Retronauts - 639: Building SimCity

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

Host Kevin Bunch is joined by author and historian Chaim Gingold to talk about SimCity and the winding road that led to its creation with his new book Building SimCity. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week on Retronauts, go ahead and destroy the financial district, Godzilla. Make the people happy. I'm your host, Kevin Bunch. Today, we are not actually talking about Godzilla directly, although he does factor in. I want to talk about an interesting book that came out about, what, a month and a half ago as of this recording. It's called Building SimCity, How to Put the World in a Machine, as released through MIT Press, and it delves into the history and design of SimCity, but moreover, and more interestingly to me, it contextualizes it in a way that I think may be interesting and surprising to read. readers as well. I've got a special guest joining me for this book talk, and that's the author. Yeah. So my name is Chaim Gingold. Thanks for having me on the program, Kevin. I'm excited to

talk to you about it. I mean, we could also talk about water rights and water quality at some point too. We were discussing that a little bit before we started recording. We have a lot of thoughts about water rights, as it turns out. This is relevant to SimCity, I think. Yeah, I mean, it was designed out in California, famously a dry region, so. Land management. Yeah. So I guess my first question is, why SimCity? What interested you in, well, actually, let me back up a little bit before that.

What is your book about in your own words? Yeah, this is a great question. I think that I struggled a lot with how to summer, like, it's like there's a long, but, well, the book was a lot longer and I kept making it shorter and shorter to hit the word count contract and for like readability and that it's really hard to get it down to like one line and get to like a title and then like a one paragraph blurb but what it is is it's a it's a deep dive into sim city and it looks at how sim city works but it's really like the successive zoom out of like sim city what's the context of sim city maxis where did it come from where did the ideas come from

so it's sort of and in that way it's also a sort of journey into the history of computer simulation and simulation more broadly. So it's like this really juicy case study, I think, about one, close to one game, but also sort of this historical context, like a fractal. Yeah, and that really was fascinating to me when I was reading it, because I went into it. I knew, obviously, from the title, it was about SimCity,

and I knew just from reading the materials around it, that it sort of delves into where SimCity came from. But actually, like, going through, through it was really interesting, because all of the ideas you're laying out in the first, like, half of the book, because the first half of the book isn't necessarily about SimCity. It's about everything that leads up to SimCity. And then, like, you were able to loop it all into SimCity in a way that made a lot of sense because you point out, oh, this is what Will Wright looked at when he was putting together,

like, his initial idea for SimCity. Like, these were the materials that inspired him in specific ways. ways and what ways were those. So it's really, like, interesting how it's all put together. So I think that does lead into the question of, like, why SimCity specifically? Like, what interested you in this particular topic? Yeah, that's a great question. I think that there's a couple ways to answer it.

I think one is just that I, you know, growing up, you know, it was born in 1980. I remember playing a pirated copy of SimCity and died probably like a night, but I was like 10. like around just when it came out, and it was just like one of these many weird things that we got a hold of and played on the computer. And it was just really, I mean, like a lot of other people was captivated by it. So part of it was just sort of like wanting to understand like the mystique of SimCity, which I think a SimCity did really have this hold on, like it had a, it really kept it of the attention of computer gamers, but it also captured the attention of a lot of other people, like complexity scientists and urban planners and the general public in a way that. I don't think had really happened before with a simulation game or a computer game. And then, of course, I had worked with Will Wright. You know, I started in my career working with him on Spore as an intern initially.

And so I, of course, you think Will's amazing. And I still sort of really idolize him. And so part of it was sort of having talked to him a lot about the design of it and knowing something about it. But I think that the reason why I converge on SimCity in particular was when I did my dissertation research at UC Santa Cruz, I initially came in, wanted to do the history of, like, 10 different games. I think it was initially the idea that I came into it. My advisors were like, you know, you really should just focus on one thing. And I think that somewhere, I have to like go look at my emails or notes or something,

but at somewhere I ended up sort of converging on SimCity. I think it was partially because it was open source. At that point, EA had open sourced it. And so we could study the source code, which was very exciting to us, I think, because, you know, they were pushing me to do this like software study. He's kind of worth it looks at the technical design of software. So it was like a really juicy opportunity as well. Yeah.

Yeah. I do feel like SimCity did hook a lot of people. I remember picking it up with the Super Nintendo release, which I feel like might have been the best-selling version of the game and maybe one of the more familiar ones for folks. But like you touch into like the PC version is a lot more in depth. obviously, because that's the version that's open source. And I did think that was interesting as someone who hasn't really messed with the PC versions of Sin City.

Because for me, it's like, okay, I can see, like, what is identical to what I came up with, or what I came up playing, rather, and what was originally intended or, like, planned and why it was that way. You know, you talk about how it started as a Commodore 64 game originally and sort of the, like, reasoning behind that particular platform and its limitations and how those affected SimCity even when it expanded out to other systems and computers. And I thought that was really interesting. Is there any particular part of SimCity that, like, really grabbed you when you were younger? Do you remember? Gosh, I mean, I remember playing the Super Nintendo version, too. Yeah, I guess we piloted the Mac version,

and we definitely bought on the Super Nintendo, which was like at that point probably, I think about that Commodore 64 to Mac and PC to Nintendo. It's like the Nintendo is kind of gets on this trajectory of getting more and more juicy and user-friendly and fun in a sense. And I think that, yeah, what hooked me on it? I don't know, I think it was like beginning to, it was the world, I think,

and getting to play with this living world, you know? And it's kind of incredible that Will got all that to run on the computer, you know, that's part of, that's kind of like, I guess that's one of the things that's fascinating about SimCity is how all of this stuff seems to be, it's an incredible illusion, and it's got this multitasking, you know, sort of multi-threading on the Mac, also like multitasking operating system in a sense inside that's juggling all this stuff. And so on this, and so on the C-64, on the C-64, will sort of get, managed to get the right abstractions to get the core of the system working there. And then, once it gets,

onto the Mac can kind of blossom and kind of get graphically richer and use the graphical user interface and become easier to use. And then the Super Nintendo version, like, Miyamoto's cloud. Miyamoto and his team are collaborating with Will Wright, you know, like, one of the best game designers of the world, you know, is like, let me take your thing and make it better, you know, and work with you on it. So, so I don't think I answered your question. I just kind of riffed on what you're saying.

You're saying, what, yeah. It's a very free-form discussion, I feel. Okay, great, great. Okay, cool. We're not on fresh air today. Okay, great. So I do want to also back up a little bit, because you mentioned that you had worked on Spore a bit with Willwright.

