The demo would consist of three scenes from the game. had a chance to kill the design, Barrett was asked to create a demo of the game to be shown at E3. “After a while, everyone was just used to the design being there. “They just pretty much ignored it,” he said. “He told me that liked the social interactions, and that he was glad to see that same-sex support was back in the game.” Nobody on the team questioned Barrett’s work. Later, Will Wright stopped by my desk,” Barrett said. “But the design felt right, so I just implemented it. “In hindsight, I probably should have questioned the design,” Barrett, who is gay, said.
He successfully wrote the basic code for social interactions, including same-sex relationships. That week, Barrett confounded the expectations of his disbelieving boss. Its pages described a web of social interactions, in which every kind of romantic relationship was permitted. That design document predated the decision to exclude gay relationships in the game. “Neither he nor I realized that he’d given me an old design document to work from.” “He didn’t think I could handle it with Jamie off on vacation, but he figured that at least I’d be out of his hair,” Barrett told me. that would dictate how the characters would dynamically interact with one another. Jim Mackraz, Barrett’s boss, needed a task to occupy his new employee, and he handed Barrett a document that outlined how social interactions in the game would work the underlying rules for the game’s A.I.
A fortnight into his new job, he found himself with nothing to do when his supervisor, the game’s lead programmer, Jamie Doornbos, took a short vacation. When Barrett joined the company, in October, 1998, he was unaware of the decision. “It felt to me like a fear thing.” After going back and forth for several months, the team finally decided to leave same-sex relationships out of the game code. really didn’t want to begin with,” Barret told me. “No other game had facilitated same-sex relationships before-at least, to this extent-and some people figured that maybe we weren’t the ideal ones to be first, as this was a game that E.A. But there was also fear about how such a feature might adversely affect the game. If this digital petri dish was to accurately model all aspects of human life, from work to play and love, it was natural that it would facilitate gay relationships. The game wasn’t even displayed on the large screen with the other title’s trailers.” But, within hours, an unplanned, illicit kiss between two of the game’s background characters made The Sims the talk of the show.ĭuring The Sims’s protracted development, the team had debated whether to permit same-sex relationships in the game. Barrett III, one of the game’s programmers, told me. “We all knew that if we couldn’t generate any interest at E3 that year, then the game would be cancelled for good,” Patrick J.
But replicating the mundane dramas of the living room in game form had proven to be a tall challenge: The Sims was almost abandoned numerous times. The game had been in stammering development since 1993, when Wright first had the idea for a simulation that would model human behavior, not from the bird’s-eye viewpoint of his earlier game but from the ground zero of domesticity. For E.A., The Sims, the latest from Will Wright, the celebrated designer of 1989’s city-planning game SimCity, was a legacy project, inherited when the company purchased its development studio, Maxis.