the original Sims was my attempt at creating a set of tools for players so they could eventually create their own world and avatar to take online."
And thus, The Sims Online was born.
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