And I think your background is very unique coming into this particular game. Like, you know, what led you from like game design to academia to, writing this book and like yeah how'd that all come together yeah that's a great yeah well let's see I came to I guess it's like I guess I read the question first as like yeah how did I go back and forth

like I remember I'd when I finished my undergrad degree undergrad degree I went to do a master's in Georgia Tech in digital media that with Janet Murray who had written a hamlet on the holodeck who was another idol of mine and then in the

two years of that program there was a required summer internship that you had to do an internship like in industry somewhere so there was already I guess about this kind of like academic industry sort of hybridization in a sense

and I was like I don't really want to games I was like kind of like not really interested in games unless of course it was with like Maxis right it was kind of like an impossible thing to do and I was just because I was like

I love games and I just didn't really want to work in games I don't know. Like, I had very mixed feelings about it. And then at some point, this opportunity came up. I'm very lucky. Janet got an email from a recruiter at EA saying that they were interested in an intern. They were looking for an intern for Will Wright or something.

And then Janet wrote me this letter. And then within like an hour or something, I had like this offer that was just like, it was kind of all. It was just like the right person in the right place, the right time. And so do this internship with Will. And it was just incredible. So I did this internship there, did some early prototyping on Spore. And when I finished the internship, they tried to get me to stay. I went back to finish my degree.

And then I came back to work as a designer. So it was like, and I wasn't sure. I was like, I want to keep a foot in academia, which I kind of did, but didn't really. And then after EA, I then did some indie stuff for a bit and then decided to go back to the academic grad again. But yeah, I don't know. I kind of feel like I'd like to, I want to think about things. I don't want to make things. I don't know.

That's the short way I'm putting it. I feel that very strongly. And then, of course, you went and made a book, which I guess is very different from making a game, although at this point, you could easily speak to both of those. Yeah. I mean, that's part of actually, but that is part of the motivation for this book, honestly, was that I think that after working on Spore, it was like a very, it was an incredible experience.

And it was also like a kind of like, it was so different than how you one would build something. on one's just like building something with a team at scale is like and getting to be part of a company with an established discipline of making stuff is incredible learning opportunity and there's also this incredible amount of like drama is maybe too strong of a word but there's a kind of like social there's this kind of like it's you could make a TV series about making a game and I guess people have done that because there's like there's the double flying documentary you know there's it's like there's a lot of it's intense and it's so and I was interested in I think after Spore, sort of, I think I was trying to, like, process some of that experience. And I had one, there's this professor, Bart Simon, at Concordia, who was like, oh, you should check out Bruno Lator's work. He's a very famous philosopher of science. And it's all about the sort of the social nature of technology. And I was like, oh, okay, I've heard his name has come up a bit, like, you know, but I was like, I'll see. And Bart recommended that exactly the right book for me, which is about this French attempt.

to make this transvertation system that just kind of falls apart and it's written like a who done it like who killed this system and it's like a really some chapters are written from the perspective of the technology but it's like very like

very eccentric and that got me and that team was really helpful because it was like a bit like oh this is almost like therapy for my the kind of like drama that I live through this is like a new way for me to think about what I experience

like with the drama of game development of software development so I'm very interested in the book not just with SimCity and Maxis, like, but also the whole history of technology. Like, what is the social drama of development and invention? And also, I had seen, like, when I was interning with Will, he one point got out his old dusty Macintosh from the closet.

And it was like, he was like, got it out. We like plugged it in. And there was like all the source code of like simant and Sim Earth and SimCity. And he was like proudly showing me the 3D rendering assembly for the Sim Earth planet. And he was like, look, there's no branching statements here. It's really fast. Like, I wrote a program to generate. this assembly code. It was like, so like, and I'd seen also all these prototypes of different

Maxis things in early Sims prototypes, which I think is what he wanted to show me. And so I was sort of got a glimpse of the drama of the Sims development and how SimCity 2000 had references to the Sims inside the code, you know, which comes out like years before. So I was also very interested in kind of like making sense of that story. I kind of got like a glimpse of and the drama behind it. Yeah, it's going to say, you do have a chapter in there about just like the broader history of Maxis and why it sort of fell apart on itself because it's just a giant company of contradictions. And you talk a fair bit about, you know, these sort of follow-ups to SimCity, like SimEarth and Sim Ant, which I grew up with and

absolutely adored. I was the target audience for that one for sure. And of course, the sins. And like you're not, it's obviously not the focus of the books, the focus of the books on SimCity. But you do talk about like sort of the process that went into the Sims. And I thought that was really fascinating because I know people have talked about it before, but you laid it out in a very like, I'd like to say, approachable method. It's just like all the iterations it went through and how it informed all these other games, Maxis was working on. Yeah. I mean, I think you could read a whole book just on that, I mean, I think I, my predictions that it'll be, well, I know that at least one of the person who's working on a Maxis book, and I think that there will be multiple, like, there's room for multiple Maxis books.

And there could be a whole book just on the development story of the Sims. I think that it's so, it's like, even that I have very aware of having left out of data details that I unearthed, but just getting, but even getting clear on like the role of like the venture capitalists and what they wanted out of Maxis and how that also helped the development, you know, that both like helped the development of the Sims in a way by bringing Will into contact with all. of these leading people in computing and, you know, at the same time, like, also kind of push Maxis away from being more weird and experimental. I think the Sims is like in a way the, that's like the psychological climax, you know, the culmination of the narrative, because it's like, it sort of draws all these, all the different influences from AI, complexity science, architecture, and it needs this weird social context to come about, but then pulls the company apart.

Mm-hmm. And I appreciated that, I know, EA gets a, has a certain reputation and frankly deserves a good chunk of it. But you do more or less credit EA to, like, making the Sims happen. And I know that is, like, historically what happened, but it's not the narrative you usually see around the Sims and Maxis. So I really appreciated that. Yeah.

I mean, I was surprised to learn just how, just, from talking to Will, just like and other folks, like just how much the EA executives were excited about the Sims. And they had a one, there was even like a related competing product

that was going on in Canada that was like another kind of people simulator. I mean, I was talking to someone else recently in other games veteran who was saying that he had another project that was actually not unlike those as well around the same time. But they, you know, But Will made it work with EA's backing, right?

And sometimes they were pulling against each other. Like that also came through and, you know, in the research that I did. But that's also the messy nature of development. Yeah, it really seemed like an idea that like people had had since computers were growing in complexity, but it really took a lot of work and, you know, almost a decade of development just to get something that like really made it all clear. And I thought that was very fascinating to read, too. And, you know, the perspective of how SimCity factors into that very cool. Because, like, that was their cash cow for a long time. I think it was the only, the only cash cow.

