» the Life and Times of Maxis, Part 2: SimWorld

Would you trust these two men with your investment? Jeff Braun and Will Wright shortly before Maxis’s IPO.

Maxis came into 1994 riding high on the wings of SimCity 2000 , the hit of the previous holiday season. They followed up that success with… SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation . This may sound like satire, but it was all too real.

To be clear, SimHealth was not, say, a playful look at the life of a hospital , with eccentric doctors and bizarre made-up diseases. It wasn’t even an earnest simulation of performing surgery . No, this was exactly what it said on the tin, a simulation of healthcare in the most macro sense. It was, to put it another way, literally a simulation of government bureaucracy. If you were getting bored with saving fantasy worlds from evil wizards and fighting the Second World War over and over, said Maxis, you could buy this game and engage with some truly exciting dilemmas. “Who gets health insurance? What does it cover? Who pays for it? How do you control costs? How will your plan affect business, physicians, specialists, insurance companies, lawyers, medical research, and the average citizen?” Hours and hours of fun for the whole family, am I right? Um… am I right?

Ironically, this most defiantly esoteric Maxis game ever arose from the same set of circumstances that gave birth to the multi-million-selling SimCity 2000 . The venture capitalists at Warburg Pincus Ventures, who had traded $10 million in cash for 30 percent of Maxis’s equity and a seat on its board in 1992, thought that the company could find a profitable sideline — or possibly even a mainline — in making simulations for Corporate America to use for internal training and planning. The sticking point was that neither Will Wright nor any of the other idealists around him had much interest in such things. Jeff Braun’s solution was to buy a little software house called Delta Logic, built around a couple of refugees from the wreckage of Digital Research, the firm that had made the most popular business-oriented personal-computer operating system in the world until Bill Gates and Microsoft came along . Since then, John Hiles, Greg Rossi, and their colleagues at Delta Logic had been tinkering with social simulations of various stripes. They were now to be rebranded Maxis Business Simulations, given a lot more money than they had ever had before, and set loose to realize the venture capitalists’ dreams. “There’s the potential for this new business to be bigger than the games business,” enthused Braun dutifully.

That didn’t happen, although a surprising number of projects came and went during the less than two years that Maxis Business Simulations was a going concern. There were a simulation of an oil refinery for Chevron, a simulation of the power grid for the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, a simulation of a telephone network for a communications consultancy, a simulation of pollution management for the Environmental Protection Agency, and a simulation of the closure of a military base (?) for the new Maxis subsidiary’s hometown of Monterey, California. With the exception of a prototype version of SimRefinery , none of the actual software that resulted from these initiatives has been preserved, to whatever extent it came to exist at all. Constant churn was a fact of life at Maxis Business Simulations. It seems safe to say that the idea of doing corporate or civic planning via interactive simulations was one of those that looked better on paper than it tended to turn out on the computer screen.

SimHealth ‘ s origin story isn’t that different from most of the other Maxis Business Simulations projects. It began when the Markle Foundation, a bedrock of old-school American philanthropy, requested a simulation to illuminate one of the hottest political debates of the 1990s, as it seems to be of every decade: what, if anything, to do about the uniquely strange and byzantine American healthcare system. President Bill Clinton, who in January of 1993 became the first Democrat to occupy the Oval Office in twelve years, made reforming healthcare on a more efficient, equitable basis the flagship issue of his first term. So far, so good. But then he decided to place the project under the stewardship of his unelected wife Hillary Clinton, who was already at this early date a lightning rod for Republicans and no small percentage of independents. It turned into an epic fiasco, burning up most of the president’s political capital without benefiting anyone and setting the stage for a brutal midterm shellacking at the hands of the Republicans. Indeed, many political scientists argue that the current, hyper-partisan era of American politics dates from those 1994 midterms, when Republicans under their future Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich first learned to characterize their Democratic opponents as not just misguided about means but evil in intent.

Is this the weirdest game ever to be reviewed in Computer Gaming World?

If this is the case, then SimHealth stands today as an oddly touching artifact of the Before Times, when there was still more than lip service paid to the notion of politics as a good-faith quest for the policies that yield the most good for the most people. In that spirit, the Markle Foundation decided to make SimHealth available to everyone as a boxed… well, I suppose the word “game” is the only one to use, considering that it was sold in the games section of those stores who were willing to sell it at all, and considering that it was given a two-page review by Computer Gaming World magazine, alongside the likes of Wing of Glory , Alone in the Dark 2 , Carriers at War II , Ravenloft , and Aces of the Deep . (One of these things was not like the others…)

SimHealth even played like a game, albeit one with unusually sober — not to say boring — subject matter; in some ways, it was actually more of a game than Maxis’s earlier SimEarth or SimLife . You start out with your political party having just won an election, and have to try to maintain your mandate and with it your chosen approach to healthcare through the elections that follow. Everything about it is incongruous. Once it was decided to release SimHealth publicly, the main Maxis office pitched in with art drawn in the house style; inevitably, it brings to mind nothing so much as good old SimCity . All told, SimHealth stands today as one of the more bizarre games ever to be put in a box and sold. One doesn’t know whether to hail it for its chutzpah or laugh at it. Whatever else you can say about it, it certainly didn’t embrace the then-prevalent gaming mono-culture of sci-fi, fantasy, and war.

