Will Wright | Code Like It's 198x

Will Wright’s career began with a mistake of emphasis. In the early 1980s he was writing Raid on Bungeling Bay, a Commodore 64 game about bombing factories on a chain of islands, and he built himself an editor to lay the islands out. He found he was enjoying the editor more than the game. “I was fascinated by bringing a city to life,” he told Retro Gamer. “At first I just wanted to do a traffic simulation, but then I realised that traffic didn’t make a lot of sense unless you had places where the people drove to… and that led, layer upon layer, to a whole city.” The result was SimCity, a game with no way to win, which nobody would publish until Wright co-founded Maxis to do it himself. Ten years later he turned the same idea on a single house and its family, and The Sims became his biggest success.

Fast facts

Born: 1960, in Atlanta, Georgia
First game: Raid on Bungeling Bay (Brøderbund, 1984)
Company: co-founded Maxis with Jeff Braun in 1987; Electronic Arts bought it in 1997
Best known for: SimCity (1989), SimEarth (1990), SimAnt (1991), The Sims (2000), Spore (2008)
Since 2009: the Stupid Fun Club, then Gallium Studios and Proxi

Robots, then games

Wright told Retro Gamer that he spent most of his childhood “building models and obsessively researching various subjects”, from 20th-century history and Houdini to insects, airships, astronomy and explosives, a subject at a time for six months or a year. Game design, he said, “gives me an excuse to go out and research these wildly different things”. After school he studied architecture and mechanical engineering. His interest in robots led him to buy an Apple II to connect to one of his machines, and the computer gave him a new subject: programming. Computer Gaming World later described the same turn, with the programming side of robotics, his “first love”, taking over until he pursued it full-time.

Raid on Bungeling Bay

Raid on Bungeling Bay came out for the Commodore 64 on disk in 1984, from the publisher of Choplifter, and it was set in the same world: the Bungeling Empire and its “computerized War Machine”. Electronic Games reviewed it in December 1984 under the credit “Designed by Will Wright”. The player flies helicopters off an aircraft carrier to bomb six factories spread across a 100-screen map, each harder to destroy than the last. The parts of the War Machine depend on each other: knocking out radar makes the choppers harder to spot, and sinking supply ships slows the factories. Arnie Katz called it “a riveting blend of fast action and tactical challenge”. In Britain Ariolasoft released it in 1985.

The factories in Raid grew and developed if the player left them alone, which Retro Gamer saw as an early sign of what came next. The bigger legacy was the editor. As Computer Gaming World told it in 2002, “he realized he was having more fun scrolling around the map than he was playing Bungeling Bay”.

SimCity and Maxis

Wright researched urban planning and, according to Computer Gaming World, found his way to John Conway’s cellular automata and Jay Forrester’s system dynamics. He also took inspiration from Stanisław Lem. In 2000 he told the same magazine that “Klapaucius is my hero”, naming the robot constructor of Lem’s stories, one of which has a deposed tyrant given a miniature city with synthetic citizens to rule.

He wrote the first version of SimCity on the Commodore 64; Edge later put it at 8,000 lines of machine code. Brøderbund, he recalled, “kept waiting for it to turn into a game, with a win or lose at the end. That’s not what I envisioned it becoming. As far as I was concerned the ‘game’ was done.” He met Jeff Braun, who wanted to get into publishing games, at a party in 1987, and the two formed Maxis to release it. The finished game came out in early 1989 for the Macintosh and Amiga, with Brøderbund as distributor. The C64 version followed, and Wright said it was released “untouched from what I was working on” years before.

“From the very beginning I didn’t want to impose a firm goal state on the player,” he told Retro Gamer in 2013. “I always thought it was much more interesting to have the player decide in their own head what constitutes a ‘good’ city; low crime, no traffic, high land values, fast growth?” Computer Gaming World made SimCity its Strategy Game of the Year for 1989, crediting Wright with the design and with a share of the graphics and sound, and noting that “‘They’ told him it wouldn’t sell”. He had not expected it to either. “Back then, computer games were much more action-oriented,” he said in 2002. “I never expected SimCity to sell like it did.”

The Sim games

At Maxis he moved to much larger and much smaller subjects. SimEarth (1990) simulated a whole planet, drawing on James Lovelock’s idea of the Earth as a single self-regulating system. SimAnt (1991) went down to an ant colony, inspired by the biologist Edward O. Wilson, and gave the player clearer goals than any Maxis game before it. Wright was candid about SimEarth. “It was very popular among twelve year olds, and I thought it would be hitting an older audience,” he said. “I enjoyed the simulation but it wasn’t much of a game.”

He had not meant to work on SimCity 2000 (1993). “I actually was trying to avoid working on it. I had another game I wanted to focus on at the time - which later became The Sims. We had another guy working on it, but the progress was way too slow. At that point I dropped everything and started working on it with him.”

The Sims

That other game began with house-design software. “I was always fascinated by those architectural design programs,” Wright told Edge in its January 2000 issue. “They sell so many copies, but not many people are designing houses. I think that means people are using them as toys.” Retro Gamer gave its early name as Home Tactics. The problem was how to score a house, and the answer was people: “By watching a simulated family living in the house we thought we could somehow use them to measure the efficiency of your architectural design.” The family soon mattered more than the building. “The simulated people have become much more interesting than we’d hoped - and so the game has shifted more on to the people and less on to the house.”