I think at some point, Jeff Ron said to me something like he, like, made this cut, we were, like, talking. It was like, it was like, it was like, never anything else. I mean, he's exaggerating a little bit, but, but yeah. Sorry, SimGolf and the other SimGolf that's completely different. But, yeah, I do want to pull back in some of the other, in talk about some of the earlier parts of the book, you know, sort of the pre-Sin-City, pre-Maxes, pre-Will-Write materials. Because a lot of this was just really, like, obscure topics that I, you know, if I knew of them before reading, this book, it was in very, very broad strokes. So, like, what was the research process for this stuff? How did you, like, come across it in the first place and, and dig it up?

This is a great question. It was, I would say, the short version, it was, like, torturous and took a very long time, but it was also a lot of fun. It was, um, how did I come across it? Well, let's see. There's this whole chapter about Doreen and Gary Nelson, this educator who spent her career doing this city building stuff with kids and classroom. And that stuff, and she eventually wrote the Maxis teacher guides in the 90s, and I work with Alan Kay at some point. And it's just to cut this incredible cast of collaborators. And the work is just so interesting. And she continues to do it to this day.

And she's like in her mid-80s. And, you know, she was watching the Twitch, the live Twitch interview that Will and I did the other last week, which is really sweet. It was like texting me for technical support, you know, but she got in there. will was having a fun time on that live stream you should check it out uh i think it's a vod uh through romchip like the academic journal they have a twitch channel yeah yeah and it'll be on the youtube i think is ral old bore what's going to live um yeah i was like just to parenthetically i was like you know will suspend his whole career if one's been just like asking him all these questions and i've been asking all these questions so i think that i was just like this will be i just kind of let him

have the reins and i was a little scared but it was fine So, so the Dorian Nelson stuff, so initially, I think when I was working on Spore, there was a designer there, Claire Curtin, who was one of the co-des, Will's co-designors on the Sims. And so, and she came on to Sport at some point, and she's super cool. And she worked on Carmen San Diego back in Bruderbund back in the day and just had this incredible career. And at some point, she just brought this little red book into the office and said, hey, Jaime, you should check this out. you'd probably be interested in this. And it was this, it was one of the first books that Doreen else that had published, like, from the, what is what years?

It's like the 70s, I think, maybe. Maybe it's the early 80s. And it's like, Buckminster Fuller has written like a little endorsement inside of it, you know, and it's just like, and the photographs are incredible. It's just like these incredible documentary photographs of kids building things. And turns out that the photographer, that's photographs are copyright, the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, you know, one of the most legendary designers, you know, of the 20th century, and

it's like, and so I got it, and the book is just very approachable, and it was just talking about this prospect of any kids to build these model cities, and it was just fascinating, and Claire said, yeah, and Doreen was wrote some of the teacher guides for Maxis products, and I got it, so I just, it's over, anyhow, so as I was writing in the book, I sort of

started researching Doreen's work more and more and interviewed her multiple times and went down and went to a teacher training and, you know, it was many years, but eventually, by the time I finished, I finished the book, I was like, in her archive in UCLA, you know, having these old photo, old slide digitized, and I was like restoring them, you know, and just kind of piece together this story, which just got more and more,

the more I pulled on it, the more interesting it got, you know. But it was kind of many years of just kind of poking away at that. Yeah. Yeah, this book doesn't seem like it was written very, like, overnight. It seems like it took a lot of hours and days and weeks, etc. Yeah. I feel like I left a lot of, and then there's like things where like I left a lot of the juiciest sort of things that I found on the editing floor because I was like, this doesn't fit the sort of overarching narrative. Like I need to keep the cut. I can like, it can be like too fractal, you know, like too many like, oh, then there's the time that George Lucas wanted to merge LucasArts with Maxis, you know, which is like, I was like, and they took a great story that Jeff Braun tells, but it's like one sentence, it's like a one sentence footnote, you know, like end note. it just doesn't it's just not that important yeah yeah like it's cool but like how am i going to fit this in i don't know figure that out for another day or let someone else sort it out yeah exactly

exactly yeah and then the other and a lot of the other chapters were like that too the solitaire automata chapter it was like it just i was a little frustrating because i'd be like i think i got it now and then i would just like fall through some other trapdoor like oh i totally have to learn about this whole other subject, like von Neumann's self-replicating robot enterprise, to even make sense of solar automata, and then, of course, I have to figure out the context for that, and it's just, like, hard to, and then it was exciting to then figure out, oh, actually, this is really helpful, because now I can explain how, why the Sanofi Institute, complexity scientists, and Will Wright get along so well later, like, and why Maxis's

social network. Yeah, for me, like, the cellular automata stuff is really fascinating because I do a lot of research into like 1970s, like, computers and games. So, like, Conway's Game of Life pops up constantly. And seeing that sort of linkage into earlier renditions of the same concept, very, like, very much spoke to me. And, you know, how you relate all of this stuff to, like, early computers and how those relate to, like, earlier tech than that, like, the different differential analyzers and the, you know, the analog, electrical analogs and all that sort of fun stuff. Like, that, that was a very fascinating through line to me to just, like, poke through and then see how it all comes together for SimCity. Because, you know, SimCity, like, you delve into how the simulation for SimCity works and all the modeling, and it is pulling from, like, a lot of these threads.

I'm really, they're very gratified to hear that you like, you like, like the whole Sam Citi. which because I'm like, I'm like, is there, are there other readers out there who are going to be going to like, you know, sort of appreciate the whole thing strung together? And so, yeah, it's very gratified to hear that you're, you sound, you sound like you're the perfect target reader for this. Because I think I think I will is reading it for the blurb. And he wrote me, he was like, I'm halfway through it. And he's like, and this is so great. He's like, I think this was written just for me. There you go. Well, I think you mentioned that it already like sold out its initial. print run or something. Yeah. I mean, it's a modest, it's a very modest print. I mean, I think we're talking like hundreds of copies at a time. It's MIT Press.

But still, that does suggest it's not just Will Wright who's into this book. Yeah, yeah. And one thing from that sort of earlier framing period that I thought was interesting is that, like, you really had a real through line from, you know, you had the digital revolution and sort of how urban unrest in the 1960s over, you know, issues like redlining and segregation, like really. informed a lot of these early city modeling games and projects and research and in turn how those impacted SimCity. So I'd be interested in hearing you talk about sort of that approach to putting this book together and sort of putting together this story of SimCity. Yeah.

