00:02Stoan Labrandi
00:02Peggy 7
00:06Hello, welcome back. I'm Stoan Labrandi,
00:08the lead designer of SimCity and I've invited
00:10a special guest to the studio today, Will Wright,
00:12the original creator of SimCity.
00:13Hi. Thanks for coming out here. Oh, my pleasure.
00:15So Will's been playing the game a lot recently
00:17and we invited him out to the studio to try it out
00:19and see what he thought of it and my first question
00:21is, what did you think of the whole
00:23experience overall?
00:25Well, this is probably the first time I've enjoyed SimCity
00:27in many years. First of all,
00:29you know, the fact that I've been kind of removed
00:31from the development and just kind of playing it as a player
00:34has been actually a pretty amazing experience
00:35and had a lot of fun. You know, right
00:37off the bat, I love the road tool. The way you
00:39can kind of do curves and splines and get this
00:41organic feeling. We spent a lot of time on
00:43those. Yeah, I blew all my budget
00:45in the first couple cities just playing with the road tool, building
00:47way too many roads. Later realized that
00:49I could build cheaper roads and upgrade them, which actually
00:51ended up being a really good trick to learn.
00:54And I love the kind of immersive
00:55zoom in thing, you know, that I could go down
00:57the street level and really feel like I was, you know,
00:59walking around the city. And the visuals
01:01and the sound were just, you know, the sound in particular
01:03was great.
01:05Then just kind of got into
01:07the gestalt of building a city
01:09and my initial thought was
01:11that it felt a little claustrophobic, just the size
01:13of the landscape. But then as I started
01:15playing more, I started realizing how much
01:17intricacy was in that area.
01:19And even if my city had been larger,
01:21you know, I'd still be dealing with the same issues.
01:23So it allowed me to kind of get into the simulation sooner.
01:26It was more about the quality
01:27of what I was building and less about the quantity.
01:30Which I kind of liked, because then
01:31I could actually really focus in
01:33on something that felt manageable,
01:35but still have the depth of simulation.
01:37Were you more trying to, like,
01:39make a statement, make something beautiful, or were you
01:41trying to win the game? Did you have goals
01:43for yourself? I'd say I'm somewhere between
01:45the two, but I definitely,
01:47aesthetics was a big part of it. You know, I wanted these
01:49organic-looking cities that, at the end
01:51of the day, I could kind of, you know, upgrade
01:53and make it look beautiful with parks
01:55and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it kind of curves up a lot with that.
01:57Yeah. Then I started realizing that I had
01:59to watch my budget, and I was
02:01blowing all my money, buying all these fancy toys for my city.
02:03And so then I started a couple more cities,
02:05you know, with a little bit more fiscal discipline.
02:07As I started kind of delving
02:09into what was going on through the different networks
02:11and, you know, the data layers, the pollution,
02:13the land value, and all that kind of stuff.
02:15I was actually very impressed with the way
02:17it was presented, because there was obviously a lot
02:19of stuff going on underneath
02:21the hood of the simulation, but yet
02:23it was presented all very, very graphically.
02:25You know, I almost never looked at a number, except for
02:27maybe my budget or my population.
02:28Those are the only two numbers I really even had to look at.
02:31Yeah, also like when you turn on, say, the crime layer,
02:32and then you see these big orange areas
02:35and these big blue safe areas, and you're like,
02:37oh, I want to live over here, and then you look at education.
02:39It's like, oh, this is a great school, no crime.
02:41This is a much better spot to live than
02:43over here in this part of the town. Right. And also, I think
02:45of the neighborhoods almost as like little test tubes,
02:47you know, where I'd go in, and I would try a lot of things
02:48in a neighborhood, see if I could improve that neighborhood.
02:50If that worked, then I would replicate that other places,
02:52you know, which in a lot of ways is the way
02:54a lot of actual cities approach city planning,
02:57is they will actually try little initiatives,
02:59you know, at kind of the district level,
03:01you know, see if it works. If it works, they roll it out
03:02to the rest of the city. It was actually interesting
03:04to me when I was playing these cities that were
03:07economically challenged, and,
03:09you know, I was having to cut back on city services,
03:10and, you know, it was really kind of an interesting decision
03:15from the players' point of view in terms of,
03:17again, do I cut back, you know, police or fire services?
03:20And I really need to get the city producing money.
