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Again, that is the Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts, and I'll let you get to this free preview of one of our exclusive episodes. with a success of SimCity, Maxis fully owned the SimBranding, and they began to apply it to other projects in the span of time between SimCity in this game.

So we have things like Simant, SimEarth, Sim Life, they're all bringing unique simulation experiences, but they weren't as immediate or relatable as SimCity. We all live in a city. We all live in society, as George Costanza said. But we don't know what it's like to be an ants. We don't know what it's like to manage a planet. That's why SimCity was so popular. We recognize roads and buildings, et cetera, et cetera. We know what a mayor is, or at least I hope we do. But Hi, M. You cover a lot of this in your book. The struggle for Maxis to gain an identity, them trying to figure out, like, what should we simulate next and the reluctance to actually make a sequel to SimCity. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it had to do with Will Wright of what makes him special as a

creator is that he just wanted to follow his own interest to do what he wanted to study

the subjects he wanted to study.

And after spending years and years working on SimCity and studying cities, he was done.

And he moved on to Sim Earth and that Sim Sim and so on. And it wasn't until

the CEO, his co-founder, Jeff Braun, the business partner said, hey, well, Maxis is going to

go under if we don't do a SimCity sequel that Will got pulled into it. But they had started a SimCity sequel before then.

It just wasn't going well.

Right, right.

The need to continue as a business really lit a fire under them.

And it was interesting to look at all of these weirdo Maxis titles that I just wasn't aware of.

They were trying a lot of things.

It wasn't uncommon for a developer to be doing this at the time. But this is not what we think of when we think of Maxis. Things like flight

simulators called Skychase, a game boy, dutron crawler called Mysterium, a turn-based robot

combat game called Robosport. These are not things I would associate with the people who make SimCity.

My understanding is that, you know, Maxis, the fact that they came into SimCity is something

that happened a little bit after the decision of Jeff Braun saying, hey, I want to do a game

company.

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