Later accounts link the idea to October 1991, when Wright’s home was destroyed in the Oakland hills fire and he had to replace everything he owned. Those accounts also name Christopher Alexander’s book A Pattern Language as an influence on the game’s architecture.

Electronic Arts bought Maxis in 1997, and The Sims came out in February 2000. Computer Gaming World added Wright to its Hall of Fame in 2001, and Retro Gamer put the game’s sales at more than 16 million copies by 2008. He moved on to The Sims Online, which he described in 2002 as “in many ways… a combination of The Sims and SimCity”. Asked for his favourite games that year, he named the board game Go, Sid Meier’s Civilization and the original The Legend of Zelda.

Spore

Spore, which started under the working title SimEverything, was in development from about 2000 and came out in 2008. Edge described its stages in 2006: a single-celled game like a protozoan Pac-Man, a creature the player designs in an editor and then controls directly, and eventually a species making its first trips into space. “I think the breadth of experiences in Spore will be higher than all my other games put together,” Wright told Retro Gamer before its release. “I think, like The Sims, Spore is evolving to be even more toy and less hardcore sim.”

After Maxis

On 8 April 2009 Electronic Arts announced that Wright was leaving to run the Stupid Fun Club, “an entertainment think tank” to develop ideas for games, films, television, the internet and toys. EA and Wright each owned an equal share. “In my twelve years at EA,” he said, “I’ve had the pleasure to work alongside some of the brightest and most talented game developers in the industry.”

In 2015 he co-founded a studio called Gallium Artists with Lauren Elliott, a co-designer of Brøderbund’s Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?. At the Game Developers Conference in March 2018 he announced Proxi, “a game of self discovery” in which the player’s own memories become the material for the game. The studio, renamed Gallium Studios, raised $6 million in 2022 in a round led by Griffin Gaming Partners. It considered using a blockchain so that players could own what they made, then dropped the idea because, Elliott said, “the transactions happened too slowly”. In April 2025 Elliott told VentureBeat that the team was “at the end of our funds”, while Wright kept pitching Proxi to investors. “This is a boat I’ve been in before,” he said. “I’m kind of used to being in this position.”

Sources

Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 17, December 1984, p. 36: review of Raid on Bungeling Bay by Arnie Katz (“Designed by Will Wright”, Brøderbund, Commodore 64 disk).
Ahoy! issue 10, October 1984: Brøderbund’s new releases, including Raid on Bungeling Bay ($29.95, disk).
Zzap!64 issue 1, May 1985: Raid on Bungeling Bay from Ariolasoft.
Computer Gaming World issue 64, October 1989: CGW awards, SimCity Strategy Game of the Year, with its credits.
Edge issue 80, January 2000, pp. 32–34: The Sims preview and Wright interview (architectural design programs; the simulated family; the C64 SimCity in 8,000 lines of machine code; EA’s purchase of Maxis in 1997).
Computer Gaming World issue 190, May 2000: “An Interview with Gaming’s Great Constructor, Will Wright” (Klapaucius and Lem).
Computer Gaming World issue 203, June 2001: Hall of Fame.
Computer Gaming World issue 214, May 2002, p. 65: George Jones, “Inside the Mind of Will Wright” (robotics; the Raid on Bungeling Bay editor; Conway and Forrester; “I never expected SimCity to sell like it did”; favourite games; The Sims Online).
Edge issue 166, September 2006: Spore feature (the cell stage, the creature editor, space).
Retro Gamer issue 47, 2008, pp. 55–59: profile of Will Wright (childhood interests; architecture and mechanical engineering; the Apple II; Raid on Bungeling Bay; meeting Jeff Braun; SimEarth and Lovelock; SimAnt and Wilson; Home Tactics; The Sims’ sales; Spore and Sim Everything).
Retro Gamer issue 115, June 2013: SimCity feature with Wright’s comments on Brøderbund, the C64 version, goal states, SimEarth and SimCity 2000.
Wireframe issue 1, November 2018: Spore, “Will Wright’s ambitious 2008 life sim”, originally titled SimEverything.
Electronic Arts, “Will Wright and EA Partner on Stupid Fun Club”, press release, Business Wire, 8 April 2009 (web, secondary). https://s204.q4cdn.com/701424631/files/doc_news/2009/04/1/376217.pdf
“Will Wright partners with Unity for new project”, MCV/Develop, 21 March 2018 (web, secondary): Proxi; Gallium Artists, co-founded in 2015 with Lauren Elliott. https://www.mcvuk.com/will-wright-partners-with-unity-for-new-project/
Dean Takahashi, “Gallium Studios finds Will Wright’s memories game, Proxi, as hard to pitch as The Sims”, VentureBeat, 29 April 2025 (web, secondary): the 2022 funding, the blockchain plan, and the studio’s position in 2025. https://venturebeat.com/business/gallium-studios-finds-will-wrights-memories-game-proxi-as-hard-to-pitch-as-the-sims
Jimmy Maher, “The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 3: The Sims”, The Digital Antiquarian, August 2026 (web, secondary): the Oakland fire of 19 October 1991, A Pattern Language, and The Sims’ release in February 2000. https://www.filfre.net/2026/08/the-life-and-times-of-maxis-part-3-the-sims/
“Will Wright (game designer)”, Wikipedia (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): birth in Atlanta in 1960; the Oakland fire and A Pattern Language; Spore’s release in September 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)