03:22And so, kind of being in these kind of
03:25behind the curve situations where I'm now looking at the residents
03:28and wondering, okay, how is this going to impact their lives,
03:31you know? Speaking of that, I'm wondering,
03:32did you feel like you got an emotional attachment to the Sims
03:35themselves in the game? Like, did you actually feel
03:37that the people were the heart of the game,
03:39or were you more focused on the buildings?
03:40I actually had more of an emotional attachment to the neighborhoods.
03:44You know, and when I'd go down the street view,
03:45and I would kind of listen to the sounds and see
03:47people walking around, see what kind of houses they were living in,
03:49what kind of jobs were there.
03:51You know, I really got a sense for certain neighborhoods,
03:53and I found myself becoming emotionally invested
03:54in particular neighborhoods. Like, oh, this one's
03:57so, you know, close, and it's such a great location,
03:59and just a little bit more of this, that, and the other.
04:01And I would go in and I would kind of overspend
04:03on parks and things in that area,
04:04maybe at the expense of some other neighborhood
04:06that I didn't really care about. But in my mind,
04:08I was almost kind of like, that's where I lived.
04:10This is my neighborhood. You know, I almost had this fiction
04:12that I was a Sim in this city, and these were the neighborhoods
04:14that were not my neighborhoods. And I thought
04:16that the street-level view did kind of an excellent job
04:18of giving you that kind of sense
04:20of, you know, of being there.
04:22Did you try new ideas and new types of
04:24experiments, new types of cities?
04:26Well, I would kind of approach, I think, every city I made
04:28in a slightly different way, you know,
04:30kind of as a meta-strategy. You know,
04:32what if I tried to do something where the transportation is my
04:34highest priority? Or I tried to really, you know,
04:36work on, you know, budgeting and making sure I always
04:38maintain a positive cash flow. Within the city,
04:40I would actually try much more kind of tactical strategies.
04:42But it felt like I was playing these, like,
04:44kind of nested mini-games inside the
04:46larger game of SimCity.
04:48And every now and then, I'd look at my budget
04:50and figure out which one of these mini-games do I need to focus on now?
04:52I'm spending too much on transit.
04:54So now, how do I go in and optimize that?
04:56Or how do I get the most effective fire services,
04:59you know, for the least amount of money?
05:00What about your, like, garbage services, sewage services?
05:03So for some of the services, like the garbage,
05:06some of the industrial stuff, I would usually
05:08kind of put it off in a corner somewhere.
05:09But at some point, it would kind of grow,
05:11start polluting the water table, that kind of thing.
05:13I started realizing I could outsource some of that stuff to the neighbors
05:15and started doing that.
05:16So you mentioned you played a couple different cities out in the region.
05:18What were the kind of specialties that you tried to highlight
05:20in the different cities that you played in to make them different from each other?
05:23Well, the first one I played with was gambling
05:25in terms of the city specialties.
05:28You know, I think unlike the other sim cities
05:30where basically the city was its own kind of monolithic thing,
05:33you know, all by itself, you know, self-supporting.
05:36I think the regional gameplay brings in this idea of specialized cities,
05:40which is kind of more, much more realistic.
05:43You know, most large cities we have are in larger metropolitan regions
05:47and they are specialized and they're depending upon their neighbors,
05:49you know, for various services.
05:52And I think that allows you, you know,
05:55to not necessarily have to build every last thing in every city that you make.
05:58Every time you play you can kind of explore a different specialty
06:00and each one, you know, seems to have its own rules,
06:03its own kind of strategy to it embedded in the overall regional gameplay.
06:09I really got the sense that if I were to look at, you know,
06:11a hundred cities that players have made, they would all seem very different.
06:14I would see, you know, totally different feeling cities
06:17depending on kind of which part of the specialization path you took.
06:21So I think that's a pretty significant difference
06:23from all the previous versions of SimCity.
06:25All right, that was great.
06:26Well, thanks for taking the time to be out here today.
06:28I had a great time chatting with you and come by the studio anytime.
06:31So we're talking with Will Wright today about his experiences playing SimCity.
06:35And it'll be out on the market on March 5th.
06:37So we hope you get a chance to play it when it comes out.
06:45Thanks for coming out.
06:45Bye.
06:45Bye.
06:46Bye.
06:47Bye.
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