Maxis (Emeryville)

» see maxis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

simcity 3000 reached internet cafes in ankara around 2000, two years late, on a burned cd that also had heroes 3. you would zone three or four blocks of residential, drop a power plant, watch the sims move in. honestly nobody i played with took the genre as seriously as the rts cafe canon, but simcity was always one of the icons on the desktop. the maxis logo (orange box, white text) was on the loading screen.

maxis was set up in 1987 in orinda, california, by will wright and jeff braun. the original simcity shipped in 1989 after will wright pitched it to several publishers and was told a city-building game with no win condition was unmarketable. it sold a million copies. simcity 2000 in 1993, simcity 3000 in 1999, the sims in 2000, simcity 4 in 2003, the sims 2 in 2004, spore in 2008, the sims 3 in 2009. that is most of the canon a casual player would recognize.

i was not paying attention to the corporate side. electronic arts bought maxis in july 1997 in a stock swap valued at around a hundred and twenty-five million dollars. the office moved from walnut creek to emeryville. spore in 2008 was the last will wright project at the studio. he left in 2009. the maxis name continued on the building.

the simcity 2013 reboot was the inflection point. it was the last game built at emeryville and one of the most public launch disasters of the decade, mandatory always-online drm that did not work on launch day, persistent server failures, a smaller-than-promised city footprint that turned out to be hardcoded into the simulation. emeryville never shipped another title. ea closed the office on march 4 2015. some of the sims line staff were transferred to other ea studios under the same maxis label. the emeryville building was the actual studio.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the simcity-to-sims arc is one of those rare cases where a single studio built two of the highest-recall titles of two consecutive decades, on the same simulation philosophy. the design language was systems first and story never. you got tools and a world and the game watched what you did with them. will wright on a stage anywhere in the late nineties or early aughts would tell you the player was the author and the game was the camera.

the sims in 2000 was the bigger commercial event of the two. it sold over 16 million copies on the original engine across the base game and expansion packs, became the best-selling pc franchise of the decade, and reframed the maxis brand from city-builder to dollhouse-simulator in the mainstream perception. in those days. the sims 2 in 2004 added a 3d engine and aging. the sims 3 in 2009 added open neighborhoods. each was a will-wright-era release in spirit even after he had stepped back.

~ the simcity crater ~

the 2013 simcity reboot was an emeryville-built game on the glassbox engine, which simulated every individual citizen and vehicle as a discrete agent moving on the road network. that was the pitch. mandatory online connection was the headline feature for ea, who wanted persistent cloud-region play. on launch day in march 2013 the servers melted. the agent simulation turned out to short-circuit in ways the marketing had not flagged, agents would commute to whatever was closest rather than to a fixed home or workplace, breaking the entire population logic. the city-size cap of two kilometers square turned out to be engine-level rather than a configurable knob. offline mode was patched in over a year later after the team was already being dismantled.

ea spent the next two years quietly moving sims teams out of emeryville. the official closure on march 4 2015 was announced internally as a consolidation. the maxis label survived as an ea-internal brand applied to the sims studios in redwood shores, salt lake city, and later helsinki and texas. emeryville as a building and as a culture was gone.

~ what got buried with it ~

the will-wright-era simulation philosophy did not really get inherited inside ea after the closure. cities skylines from colossal order in finland is the spiritual successor on the city-builder side and has done the work simcity 2013 was supposed to. the sims continues under the maxis label as a different team in a different building. spore never got a sequel and the maxis spore servers eventually shut down. the simcity series has not had a numbered installment since the 2013 reboot. the emeryville studio that built two of the best-selling pc franchises of all time is gone with its name absorbed into a brand asset that the parent company still uses.

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