Yeah. I think so I think when I, so Henry Lowood, who's one of my, one of my advisors at Santa Cruz, he's a librarian at Stanford who does. He's like, he's like the dean of. game history as far as I can tell. He's like, out of degrees like, or his original research was like, he's like history of technology guy who did like

German forestry. He's like most cited academic papers about German forestry. It's an awesome paper. By the way, I highly recommend it. And Henry, when I did my defense, he was like, kind of like, you know, great job. You need more context. You know, like it's too kind of like

internal. The history is like too sort of internal. And I really took that to heart as I read more more history. I was like, oh, right, it's really about learning the social, the social historical context. So, that's one of these things that just kind of like pops out. I mean, you, you know, Will, has been very clear about the influence

of Jay Forrester's work, Urban Dynamics on SimCities, you know, one of the key influences, and you open up the beginning, you get, open up a copy of Hermodynamics, and which I think is like a thousand dollars or something on eBay, if you want to buy it now. We open up and like the

forward is written by John Collins, the former mayor of Boston. And I think when I first read, I didn't quite understand the historical context, but he's talking about, like, he and Jay Forrest are talking about the crisis of the cities. And, like, what are they talking about? And it's like, well, because I'm not really explicit about it. But what they're really talking about is, like, all of this urban unrest, you know, all of this, you know, black people that are fed up with the discrimination and oppression

that they're experiencing. and there's like the Watts riots and I was just so it's just fasting it's like this and there's this moment like the historian Jennifer Light has written a lot about this about how like there's this whole moment during the call at this time

when there's this crisis brewing and all of these Cold War intellectuals get sort of attack this problem using their tools right these like analytical tools and so Jay Forrester is like one guy you know he's like one example of this kind of larger movement

of intellectuals that try to adjust this problem with computer modeling, right? Like, of course, right? That's what you use. That's like the hammer of the moment. And then I was also interested in then also with Dorey Nelson's work with her work with the kids in Los Angeles. Like, it also is prompted by the same thing. Like, Los Angeles is experiencing these rights.

And then the mayor organizes this commission of citizens to try to like look into the problem and try to address it, right? It's like, it's civics at work. And that's part of what sparks her interest. And she's a school teacher. she starts getting interested in the city, and eventually, like, you know, she's bringing in her older brother's architect Frank Gary. She's, like, bringing her influence from architecture and design, and she starts to address the crisis of the cities as well through her own city simulation work, right? And then she builds upon the work of other computer simulation people in her.

So, I don't know. I just was, like, struck by how this crisis of the cities sort of triggered a whole wave of work that all, in a sense, is goes together. Yeah, and you also note in there, some of the critiques of, like, Forrester's work, you know, it's very top-down. It doesn't take, you know, race into account at all. It's only, like, class-based, which, you know, I think that's reflected in SimCity as well, because SimCity, obviously, the Sims are just points of data. They're not really anything. Yeah. For some of these other models that people were doing, you know, we're taking sort of a bottom-up approach.

And you sort of describe the difference between those and how those work. How you decide to cut up the world, abstract the world into your simulation matters a lot. So there's no race in SimCity and in urban dynamics because it didn't seem important. It wasn't the important thing. But for Thomas Schelling's work on segregation, this is around the same time, it's like all about race. Yeah. And I know that I know one of the things that people have lobbed is, the critique against SimCity as, like, a teaching tool and not just a game, is that, you know, you only have the values that are being brought into the model by the designers in this case.

And, you know, he pulled some of this top-down approach from Forrester, who, again, did not take race into account. But at the same time, Will Wright very big on public transit. And I think that is reflected in SimCity's simulation as well. I think that's sort of an interesting angle to see, like, pulling the curtain back a little bit. Yeah, and part of why, looking at all the, looking at the context of simulation and, like, who makes it, like, why? Like, who's paid, especially when you get into, well, even for commercial work and non-commercial work, and who's paying the bills? Like, who's funding it, you know? Like, who's writing the grants, right?

Like, at some point, Forrester gets a grant from the Nixon administration because they, like, these resurgent conservatives, like, love. of Forrester's work. It like sort of fits a lot of their thinking, right? You shouldn't, you kind of like, because he's modeled, this urban dynamics model is like to use taxation and like social welfare as kind of like a, just like an like a way, it's like a bad idea. Like you just don't want to give people that are having a hard time, any benefits because it's going to make the city more popular for you to get more people moving there who want

the benefits and want the welfare and it's going to bring the whole system down, right? So it's like this very, you know, like very concerned. perspective. And so they give him money, right, to do the work. Yeah. And, you know, some of these other simulators, they were coming out of, you know, Lyndon Johnson's, a great society initiative. So, of course, they take their own approaches to it. So. Yes. Which I think also comes up in the book as well. Yeah. I'd have to sift through and find the specific parts. Well, Lyndon Johnson found the, I mean, it's under his administration that the National Department for the Arts, I think, is started, which has become. becomes one of the big, that can be the original funder of Joy Nelson's work. And then Will's neighbor, Bruce Jaffe, who turns out, like, lives around the corner for me here in Oakland, who is the urban planet that lived across the street from Will. Bruce had worked for, like, a housing development program that Menden Jophe started.

And he was very ideologically motivated in that work at that time. And then went on to do centralized city planning for, I think, like building. like cities in Saudi Arabia or something like that. Yeah. Kind of boom towns, I guess, or something. And, you know, and SimCity is not just like the modeling and everything, all of that is a big part of it, is that you also talk a lot about how approachable it is to play with SimCity and operate it. And in that regard, you also delve into sort of the history of the basic computer language and some of the previous, like, GUI, GUI arrangements that people had been coming up with, you know, Apple and like. and I think that's interesting as someone who's also very fascinated by, like, the Dartmouth College basic, like, creation.

Yes. So did you get to talk to anyone who was involved with Dartmouth when you were putting this together, or did you just pull from materials? I pulled from the, I looked, and what was really helpful, I looked at the, there's a history, there's a series, the ACM has a series called the history of programming languages, and they, It was an amazing basic article in there by one of the creators of Basic that laid out their original process. And then there's a book, really, really excellent book. Everyone should go check out about Basic. What is it called? It's Rankin.

Joy Rankin is the author. And it's a people's history of computing in the United States. And it's like this really great history of computing as like a folk culture and the importance of basic in there. She does a lot of great original research. And I mostly spoke to, the person I spoke to you, which was really delightful, was this guy, Bob Albrecht, who is famous, and most famous perhaps for hosting or organizing the Home Brew Computer Club, where Steve Jobs and Steve Woznihan came out, and he was an early proselytizer for Basic. And I met him, I just reached out to him and contacted him and drove out to visit him. I live in Oakland. I was at Santa Cruz at the time, and he was in Livermore. and he was like, I don't know, in his 80s, I forget how old as it was at the time, 80s or 90s, and he just like was just this like teenage boy in his energy, and he was just so cool. He just talked to me, we talked, and that was just, and he had all these funny little historical tidbit he told me, like, going to the first, what was that called in the 1970s that playful, the new games movement?

