Retro Gamer sits down with 'the nerdiest nerd in the entire Computerverse'

Will Wright thinks outside the box. We know it’s a hackneyed phrase that’s been coined so often you can’t even type the words without feeling uninspired, but there is simply no better idiom to exemplify the achievements of this man.

The prolific designer changed the way many view games, pulling pixels away from irreverent subjects and plonking them into everyday scenarios. This workman-like approach to game design has earned Wright a place in the prestigious Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame, alongside friend and fellow industry great Shigeru Myamoto. He sees the accolade as a huge honour and a giant step for the industry. His social simulator The Sims would also knock the spellbinding PC classic Myst off the top spot to be crowned Greatest PC Game Of All Time.

Like all great practitioners, Will was an enthusiast of literature and a gifted obsessive, a guy that would approach interests and hobbies with compulsive furore. Feverously investing the time to understand every microscopic detail there was about the subjects that fascinated him. It’s no surprise then, when you consider the archetype game that he’s most synonymous with, that the one area that continually sparked his curiosity was construction.

“I spent most of my childhood building models and obsessively researching various subjects that I found interesting, such as 20th Century history, Houdini, insects, airships, astronomy, and explosives. I would usually get very obsessed with some subject or area of interest for six months or a year, and just learn everything about it. I’ve always liked studying different things. That’s one reason why I really like doing game design. It gives me an excuse to go out and research these wildly different things for a year or two and then move onto the next thing later.”

After leaving school, having studied architecture and mechanical engineering, Will’s pragmatic nature, talents and love for space would stand him in good stead for a career in game development. He discovered a keen interest in robotic engineering, which would prove the catalyst for his eventual career in games when, after purchasing an Apple II home computer to hook up to one of his mechanical creations, Will inevitably discovered a new subject to learn and master: programming.

Raid On Bungeling Bay for C64 was Will’s first ‘proper’ foray into programming. Raid was an overhead helicopter blaster that saw gamers dropping bombs over enemy installations. Its look shares a certain semblance with Will’s second and most revered game, SimCity, the idea for which, incidentally, came to him during Raid’s development when he realised he was having more fun designing its levels than playing the finished game.

“I was fascinated by bringing a city to life. I wanted to add more behaviour to it. I wanted to add traffic and see the world kind of come alive and be more dynamic. 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 – SimCity,” muses Will.

There are areas of Raid’s gameplay that show evidence of the SimCity ethos. Players would receive intelligence reports and, over the course of the game, the enemy factories ripen, causing headaches if not obliterated quickly. This idea of sprites growing and developing is a significant aspect in all of Will’s videogames.

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