alt Hacker NewsWill Wright handed the original Maxis SimCity 3000 team a great design for the next SimCity (which I think they should have called SimCity 2001 instead of SimCity 3000, to more realistically set expectations).
But they ignored him, and went off on a tangent trying to design their own ultimate totally general purpose virtual reality (and we know how well Second Life has done ;), without much thought to what was actually possible, playable, or fun on current computers.
They gave some demos of the 3D prototype to reporters, then Maxis ran out of money because it was nowhere near shipping, then EA bought us, then fired the people who were out of control, and Luc Barthelet announced to the reporters that SimCity 3000 wouldn't be 3D, but it would be 2D and beautiful.
Here is a little nugget I saved from that time: Guru's infamous SimCity 3000 design document, from when the 3D design was really going off the rails:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rnvzKdJp9tyEJwEGxsIjoHnT...
Ocean Quigley says that Guru was really sincere and believed what he said (and was not just on mushrooms).
I have to admit, that if that's true, then that Guru dude was 15 years ahead of his time, and not just a crackpot! But he should have mentioned something about the fact that it would take 15 years to develop those ideas into a shipping product!
- Peak hubris / scope explosion:
“It is possible to bridge the chasm of expectations and technology in the forthcoming year in a realistic and economical manner.”
“The Real Time Render mode shall define a visual paradigm hitherto unseen in any game or product.”
“Hence attempting to assault the cliff of expectations of the visual paradigm by means of the linear ladder fails.”
“There is a whole think tank of concepts and ideas which shall be explored and implemented…”
- Hardware reality fighting back:
“Needless to even state this is impossible performance for a delivery Pentium 75 within one year.”
“Terrifying thought. Cut the flexibility we say ! Let’s govern the flexibility I say.”
“That’s a tall order, admittedly, but then, this is an ambitious project !”
- Glorious jargon poetry:
“The semi-digested spatial data is nothing more than just that.”
“This data simultaneously suffers further transformation…”
“The motion window is always stabilized and will ‘fly’.”
“The Snapshot Port — a.k.a. The Portrait of Reality”
“causation of an event singularity for the common reference of the simulator and the visual computing system”
- The “there / that / do this” interface:
“Once ‘that’ has been identified to be able to ‘do’ ‘this’ to ‘that’…”
“The user can merely point ‘there’: and place a building. The user can point to ‘that’ building and delete it.”
“A single pencil beam shot back into the scene from the point of the mouse…”
- Biology metaphor goes full Spore:
“The species of the virtual world… shall be encoded for spatial representation as chromosomes…”
“The species itself shall be represented in its completeness as a self descriptive cell.”
“Needless to add… if transfer RNA were metaphorically the lifts of the building…”
“The other facet… is the ability to create more species by crossbreeding and mutation of species.”
- Buildings become existential -- this is the crown jewel:
“The behavioral transformation over time has a standard pattern
Now I’m a cylinder and Now I’m an egg
Now I’m smooth & shiny and Now I’m not
Now I am mottled and Now I’m not
Now I feel mottled and Now I do not
Now I’m here and Now I’m over there
something or the other blah blah”
“Once the Simulator and the VC shell agree that there is a building called Big Joe’s Shark Tent…”
“yes I have neon lights, I have thirty bulbs all having high level scripts…”
“aaah OK ! you got it ! the script is queued, bye”
- Voxel fever dreams:
“This throws up the possibilities of bulldozers actually bulldozing soil. And Mining community towns actually mining inside a silver mine !!!!”
“Voxel space animation methods can actually cause earthquakes.”
“The display of a building or a city block being engulfed by splitting seams of the earth is not an impossible target…”
- Favorite one-liner:
“Modelessness is messy.”