Will Wright

William Ralph Wright, born January 20, 1960, in Atlanta, Georgia, is an American video game designer and co-founder of the development company Maxis, best known for creating the open-ended simulation games SimCity, The Sims, and Spore.¹⁵¹³⁵ His work established a genre of non-violent, open-ended games built around complex adaptive systems, redefining what a commercial video game could be about.¹⁹¹⁰

Wright was the son of William (Bill) Wright, a chemical engineer who owned Wright Plastics Company, and Beverly Edwards, a community theater actress.¹⁵ When he was nine, his father died, and his mother moved the family to her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Wright lived until he was 18.¹⁵² As a boy he built models of tanks, ships, and planes and used them for diorama and wargame play, before moving on to robotics, cobbling together home-made robots from salvaged electrical materials and building his first robotic arm from hypodermic needles at 13.¹⁵ He bought an Apple II to control his robots and found that programming and artificial intelligence interested him more than the mechanics.¹⁵

After graduating from high school at 16 following three years and one summer-school class, Wright enrolled at Louisiana State University, then transferred to Louisiana Tech and the New School University in New York, studying architecture, mechanical engineering, and aviation and earning his pilot’s license, but he attended college for five years without taking a degree.¹⁵² He met Joell Jones, an artist twelve years his senior and the older sister of a childhood friend, one summer while she was recovering at her family’s home; he dropped his college plans and followed her to California, settling in Oakland.¹⁵² An enthusiast of long-distance road rallying, he once won a coast-to-coast race in a souped-up Mazda RX-7 with a time of 33 hours, 39 minutes, talking his way out of speeding tickets along the way.¹⁵

SimCity and Maxis

Wright’s first game, Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984), was a war game in which the player flew a helicopter to bomb islands; it was published by Broderbund and sold well in Japan though it gained little traction in the United States.²¹⁵ While building the game’s landscape of islands, roads, and buildings, Wright found he enjoyed creating the terrain more than destroying it, an interest that led directly to SimCity.²⁴¹⁹

Without an interested publisher, SimCity sat unfinished until a 1986 party at an Alameda apartment, where Wright met entrepreneur Jeff Braun, who wanted to enter the video game market.² Braun was captivated by the prototype despite Wright’s repeated insistence that the city-building concept—lacking clear winners and losers—would fail commercially.² The two founded Maxis in 1987, and SimCity was released in 1989 to instant success, with a full-page story in Newsweek helping cement its place.¹⁶²¹⁹ The game and its spin-offs went on to sell more than 17 million copies, and it is credited with introducing the mass market to the simulation game and founding a genre of open-ended, non-violent play.¹¹⁹

Maxis followed SimCity with a string of simulation titles through the 1990s, including SimEarth: The Living Planet (1990), a world-builder in which players seed a planet with primitive life, SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (1991), SimCity 2000 (1993), SimCopter (1996), and SimCity 3000 (1999).¹⁹¹⁷ Maxis went public, reaching $55.4 million in sales in 1996, but revenue fell the following year and the company posted a loss; in 1997 Electronic Arts acquired Maxis in a stock deal worth $125 million, a move that required laying off about 40 percent of the company’s roughly 240 employees.²

The Sims and Spore

The acquisition allowed Wright to pursue a project he had described as a “doll house,” in which players control characters as they eat, work, find a spouse, and decorate their homes.² Originally conceived as an architectural design simulator, the game added small inhabitants to “score” the quality of buildings; the simulated people stole the spotlight, and Wright recognized that watching their lives unfold was the real entertainment.¹⁹ Released in 2000, The Sims became the best-selling PC game of 2000 through 2003 until its sequel The Sims 2 surpassed it, and the franchise—described by EA as drawing players of whom 20 percent were over 35 and 50 percent female—has sold well over 100 million copies worldwide.¹⁹¹²

Wright’s next project, Spore, released in September 2008, traces a player’s creature from a single microbial cell through evolution into a space-faring civilization.¹⁹ He cited as inspirations Powers of Ten, a 1977 documentary film by Charles and Ray Eames depicting the universe across scales, the Dutch schoolteacher Kees Boeke’s 1957 book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, and the astrobiologist Frank Drake’s equation for estimating the prevalence of intelligence in the galaxy.¹⁹ Electronic Arts reportedly invested some $20 million in the game.¹ Spore sold 406,000 units in its first month and was named to Time magazine’s “50 Best Inventions of 2008”.⁶¹⁹

Later career

On April 8, 2009, Wright announced he was leaving Electronic Arts after twelve years to devote himself to Stupid Fun Club, a venture he and his friend Mike Winter had started years earlier after meeting while competing in Robot Wars and Battlebots.⁵¹²³ Reconstituted as an entertainment “think tank” developing new intellectual property across video games, films, television, the internet, and toys, the club was jointly owned by Wright and EA, which retained first refusal on game projects.⁵¹¹ Lucy Bradshaw continued to run Maxis and the Spore franchise.⁵ Wright produced the show Bar Karma for Current TV in 2010.¹³

Wright has served on the board of directors of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, and is a member of the board of trustees of the X Prize Foundation.¹³¹⁴ From 2015 he became absorbed in Proxi, an AI-driven life simulation built from a player’s own memories, on which he spent a decade and a million dollars of his own money through his studio Gallium Games, with the game still unfinished as of late 2024.¹⁸²⁰

His honors include the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2001, induction as the fifth member of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in 2002, the PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award and the Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Progress and Service from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2005, a fellowship from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2007, and the first Spike TV Video Game Awards’ Gamer God Award in 2008.¹⁶¹⁹¹⁴