They had designed the operating system CP/M, which powered most computers in the United States until IBM and Microsoft took over the personal computer market within a decade, they would be out of business. 8 Digital Research was a company that arguably had their biggest days behind them.

7īy the mid-80s, he had become the senior vice president of product development at Digital Research in Monterey, California. He quickly made his way into the nascent Silicon Valley tech industry. He was interested in astronomy, 6 and so he started off his programming career with the aerospace industry, working on the Skylab space station that launched in 1973. Hiles had just left the Peace Corps in the 1970s when he decided to teach himself programming. The history of Maxis Business Simulations is really a biography of John Hiles. Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with employees from Maxis and the Business Simulations team to learn more about their company. But their software raises questions about the role we want games to play in society. Their games found their way into corporate training rooms and even went as far as the White House.Īlmost nothing they developed was ever released to the public. After Maxis cut the division loose, the company continued to operate independently, taking the simulation game genre in their own direction. But for two brief, strange years, they did.įrom 1992 to 1994, a division called Maxis Business Simulations was responsible for making serious professional simulations that looked and played like Maxis games.

Maxis didn’t want to make professional simulation games. The last thing I want people to come away with is that we’re on the verge of being able to simulate the way that a city really develops, because we’re not.” 5 “That really scares me because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared to reality. “Many people come to us and say, ‘You should do the professional version,'” he continued. Will Wright didn’t believe that was even possible. 5 But that didn’t stop companies from believing Maxis could design realistic simulations. “I think if we tried to make it realistic, we would be doing something that we wouldn’t want to do,” Wright said in an interview in 1999. SimCity was always meant to be a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model of the way a city works.” 4 But we’ve kind of caricatured our systems. “I realized early on, because of chaos theory and a lot of other things,” said designer Will Wright, “that it’s kind of hopeless to approach simulations like that, as predictive endeavors. The game was inspired by research on real-world urban planning concepts, 2,3 and although it was created as a way for players to experiment with running a city, the goal was to be fun rather than accurate. SimCity wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. Thumbnail of the SimRefinery title screen.

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