Maxis Studio, Electronic Arts, Redwood Shores, CA The Sims 2: Game Designer and User Interface Director The concept of “God Game” was just taking hold in the industry and I decided to give the concept it’s own button. I then moved on to UI design and came up with the game’s “God Mode” interface. Initially, I helped the Art Director create a greater realism using incrementally better tools than we had in the previous production. I had studied Edward Tufte’s books and was ready to apply his design guidelines to the SimCity franchise. This was an iterative game release that improved on the successes of SimCity 3000. Ocean Quigley, Andrew Willmott and I teamed up to create what is considered the best of the early SimCity games. SimCity4: Technical Artist and UI Designer Several of my SimMars illustrations have been featured in the Smithsonian magazine. We luckily closed it down before doing any major investments. I honed my illustration and infographic chops with this project and garnered fame among execs for creating a gameplay chart that showed how the game couldn’t succeed. In those days, most games still used the basic Microsoft UI framework so this marked a huge moment for the studio.Īrt Directed SimMars - a game that never shipped but has been better known for the concept work that came of it. The move transformed my career! A year later, Bing Gordon credited the huge success of SimCity 3000 to my interface design.
the EP, Lucy Bradshaw, tapped me to do the user interface. I started out by revamping the art pipeline and improving the art style for the franchise. My previous architectural illustration experience was put to immediate use at Maxis/EA. SimCity 3000: UI Designer, Technical Artist Now you may resume getting down to Renaissance Act I.Ĭhristian Stratton, Game Designer and User Interface Director of The Sims 2 also worked on SimCity 3000, SimMars, SimCity 4, Spore and SimCity 2013. In fact, it’s such a playground, goddamn it! These days, Edith is oftentimes credited as a reference material from the own masterminds behind the game and a few academic enthusiasts, and was upgraded several times in order to meet the needs from different The Sims builds and, later on, the neo-sim-sapiens of The Sims 2’s AI…
Bunker, designed by former SimCity artists Jenny Martin and Susan Green, made them Maxoids so melted in love that it was more than enough to repurpose the SimAntics editing tool after her, and become what it is today.Įdith was, by the looks of it, the fourth and final iteration of something that had been developed for this virtual dollhouse ever since it was but a modest SimCity 2000 add-on, previously called in a myriad of generic ways, like ObjEdit, TDSEdit (TDS standing for Tactical Domestic Simulator) and ObjMaker! But, in the end, they fundamentally work in the same vein of, among other wacky things, orchestrating the brains of Sims and their four-quarter world (or, better, the smarts from objects, making the characters as dumb as possible) through a surprisingly fun visual language based on (deliberately or not) convenient family-tree-akin windows that make even the most coding-chicken kinda to see how the cause-and-effects game behind programming can be kewl.
Along with her, a certain Archie Bunker, in all his unpolished and polygonal charm, rules the scene, and probably makes you wonder “oh, shit, aren’t those also the names of the characters from that supercheesy All in the Family sitcom, notoriously revolutionary for touching upon 20th Century-unfriendly topics such as homosexuality, racism, politics and all?” well, in a way… so is our own The Sims, isn’t it? Damn, the more we know about it, more we take our hats off for it.
“Edith”’s name came from Edith Bunker - the word-of-mouth (and, more realistically, articles plus the own SimAntics wiki) have it that she was the #1 Sim ever made for the game, sometime in 1997, in a not-so-shiny prototype for a pre-EA The Sims whimsically titled as “Jefferson”, a minimalist shout-out to USA’s former president. In fact, as something that is remarked as some kind of humanity cliché when it comes to good things that made their way to reality, it all started with a girl. Chances are that you, o High-Simulation-and-Everything-that-englobes-it rat, already read a little bit about EDITH.