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I worked at Maxis for about six months during the middle part of the events described in the article. I started during the tumultuous days surrounding the init
by mewse 5y ago
I worked at Maxis for about six months during the middle part of the events described in the article. I started during the tumultuous days surrounding the initial attempt at SimCity 3000 (I didn’t work on that project, though I saw its prototypes from time to time), up until shortly after the EA buyout was announced (but before it actually happened).
On my first day at work there was a giant poster in the reception area which you’d see on your way back out to the elevators, which began with the text, “To departing staff:”. The SimCity 3k debacle was already bleeding their staff, and I remember thinking — even as a fresh university graduate with no real work experience — that that probably wasn’t a good sign. (I don’t remember noticing it again after the first day; it may actually have only been up for that one day)
My cubicle was about two meters from Wil Wright’s glass-fronted office, with direct line of sight into it. My major regret is that I never introduced myself to him or even spoke to him at all (I was just a fresh university graduate and he was freaking Wil Wright. And also, he always looked kind of stressed and unhappy in there and I never wanted to impose)
RE: the story’s comment “There was absolutely no explanation as to why SimCity 3000 needed to be 3D,” I again wasn’t actually on that project, but it was clear to see that it wasn’t possible to make the game in 3D at that time. This was the era of the original 3DFX Voodoo card, and there were only two of them in the entire company (and somehow I had one of them and I never understood why). But the reason I was given for making the game in 3D was that it was a decision from Marketing; it was a core game bullet point that was going to be required if SimCity 3000 was going to save the company the way that SimCity 2000 had done. No 3D? The company wouldn’t survive. So there were epic battles between marketing and sales saying that it was what was required to save the company on one side, and the programmers who would have to actually implement the game saying that it wasn’t technically possible on the other side.
It was an interesting situation to be tossed into as your first thing out of university, I have to say. Even if I was kind of over to one side working on Streets of SimCity and only seeing it in my peripheral vision.
- PLenz 5y agoI just want to say that my brother and I played _the_hell_ out of Streets. So thanks for being a small part of our childhoods.
- Mezzie 5y agoI did as well! I also shared a lot of crazy driving cities online.
- willismichael 5y ago> Streets of SimCity Maybe that's why you had a Voodoo card? My brothers and I loved Streets of SimCity. That you could load your game from SimCity 2000 and drive around in it was genius. We had so much fun with that game. The ridiculous songs on the radio and the over-the-top cheesy dialog were just icing on the cake.
- hattmall 5y agoI love it too, if I remember correctly I believe you could set it up to play your own mp3s in the car radio.
- xattt 5y agoI devoured all and any news around Maxis and Sim games as a kid, from Happy Puppy and the like. I don’t think I ever made a connection at that point in time that it was possible to be part of the action, however dire the situation was in reality.
- ReactiveJelly 5y agoLike the other two commenters, me and my brother also played Streets! I'd love to hear dev gossip stories about its development. I'd love to hear what kind of delicious spaghetti code caused it to crash all the time and then eventually stop running on newer CPUs. Edit: And why, IIRC, some of the weapons were split out into their own DLLs. Faster compile times?
- mewse 5y agoObviously there were some amazing physics hacks to make it possible at all to drive a car over the sorts of extreme slopes (and extreme changes in slope) from SimCity 2000 maps, where the ground was always either completely flat or else a 45 degree upward slant. IMHO the physics folks did an amazing job in trying to paper over all those problems, but there was one known driving physics bug that I'm pretty sure we never managed to fix, and it was this: Setup: in SimCity 2000, put a railroad track adjacent to a road so that the two are parallel with each other. Have them travel flat, then up a slope, and then flat again. Loading the map into Streets, drive your car so that two of its wheels (either the left wheels or the right wheels) are on the road, and the other two are on the railroad tracks. Now drive as quickly as you can, keeping your wheels on the two different surfaces. Everything seems fine until you crest the hill at the top, at which point the various physics hacks trying to keep a vehicle from bottoming out as it goes over the hill compound with each other catastrophically, and the car gets launched into the air like a rocket; flying high into the air and super fast, typically wrapping around the entire world a half dozen times before finally coming back down far enough to hit anything. RE: the DLLs, I don't remember the reasoning for separate DLLs for the weapons, but it was kind of amazing for our LAN sessions; you could create your own weapon as a DLL and it'd just work in the networked games even if your opponents didn't have it (since your client is authoritative over your own projectiles), and they could use any art asset available to the rest of the game. I remember in particular one LAN session where one of the programmers had made a custom weapon which just caused a mayor statue to smash down from the sky, instantly destroying their foe. You'd never get away with leaving those sorts of holes open in a networked game these days; in retrospect it was ripe for all sorts of abuse. (I don't know whether they hardened that at all before shipping the game, but it was a different era back then)
- DonHopkins 5y agoLGR's Streets of SimCity Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi60A2-PcpM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi60A2-PcpM