November 4, 2000

6:37 AM

The life and times of a game company. While everyone knows Maxis for the SimCity games, they've has dabbled in everything from kids' games to Diablo-like titles. While this isn't a brand new article - it mentions The Sims in future tense - it is fascinating to see what happened to this unique company.
posted by hijinx (2 comments total)

"they've has dabbled". Hm. I guess it's early.

I found this article yesterday and thought it was a great read. It's interesting to see the story from the inside, because from the outside it was almost exactly the same - great game, huge lull, lackluster follow-up, Phoenix-like return after being bought by EA.

The very first Maxis game I played was SimCity on my Commodore 64, and I thought it was awful; the PC version looked so much better. Copy protection was a bigger deal then, and the game included a black-on-red sheet of cities and "high scores". You'd be given a couple of symbols on screen and needed to enter the city and score to play. What a pain in the SimRear that was.
posted by hijinx at 6:40 AM on November 4, 2000

I've just been playing Sim City "Classic" Live on their website. Its a pretty complete version of the pre-2000 version in a java applet or something. It's really great, wasted a lot of time on it.
posted by lagado at 2:09 AM on November 5, 2000