He went to the first, one of these new game movement events, you know, where they had like, played like Earthball and all these like non-competitive and competitive games. And it's like, and he's like, and he's like, I think he said he went to Nolan Bushnell maybe and got like some pong got some like Atari arcade machines to bring out there. And it's like totally, it's like not when you think about like, if you picture it's like, it's like the hills of Marin and these like hippies kind of rolling around and like, you know, playing with, you know, foam swords and things like that. But then there's like, it's like, oh, then there's like video games like around too. And Bob Albrecht is, of course, the guy who connected these worlds together, which makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I'm really fascinated by basic and, like, modifying programs as a sort of a way to introduce people to programming, which, of course, that was sort of the whole idea with basic and with popularizing language and deck and, oh, God, I'm blanking out his name now.

David Oll, putting together the, like, 101 basic computer games and all that fun stuff. Yeah, I got to talk with one of the early, like, Dartmouth basic proponents some years ago. And, like, he was also very enthusiastic, like, in his 90s. It was just about how cool it was, like, programming games for it, for his classes and his students and everything. So, yeah, that was very interesting. I mean, that's like one of my take, I don't really, I don't really talk about this in the book, but one of my takeaways the other people have written about, I think also is like, I was like, after studying all this, I was interested in computers as a creative medium. And these people doing on the circle with basic and getting people to make games, I was like, and looking at what games are popular, the best selling contemporary games. I was like, I think games, the medium of video games is making games. Like, I think that's what it's about. It's about modding. It's about making your own. It's like, you like, that's That's the story again and again and again that you see of like, oh, like Bill Budge gets Steve Wozniak's basic version of breakout. And then he modifies it.

And that's how he lords to program and start making his own games. And it's like that folk culture of game making and game playing seems computers are somehow especially good at. Yeah. Well, if we choose, if we choose. Yeah. They could be good at lots of things. But let's talk about the thing that we want them to. be good at in this particular instance.

But yeah, like Bill Budge, he factors into your narrative as well, you know, the pinball construction set that he puts together was big influence on SimCity, which I never realized. Like, it never really occurred to me that, yeah, yeah, the user interface for pinball construction set would be a major influence on SimCity. But you lay out how it is, and that's very, like, surprising. And just, I think, and even just like the idea that you could release this commercial game or toy, you know, really. Yeah. Like, the people would buy, you know, nowadays, it's kind of like, well, duh.

You know, of course you're going to buy a thing where you get to make stuff and like a sandbox. Yeah. Like, I'm trying to think of anything that really predates that. And I'm struggling outside of, again, selling copies of basic, which, you know, that's a, It's a programming language. This is very different. Right. It's like somehow at this threshold of commercial and non-commercial, right?

Because what comes before is this folk culture of people sort of reproducing like space war over and over again. You know, it's like no one's buying it. It's like it's just kind of getting reprograms. And the people are getting David All's book and, you know, like repiping in the programs and making up their own. So it's non-commercial. It's like a folk culture of game making. But that's like making that. Yeah.

I do find it interesting. It's off topic, but I talked with one of the people who wrote a game in David All's book. Bob Liedem, he wrote Super Star Trek, and he mentioned that he had been getting letters into the 2000s from people across the globe, like asking him for advice on modifying his program to work on whatever platform they were running basic on. And he would, like, give them some basic advice, you know, that no pun intended. What's amazing about that. Sorry. What's amazing is I would expect it to be at this point, like, in JavaScript. The fact that it's like, how do I get this trend, like, in the kind of I'm based on this basic or like I'm trying to run in basic.

That's fascinating. Yeah. So, like, that's a very interesting topic to me and just like people modifying games, learning to program. And then coming up with these, like, sort of like, design your own pinball machine, design your own city. design your own earth design your own dollhouse like yes it's all in like this interesting

not spectrum per se a rich tapestry we'll call it yes yes So this is a book out of MIT press. So it's a very, like, academic work, although I think it does also, like, read reasonably well for someone who's not in academia. So, like, what aspects of the book do you think appeal to broader audiences, not just, like, people who are just very like academically interested in game history well i think that's i

think that's kind of a that's like the big question that i'm kind of like on the edge of my seat with right now honestly because i'm just like i don't know like i'm like kind of interested to see like who does find it interesting and take it up because i tried really hard to make it accessible to a really wide audience but um it's but you know but then there are those amazon reviews that are like, I bought this book and it's a, you know, I'm like, yeah, I just like, howdoms want to take all the worst reviews and put it together.

It's kind of awesome. They do love that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's always hard to tell like what is going to like speak to someone until they actually read it. Obviously for me, I think it's just sort of the general simulation discussions.

Like I said, the cellular automata like developments and how that's, sort of feeds into SimCity. That was very fascinating to me. I'd be interested in hearing what people who read the book think if they want to, if they want to let me know, sure. Yeah, I'm just thinking, like, I try to make it to make it as every chapter kind of

standalone and be as readable as possible to kind of like, as a just like pacing kind of like, you know, sample and just kind of get as accessible as possibly if we don't know anything about how computers work or the history of computing or games or SimCity. Yeah. But I don't know. I'm also a guy who really like basically reads nonfiction exclusively, and I'm currently on volume four of the London Johnson biography by Robert Caro, and I think it's just totally riveting. So I'm not the, I'm not the target audience. Yeah. I do like how you have everything split up into like, all right, here's the chapter on this topic. Here's the chapter on this topic. And you have a whole chapter, a fairly lengthy one on just how SimCity operates under the third. hood that was like really like interesting to read through um how did you how did you manage to pull that together where did you have to like dig through the source code or did someone help you like walk through it that's a great question uh so part of it was i mean obviously you get one sense

for how it works by playing it and then talking to i've talked to will about it quite a lot and you know when i was working with him so i kind of had a general sense of some of the design principles but Honestly, it was a lot of reading code. Which to come back to her to what I was talking about earlier, I think my advisors at Santa Cruz really wanted me do this software studies dissertation and really look at the code material. And that was part of why we settled on, part of what sort of pulled me towards SimCity.

The code was available, which is a very cool opportunity. So I was trying to think about how the, because I make all these diagrams to explain, I was trying to think about the origin of that. I have to look through my notes, but I think it may have been because I was reading the code. And I was just trying to make sense of it. And so I just started like scribbling pictures. And I think it started with me just like mapping out the tile set. Like what are the tiles? Like what do they mean? Because like in the code, it's a lot of just like numbers because it's just all in Will's head and people's head. And then Don Hopkins who did work on the open

sourcing like in his versions of the code and his ports. There's more like pneumonics, you know, like, but still not complete. But it sort of was kind of like first, the first thing was like You can't make sense of the code that's operating largely on these characters without knowing what they mean. So the first thing was kind of building this visual map. And then over time, I was like, well, let me, I was just, it was a lot of back and forth. Once I had more of the diagram built, I could understand more of the code and then I can make the diagram better. And so, and that was really just, you know, I did that for the dissertation. And then that was done.

