Sims Creator's Next Project Is Not a Game

The creator The Sims has released his first ever standalone app, a social media application called Thred.

In an interview with Business Insider, Will Wright revealed the inspiration for its creation, "My phone is how I'm consuming most of my content, but a lot of the content I've noticed wasn't really designed for it."

Thred features a variety of tools that allows users to customize their social media feeds. Wright said his initial interest in communities who shared their creations spawned from games like The Sims and Spore, both of which he's worked on.

"'Sims' also had very rich storytelling, where people would use these little dolls and sets to tell these elaborate stories and share them and you'd get hundreds of thousands of stories--people did whole novels in there. I started thinking about how we can give people more creative content creation, and a lot of it comes down to there really isn't any existing content format that I feel like was designed for the mobile phone, you know the one-handed interstitial, standing in line at Starbucks kind of thing," Wright said.

Wright co-founded Maxis in 1987, where he designed classic city-building simulation game SimCity. Maxis was acquired by Electronic Arts in 1997, after which the studio went on to develop SimCity 3000 and The Sims. Wright departed from Maxis in 2009 to form The Stupid Fun Club, a start-up backed by EA which Wright described as an "entertainment think tank."

You can download the free app on iTunes right now.