'Sims' Creator Talks About Game's Success

L O S  A N G E L E S, March 17 -- It's a game about people — simulated people.

"You never know what's going to happen. Every time you play it, it's a surprise," says Will Wright, the designer of "The Sims," an unusual computer game that has itself become a surprise hit, with over $100 million in sales. In the game, you create and direct virtual people as they go through their daily routines in a 3-D simulated world. (See related story for a full description.)

The project started when Wright thought it might be fun to build a city — not a real one, but a simulated ('sim') city, in which you start with a blank screen and create a landscape, and put in roads, utilities and watch the simulated people move in.

"And so pretty soon you find that you have this little group of people living on the landscape you've built, demanding this that and the other," he explains. "You know, 'We want more roads; we want less taxes.'"

Sim Series Spawns Real-World Success

Sim City's success paved the way for a string of Wright's simulations: Sim Earth, the global ecosystem; Sim Farm, where you manage your crops; and so on.

In total, Wright has sold 15 million copies of his various computer creations, none of which has monsters, shootouts or even winners and losers. Wright makes games out of life, and the challenge of making it work.

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"There's things that you can do on the computer that kind of expand your perceptions of reality and that you can go back and apply to reality," he says.

Wright has long been fascinated by the possibility of giving intelligence to mechanical things.

"When I was a teenager, I built all these strange mechanical contraptions, and they got more and more elaborate."

But his most sophisticated creation is The Sims. It's life in a box, the computer box.

"There's always going to be some box, some creative box around us. And people are going to be afraid to leave that box because they're going to go broke or their game is not going to sell well," he says.