And then I did the book. It was like a, you know, this six by nine format, not the eight and half by 11. So I had to like, well, I've got to like do like tighter visual design now. And, of course, my design skills were better at that point. So I was like, and also I kind of iterated it more. And then also kind of needed to emphasize different things, you know, in the book. Because I kind of, the story is more complete in the book than in the dissertation. So, yeah.

It's nice that you were able to pull from, like, work you'd already done to, like, sort of, I guess, save a little bit of time for the book. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, yeah, totally. I mean, it's just like, and I don't think we set up, but it's like, it's like 10. like 10 years, over 10 years of like, you know, I'm not, it's not full time 10 years, but this is like a 10 year plus project. So as part of it is like these things like have been iterated for a lot. So did you did you get like approved for this with MIT press or were you just doing it on your own for like a chunk of that time? It was initially it was, I mean, first it was my

PhD research and that I finished that in 2016. And then I was kind of working on it in the background and then I think that I forget when I got the contract with MIT Press, but it definitely took a lot longer than we thought. Also, I had two kids and while that was happening and that slowed things down. They do take up a lot of time. Yeah, surprising. What making human beings is quite a lot of work actually. So you had to like put in your own comments for the code on what everything meant or did the like source code that you come across? Did it already have comments in there to help describe it? There was some. comments, but it's a lot of

I was talking about Will about this last week. It was like, the code is both very elegant, like sort of the abstractions are very elegant. There's a kind of deep elegance in the design. At the same time, the code is like a total mess that is like, would just kind of make people run the screen. In part

because a lot of it was translated from assembly to C, right? So it's like, it's kind of the idiom of it. But at the same time, it also has, can have its own elegance too. You've mentioned in there that like the original Commodore 64 assembly code was lost, you know,

even prior to the big fire that destroyed Will Wright's house. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So, like, they didn't even have the original source code to, like, refer back to.

They just had the, uh, sort of the program itself. That's right. Well, they had, they had the, they had the,

they had the Mac, Amiga PC versions. Will rewrote the simulator in C. and then the other programmers sort of built the UI and the rest of the software around it. But then they wanted to release. Then the game became a hit. They wanted to release it for more platforms.

Then they wanted to release the C-C-64 version, but they didn't have the assembly code for it anymore. That had been lost. So I guess, yeah, in there, it's kind of like it's somewhere in that transition. It's gone. I forget the specific path lost. But then they want to modify the title screen

because it wasn't called SimCity yet. So they don't have the code for it. So they have to go in and modify the machine code and, like, patch in the proper SimCity title graphic. Figure out exactly where in the code, the city, like, the city planner title was at and just, like, swap it out. It sounds miserable. Yeah. But the beautiful thing about it from a historical standpoint is that the Commodore 64 version then gives you, like, a glimpse at what the prototype for SimCity was before it became SimCity.

So, because really, it's not the same, you know, like, it's like, it starts a lot in college. but the heart of it is like there in a sense, but it's a different beast. So you get the snapshot into the design evolution of SimCity, the development of it. Yeah, this really makes me want to check out the Commodore 64 version just to like get an experience of like, what was SimCity between being SimCity

and being just like the dev tools for a raid on Bungling Bay? Yes, yes, totally. Which I did like how you like, laid out the description of, like, how bungling bay's systems were. Because I knew, like, okay, yeah, like, I knew this is how this led to SimCity. I knew that there's, like, stuff going on in the background that, like, the city or the city, the, like, enemy base has built up over time. But you were able to sort of, like, draw out, like, this is how this whole thing works,

even though you don't actually see it. And that may have played against the game's, like, reception. But I thought that was really, like, interesting how that comes together and like that sort of interconnection between the two games. Yeah, there's a great, Will Wright did a GDC talk, a post-retro, what do they call them, retro, they have these are retro perspectives. I don't remember what they called them. It's like a vintage post-mortem, something like that. That's not what it's called, but something like that.

They did want to write a bungling bay, and that's where a lot of that material came from. And then like, and then I was like, oh, yeah, you can see him kind of like working his way towards Sim City. not just with like the level editor, but also his sensibility as a designer with the simulation logic. And then also the struggle with the kind of user interface, where he's like, it didn't work. And then people didn't see what was happening. And then the C-64 version of SimCity, it's like really awkward,

you know, but you can see it kind of groping its way towards the GUI. Then once it gets on the Mac, it's like, ah, now I can really breathe. Now I've got a mouse. I've got a mouse. It really helps. It sure, but it does. Jeez. Interesting tidbit when I was, I was corresponding with Nintendo and Miyamoto's team through some channels to get into some of the Maxis Nintendo stuff.

And they were like giving me a lot of really nice information. And one of the things that Miyamoto said is that one of the things he was most proud of, I got the sense of, was figuring out how to make the mouse controls work on the console. That was like one of the things. That was like this key, you know, he remembered that is like one of the key things. that they figured out that he seemed proud of. Yeah, you mentioned there's like a good chunk of the narrative and the word count. Yeah. Are there any particular, like, stories or, like, anecdotes or even just general, like, data that you thought were really interesting that you couldn't fit in there other than, like, the Lucas bit?

I mean, there's so much. Oh, my gosh. What's another one that I've got is, like, Sim Earth? So James Lovelock, who's the co-inventor of the Guy Theory, which is basically Earth System Science. Yeah, with a silly, silly name. Yeah. So he collaborated with Will. So he helped with Sim Earth. And then Stuart Brand helps connect them. I mean, there's like the connections here. Just fascinating. Stuart Brand, who was involved in the New Games movement and created a Thoroth catalog. And I was talking. And so in Lovelock, in his memoir, his book, he says that Maxis gave royalties for Sim Earth back to them, which helped his nonprofit keep going, which I write about in the book. But then I asked Will about it. And he was like, no, he's like, I don't think so. But I found the documentation that proves that Lovelock is correct. He's like, he will, didn't remember that.

But he's like, but I do remember that we had a regent in the registration card for Sim Earth, you could choose a nonprofit for us to donate one dollar or two. So you register, some of the registration card, you check off your thing. So Max has got your registration info, and then they would donate a dollar or two a nonprofit. And initially they had, Will said, they didn't do their research carefully, but they had Earth First on there, which is like a sort of radical eco-terrorist group of some kind. Maybe I'm being overly harsh, but you can read the, Wikipedia yourself.

But he says they got a lot of blowback from that and they had to change that. And then I, and then Phil Saul, I was asking, but I couldn't find the, I needed to verify the story. I wanted to get like another data. Like I wanted to validate that, that story. I was looking for registration cards. And the registration card I have in the copy of Sim Earth, I have here, does not have Earth first. And then I asked Phil Salvador at Video Game History Foundation.