The discussion that sprang up around SimHealth was, to the extent it sprang up at all, dogged by the same fallacies that swirled around SimCity . For all that SimHealth presented itself as an early example of a “serious game” with something to say about the real world, there was no reason to believe that this purported “simulation,” created by a few harried programmers in well under a year, could possibly be modeling anything as complicated as a national healthcare system for one of the more populous and diffuse countries in the world with any sort of accuracy. Approaching it as a gamer would — because how else was he supposed to approach it? — Computer Gaming World’ s Keith Schlesinger quickly found a winning strategy.

All you have to do is adopt an extreme libertarian ideology, eliminate all federal healthcare (including Medicare!), and cut other government services by $100-300 billion per year. The polls never sink below 57 percent favorable, and the behavior point total is almost a perfect 400. You can set the game to “Run to the End” and breeze to victory while hardly touching the mouse or keyboard. Institutions wax and wane, but the “invisible hand” of the free market keeps everything pretty much in line.

There is one catch: the entire private insurance industry goes bankrupt in the first three months of the game! That means no one has any protection even from catastrophic disease and injury. One wonders what people are doing about this. Why aren’t [they] rioting and burning down Main Street?

Once they’re through celebrating this endorsement of their views, even the extreme libertarians among us may, if they’re being honest with themselves, feel a twinge of concern at the pernicious idea that simulations like this one are somehow modeling abstract truths instead of being a morass of oversimplifications, biases, and highly questionable judgment calls on the part of their designers. I do suspect that the anecdote above arose by accident rather than out of any deliberate attempt to instill an ideological slant into the software. In fact, to their credit I suppose, the designers of SimHealth included an “Assumptions” menu which lets players tinker with the most fundamental rules of the simulation itself. But it does rather raise the question of what the point of it all is. What am I meant to learn from SimHealth if even the designers aren’t sure what the rules should be? The whole project was noble and well-meaning — and also kind of useless.

Unlike SimCity , though, SimHealth came and went quickly enough that the debate around it hardly got started. By the time it was released to retail in early 1994, Maxis was already in the process of divesting themselves of their brief-lived Business Simulations division. “The gap between building simulations for entertainment and simulations for businesses was too great,” said an older and wiser Jeff Braun. “One was a product, the other was a service.” The former Maxis Business Simulations would soldier on independently for a while as Thinking Tools before closing up shop for good.

In his (excellent) article on this side quest , Phil Salvador of The Obscuratory states that Maxis sold about 50,000 copies of SimHealth . I find that number extremely surprising, assuming it’s correct — not because it’s so low but because it’s so high. My guess would have been more in the range of 5000 copies — and that’s if I was feeling generous.

Regardless of the exact numbers that SimHealth did, we can say with confidence that Maxis’s second and last Sim title of 1994 sold far more. SimTower: The Vertical Empire still stands today as the best-remembered Sim game of the 1990s that isn’t a SimCity . That said, this particular apple didn’t fall that far from the SimCity tree. Your task in SimTower as well is that of building a functioning community — but here you’re to do it all inside a single skyscraper. It feels only appropriate that the game was conceived and coded in Japan, where people have long been in the habit of living small and vertically.

Yoot Saito, the mastermind of SimTower , was once memorably described by Jeff Braun as “a rock-star groupie who became a rock star himself.” He fell in love with SimCity not long after its release: “I didn’t leave the Macintosh for almost 24 hours. I so much admired the creator of this genius and crazy software.” He chased Will Wright into a hotel lobby during a MacWorld exhibition like a screaming girl from A Hard Day’s Night . He then proceeded to tell his cornered hero about his idea for a SimCity inside a single building. One thing led to another, and in late 1994 Maxis brought his SimTower to the West.

Your goal in SimTower — and yes, you do have a goal — is to eventually erect a five-star building, meaning one that has at least 100 floors and at least 10,000 more or less happy residents, with a cathedral as the cherry on top of the imposing sundae. How you do this is entirely up to you. Your biggest challenge, the direct equivalent to SimCity’ s need for efficient roadways and subways, is your elevator system; get this wrong and your gleaming utopian tower will soon collapse into impatience and discord. As Yoot Saito would be the first to tell you, the rest of the game was really born out of his odd fascination with elevator systems.

Late one night