A world without The Sims is hard to imagine: countless virtual homes unbuilt, countless bizarre challenges unplayed, countless Sims untrapped in swimming pools without ladders. What kind of path would my life have taken if I hadn't been able to pack the first game full of mods so I could watch Batman and Gandalf be roommates? It's unthinkable, but it was nearly the world we got. In the late '90s, Maxis almost axed The Sims—not once, but multiple times.
The story comes from Spore designer Chaim Gingold's book Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine, published last week by MIT Press. Through chronicling the design and creation of the gold standard city builder, Gingold charts the history of simulation games, and of the company that brought SimCity to the world. And in the late '90s, Gingold writes, Maxis had canceled the project that would eventually become The Sims, nearly spelling an early death for the studio's now-beloved series.
