Sneak Preview: The Endless Hours of The Sims Online

Coming Next Thursday at 3:30pm Pacific

It was September, 2001, only a week after the terrorist attacks on America. While the nation was still recovering, the team behind The Sims Online at Maxis had its own serious issue to overcome: The follow-up to the best-selling computer game of all time was broken--and no one was sure how to fix it. "Last September, the general sense inside the company was that this game couldn't be made within two years," said Luc Barthelet, general manager of Maxis. "The game code was like a big bowl of spaghetti. It was all tangled up, largely because we had kept iterating off the original Sims code that was started seven years ago."

Within days, Barthelet came to realize what everyone else on the team didn't want to admit: The Sims Online was going to have to be reengineered from the ground up. "We needed to look at the game's 3 million lines of programming code, take it all apart, and reconnect it back together," he said. And that's exactly what the team did. On September 20, 2001, Maxis began the painful process of completely rearchitecting one of the most ambitious projects in the history of Electronic Arts.

Fourteen months later, the reengineering of the game has paid off. Right now, more than 50,000 people are participating in The Sims Online play test, and the development team is gearing up for the product's December 17 launch. Inside Maxis' Walnut Creek, California, offices, more than 100 employees are working hard to prepare the game for launch. But everyone knows that The Sims Online will never be done. The launch of the game is just another milestone in the endless development process of an online game. Even once the game ships, the team will have to support it with new features and new content. "I'm going to be observing and working on this game for the rest of my life," explained designer Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims.

Next Thursday, Geoff Keighley and GameSpot will take you behind the scenes at Maxis for an unprecedented look at the nearly three-year development process behind The Sims Online. For the first time ever, Will Wright opens up about the real story behind this highly anticipated project. You'll find out why he says The Sims Online scares him more than anything else he's ever done, and you'll also get a behind-the-scenes look at the game's play test and hear the untold stories about the game development, including the aborted concepts and the plans for the future. This is one Behind the Games you definitely won't want to miss--and you can read it only on GameSpot, next Thursday at 3:30pm Pacific.