And then he contacted an archivist at the Strong Museum. And they have an early copy of Sim Earth that did, in fact, ask. at that card. So I thought that was pretty interesting. But there's so many, like, I mean, there's a whole book of, like, what isn't in the book. So, yeah. Oh, yeah. I know Phil is a big Maxis person.

And I saw, like, when you were writing about the Maxis business simulations, I'm like, I know, I know where some of this came from. Totally. Totally Phil's work. Yeah. I mean, I think he, for me, he, like, really just kind of cracked that open for me. I was like, I never really got the scope of it and the import of it. And then what I, and then what I talked to, I would just, that was super helpful. And then when I talked to the venture capitalist who invested in Maxis, that then like,

helped me get the context for the Maxis Business Simulations. It was like, oh, because it's like, that's why Maxis got PC funding at all was basically, was basically do that line of work. Yeah. Yeah. I do think it's always, it's always really cool when folks go outside of the, just like interviewing, you know, game developers and talking to some of the executives and, like, the, the, the marketers and the folks funding these things, get their perspectives, because those are, like, historically important, too, and they help, like, get you that fuller picture. Totally.

Because, you know, technically developers, they're just like, they don't really know what they're doing. And then everyone else's like, how the heck are the developers do? Totally. I think it's like the developer, I remember that, like, from EA, it'd be like, we'd be like, all of us would be like, what? We have to ship Spore on the Wii now. Like, we have more console first at some point. It's like, who's making these decisions? Well, it's like, actually, like, who are these knuckleheads?

And it's like, no, no, they're not knuckleheads, actually. They're actually the people that manage to run, because especially you think about how many game companies collapse. It's like, there are people that are like thinking about how to run a game company and make it work as a business, not just as a creative endeavor, right? So it's like, you've got to have that mix, which is like one of the things that I really got attuned to writing this book was that. And, of course, I know as I'm more on the development side, I'm trying to build up my business muscles. Do you know the GameCraft podcast? I'm not familiar with that particular. It's so good.

Can I, like, can I pitch it for a minute? It's, it's a, I'm just going to not listen to your answer. I'm just going to go. Go for it. It's hosted by two venture capitalists who do games. But one of them, Mitch Lasky, has been doing, is like I've been a games executive for decades. And so it's like a history of video games from the perspective of business. And it's really good.

And part of what I love about it is that they may say things like, the last thing you should do when you make a game is like innovating game design because you're just taking an unnecessary business risk. And I'm just like, I love it. These guys are so smart. And they think completely differently than me. And I have a lot to learn from that. Yeah, it's very strange that like a business that's so like diametrically opposed on both ends

has managed to muddle through and become so large for over the past few decades. I guess it's not too different from like the movie industry in that regard. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. And actually, and like these, and like Deer Hunter, you know, like there's some games and some moments, some bits of game history and the rise of casual gaming. They just do not make sense unless you have the business context and talk to the business executives. And that's part of what I got out of listening to that.

Yeah, the big buck hunter games. all of those Gulf arcade games that still float around in like bars and such. Yeah, it's like a buyer. It was like a buyer at Walmart or something like that who was like kind of initiated a lot of that. It's like a wild story.

Yeah, it's really like interesting and like seeing that and then also reading about games like Sim Earth and Sim Ant, which are super cool, super interesting games. I love basically everything about them. And they just

they just flopped, but like, Jeff Braun was like, you know what? We got to let Will Wright cook and we'll see what he comes up with. And it just, as it turns out, that is not a good business model either. So finding that balance is not something I think a lot of people are very good at. And the ones who are, like, they are in demand. And that's the saga of the Sims. I think that's part of what makes it such a juicy story to follow is that like the business, kind of the management and business side of Maxis versus the creative

side at Max is struggling with it for many years, and even EA also, but it eventually finds it, like, threads the needle and they find his way through. Yeah. And, yeah, the Maxis business stuff is extremely, like, fascinating because, like, yeah, being the source of the venture capitalist funding makes a lot of sense why they even did that stuff. But it's also, like, fascinating because you sort of lay out, like, yeah, these people looked at SimCity, you know, and we're like, we could use this to, like, train people to do stuff.

I'm going, well, no, you can't, but I see where your head's at, and Max sees a business opportunity and gives it a world. I mean, I don't know. I guess I do spend some of my time, like, as a developer or design or doing, building those kind of things. I do think there is a space for kind of like learning simulations or simulations that teach things. But I think it seems like it's maybe it's not like a cracked kind of business strategy or like or something. to do it or something. I don't know. There's something there. But I think the thing that wasn't there for Maxis was that you couldn't like just, it wasn't like an easy pivot for Maxis to do business simulations. And in fact, the other one of that one of, so William Janeway

is the VC who was pushing for Maxis business simulations and he saw this kind of enterprise simulation market. And then his partner, Henry Cressel, when I talk to him, he says, he's like, yeah, he's like, I always kind of thought that it really wasn't a compatible. business, but he was really interested in the education side of it, you know, the kind of But what Henry was saying is that he's like, yeah, it always seemed like it was a bit more like a kind of consulting

business to do that kind of work, which is very different than packaged goods. It's like a really different kind of business operation. Yeah. Yeah, like I agree that you can use like SimCity as an educational tool and I

think some of Maxis's other sim stuff very much could work in that vein. It's just like I don't know that you could use it as necessarily like a professional development necessarily, at least SimCity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will say Sim Ant taught me a lot about ants as a kid. Likewise, likewise. And, yeah, it's very interesting.

Like, you don't really touch it on, like, some of the saga of some of that stuff, like Sim Health, in particular, just has a very strange history. That's very much in a political moment. Yeah, totally. Yeah, go read Phil's stuff. But, yeah, that's like, I think, again, that's like, I think there's, like, I think there's, like, books to be written. about Maxis, and I think that in the book-length Maxis, you'd get that one day.

I'm not writing any more books. I was going to ask if you have another one in you after that. I guess not. No, definitely not. Definitely against it for the time being. Not like it was, not like I regret it, but just like that was, that was a lot. I need to, I need a break. I need to do something else.

Yeah. So what sort of stuff are you working on at this point, now that, You've got this book wrapped up and you're doing things other than that. Yeah, I mean, the main, see, the main thing is, I guess right now, this is, this can take, we can come back from our water conversation. I'm building, working with some, with some collaborators on a interactive simulation for learning that's about water, it's about water dynamics. And so there's really, there's very cool collaborators who were working on a tool that is all about how to helping people. people think about and make decisions about how to plant trees and urban environments to like get more to like waste less water. So like, you know, because there's a ton of like in Los Angeles, like a ton of rain comes down and it's all channeled off in the L.A. River, which is a giant, you know, concrete thing.

