It's hard to imagine a world without The Sims. Countless virtual houses would not be built, countless strange challenges would not be played, and countless Sims would not be trapped in ladderless pools. I wonder what path my life would have taken if I hadn't been able to stuff my first game full of mods just to see Batman and Gandalf become roommates" Unthinkable, but that was pretty much the world we got: in the late 90s, Maxis released "The Sims ' was nearly cancelled from development not once, but several times.

The story comes from "Spore" designer Chaim Gingold's book Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine (MIT Press), published last week. Through this gilded record of the design and creation of a city builder, Gingold chronicles the history of simulation games and the company that brought SimCity to the world. Then, in the late 90s, Gingold writes, Maxis canceled the project that would eventually become The Sims, and now the studio's popular series was about to die an early death.

Shortly after SimAnt's release, Will Wright, a well-known designer at Maxis, lost his home in the 1991 Oakland Hills wildfires. As his family rebuilt their lives and home in the aftermath, Wright realized his fascination with the material and psychological motivations of everyday domestic life as the basis for simulating human behavior." The right set of motives and objects, Gingold writes, will be the basis for a new project that Wright hopes will "simulate humans as elegantly as a sim-ant simulates ants." Wright called the project a "dollhouse." We will eventually know it as "The Sims."

However, Dollhouse was not well-loved by Maxis management. Due to underperforming software releases and an increasingly expensive industry to compete in, Maxis was averse to risk. Also, according to Gingold, Will Wright was falling out of writer status within the studio: with the exception of "SimCity 2000," his "SimEarth" and "SimAnt" were only middling sellers.

"There was widespread suspicion and hostility toward Dollhouse," Gingold writes, and Jeff Brown, then CEO of Maxis and the primary source for Gingold's book, sums up the sentiment of studio management at the time: Dollhouse, that is for little girls. In the 1990s, the gaming industry still assumed that only men would buy games, and as far as Maxis knew, no man wanted a dollhouse. The studio's marketing focus test pitched the concept to teenage boys, but "they hated it," Gingold wrote.

"In retrospect, it was totally insane because we expanded the market," Gingold said in an interview with PC Gamer. While the potential of Dollhouse seems obvious in 2024, Maxis seemed like a failure to its target audience. Nevertheless, Dollhouse survived, thanks in part to Wright's rebranding as a "tactical home simulator" called "Project X" within the company and avoiding a lasting sense of focus-tested doom.

Riding the success of 1993's "SimCity 2000," Maxis went public in 1995, but mismanagement and industry headwinds almost immediately worsened the studio's fortunes; in late 1996, amid growing financial turmoil, Maxis announced Wright's "Project X" It was cancelled.

Fortunately, the project did not last long. Jim Mucklers, head of the recently formed Maxis team known as the Core Technology Group, quietly took over the project, continuing to work on it as Maxis spun off, subtly shifting funds and pulling developers. Eventually, the game was renamed "Jefferson" again and pulled from the disintegrating Maxis by an unexpected savior: Electronic Arts.

In 1997, after surviving financial ruin, Maxis was acquired by Electronic Arts. Quietly refined in the face of scorn, Jefferson was enthusiastically received by the new owners of Maxis. And it was also thanks to the women of Maxis who worked on the production. [For example, Robin Harper, who established the newer, more sophisticated brand as vice president of marketing for Maxis in 1991. Importantly, while "The Sims" was rejected by upper management, the women of Maxis helped shape and support "The Sims." Artists Jenny Martin and Susie Green encouraged Wright to "emphasize people and their personalities" and helped set the direction of the game, Gingold wrote.

Also involved in the ultimate success of The Sims were Maxis designers Claire Curtin and Roxy Wolosenko. They went on to work with Wright as co-designers on projects that were cancelled after the EA acquisition. And even Wright's daughter, Cassidy, had a hand in shaping the game: according to Gingold, she had played the early prototypes and, like Martin and Green, helped convince Wright to abandon his initial emphasis on architectural efficiency.

With new support at EA, the project would be released as The Sims in 2000. As it turned out, it worked out quite well. Gingold writes, "As of 2020, the franchise has brought in over $5 billion in profits for EA."