Will Wright, Stupid Fun Club
- Bungeling Bay
o Will’s first game
o Didn’t consider himself a designer
o Took him 1 year of work (1 byte/minute – now 100 bytes/minute)
o Game came out in 1984
§ Same year as the first portable CD player
- 1980, Will was into robots and racing
o Bought a computer to help with working on robots
o It was the last time that one single person could fully understand the whole computer
o Played the game “Conway’s Life,” recreated it to learn coding
o When the Commodore 64 came out, decided to make a game for it (since it was new, so the game market wasn’t built up yet)
- Inspiration
o Loved helicopters
o Wanted to create an intricate clock like world. Wanted the world to be large enough to get lost in
o Commodore 64 allowed for screen to move seamlessly across several screens (before you just got what was on a single screen, but now you could have a bigger world)
- Created tools: Cedit (character editor) and Wedit (character and world editors)
o Wedit later became basis for Sim City
- Memory
o When working on programs, you knew where code was – it lived in a specific place in memory
o You would spend time hunting through code to find single bytes to add up
o Now he feels like a grandparent who lived through the Depression: “You’re using that many bytes?!”
- Systems
o Whole system of resources, war machine
§ Chain of resources moving from oil rigs -> ships -> tanks -> factories
§ People seemed to get some of it, but not all of it. Might have been better if showed resources actually moving?
- Progression
o As you got farther into the game, difficulty built. The escalation of difficulty doubled after each factory you destroyed
o You always go back to the aircraft carrier for repairs, you build a relationship with it
§ 2 factories into the game, bombers attack carrier. You have to protect it!
- “Bungeling Empire”
o Took game to Broderbund for publishing
o They wanted it to be explicit that you were not killing humans in the game, so they came up with the Bungeling Robot Empire
o They also were the bad guys in Choplifter and Logan’s Run
- Piracy
o Piracy was rampant
o Spent hours trying to protect games
o 20,00 units sold on Commodore 64
o 800,000 units sold when game went onto the NES (piracy!!)
- Evolved into Sim City – every version of Sim City has had helicopters (also Sim Copter)
- Surprised at how many fans have remade this game
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