It just kind of gets so it's like you need this is a place and that doesn't have got doesn't, that needs a lot of water, but all, and it has a lot of rain, but it's all kind of thrown away. So how do you modify the environment So you're getting So you're keeping that water and using it So I was like I had this insight recently I was like let's use like a falling sand sim You know like to like try to like make some of this stuff like fun

And engaging and informative so That's one project I've been doing this last month But you can't escape the simulation realm Yeah I mean I love it So that's part of it is I guess like in my own work I just kind of love I love toys. I'm making toys.

I love making simulation toys. And I also like learning about the real world. So it's like an excuse to do all those things at the same time, I guess. So SimCity sort of factors into your career in that regard to sort of like you played it as a kid and now here you are as an adult. Totally. Yeah, I think that's part of why I wrote a lot of this book, too, because it is relevant to my life as a designer, and especially that analog simulation stuff. Yeah, which I'd never heard of before reading this book, and that was just, like, very, very interesting.

It's like, I guess they would have had to have, like, simulations and stuff before, like, digital computers were doing it. Yeah, totally. And those things, and actually, that's one thing. When I talked to Bob Albrecht, who we talked about, you know, was one of the basic proselytizers, you know, he, in, I think it was in the 70s, he was did programming on analog computers. So these analog machines are still around, even in the, and they overlap with digital machines. And so I wasn't sure. I got recently got an email. I needed to respond from Ken correct Outsias, who's the author of Sim Life. And I'd interviewed him at one point for the book. And he was like, oh, you know, told me that he really enjoyed the book. And he really liked that chapter

on analogs, which was very gratifying because I'm like, I don't, this is a very like a very deep cut kind chapter. I was like, this is really for me, you know, like, and people that are like designing these interactive simulations and really want to think about like cognition and, you know, what it means to use one kind of material to represent, we use one kind of substance, like electricity to model, another kind of substance, like a bridge, you know, like to me, I'm like, this is like the, this is the GCIS. It's catnip. Yeah, for me it's catnip. I'm like, I don't know who else is going to be catnip for when I tried to make it really accessible. I hope I did. But the fact that Ken was like, I really like that. I was like, cool. Another simulation

nerd is like really into this. I think I did it. Yeah, I know in sort of my day job, we do have simulators here and there, like model out water flows and levels under different conditions. So, you know, that sort of thing is very interesting to me. Obviously, one of their Max's business things that didn't really go anywhere was Sim Environment which I don't remember if you like name drop that one or not I think you did. I think I listened. I tried to

list the names of them at least to kind of get the yeah. Yeah, but that one obviously didn't go anywhere either and like but hearing about that one I'm like oh yeah, that would be kind of neat if that was like a Sim city like style program. Totally. Well, what would be in your Sim

environment? Because there's like many, there's so many different environmental. I mean you got to have got to have your water like pollution you got to like factor in I think you could factor in like a climate model of some sort like one of the one of the potential paths like for changing conditions yes you have to deal with like the historical conditions if you're talking about like a real place like it's a scenario otherwise you could probably just sort of define that however I don't know I think it's I think it'd be interesting I think there's a good I think there is a game there I don't know that Anyone's going to make it? I mean, who knows? It's a world of indie games these days that I can't keep up with. It may exist. It might exist.

I mean, actually, hearing you say this, I'm just realizing that Simpson doesn't have that stuff in it, but it does have Godzilla, which in some way is a kind of shorthand, quote, Godzilla, right? Like, it's not Godzilla, but. It's illegally and medically distinct from Godzilla. Exactly, exactly. It has Godzilla, which is like, isn't Godzilla's. story that he's sort of a he's like the nuclear fallout in a sense but like made kind of like this personification of environmental ills so in a sense it's like sim city has it but in this very playful abstracted way that's not at all like what you're saying but like it's it's it's like it's

it does it by not doing it in this way yeah i mean you could you could just set it to like cause disasters very frequently and you're like there you go it's it's uh it's the really bad climate change track if we're going the wrong way I'm thinking about plagues, like the ten plagues, like in the backstory. You'd have like giant locusts come. What if it was just SimCity with environmental disasters were just things like that? Raid of Godzilla's over the land. Yeah.

And I think that kind of wraps up, the questions I had for this. Do you have any final thoughts or anything you'd like to discuss on this book, on this topic before we call it? I think that was great. There was one last, I just, you did, I didn't remember one other tidbit that I wanted to mention. Yeah, go for it. May or may not be true. But, um, the, but, um, the Godzilla as I was talking, because there's the, there's the, there's the, there's the, on the cover of the original SimCity box, there's the Godzilla, quote, does the giant monster, sorry, who's not Godzilla. And actually, I am, I am told by multiple sources that I think are reliable that actually, but it was another monster that kind of was like Godzilla like, like, actually.

But, um, then it was replaced by the tornado after Toho came after a max. Now, there's a video from 1993 in the SimCity 2000 or mid-2000s. You can see it on YouTube, where Will Wright talking about SimCity. It's like for the CD-ROM edition of SimCity 2000. You can see the Godzilla. Sorry, the monster doll next to him. So there it is. It's kind of like, where's the doll, right?

That's the question. And then I was talking to Maxis's former general counsel, and he was saying that he has the doll, which totally makes sense, actually, because he's the one. who helped defend Maxis to negotiate with the Toho Lawyers and he says it's in a storage unit somewhere so, you know, I don't know if all that's true, but it would make sense.

So somewhere, it's somewhere out there. We need to get that doll to the Strong Museum. Yeah, exactly. An important piece of Max's history. I tried to, I tried to, I did make an introduction, I think. I don't think it went anywhere. Well, someday, maybe. Yeah, yeah.

All right. Well, thank you. This has been Retronauts, a Patreon-supported show at patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you want to subscribe to us at the $3 level, you get each episode one week early and at a higher bit rate. And at the $5 level, you also get access to Friday bonus episodes twice a month, Diamond Fight's weekly columns every Sunday, and the Retronauts Discord server. So that keeps us going. And if you back us already, thank you very much. And if not, please consider doing so.

And where can we find you? My website is chan.com. Or you can go to for the book. The book is Building SimCity. You can go to building simcity.com or SimCitybook.com. And that'll take you to the MIT Press page. We'll see if we can link it in the show notes as well. And yeah, where can people buy your,

book? Anywhere books are sold, I think. I think like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, I think it right now is mainly, I think it may be only online. So if you go to that MIT Press page, you'll find the links of different stores that have it. Awesome. Yeah.

It has for me. I'm on Blue Sky at Huberousaurus. You can also find my book. My book. I did do a book, Atari Archive, Volume 1. You can find that on Amazon and through limited run games. and I also produce the Atari Archive YouTube series sort of delving into the history of early video games

through the lens of the Atari 2,600 library. So if that's interested you, check it out as well. And with that, I think we'll sign off. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you. You know what I'm going to do.