William Wright (born January 20, 1960 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American computer game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis, now part of Electronic Arts.

The first computer game Wright designed was Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984 but it was SimCity that brought him to prominence. The game was released by Maxis, a company Wright formed with Jeff Braun, and he built upon the game’s theme of computer simulation with numerous other titles including SimEarth and SimAnt.

Wright’s greatest success to date came as the original designer for The Sims games series which, as of 2008, is the best-selling PC game in history. The game spawned multiple sequels and expansions and Wright earned many awards for his work. His latest work, Spore, was released in September 2008 and features gameplay based upon the model of evolution.

Early life

Wright was born in Atlanta, the son of Bill Wright, Sr., and Beverlye Wright Edwards; his father was a graduate of Georgia Tech’s engineering school, and was an entrepreneur in the field of plastic packing materials. In the early 1960s, Wright Sr. founded a successful company, which allowed the Wrights to live comfortably in Atlanta. Beverlye was an amateur musician and actress. Wright was educated at a local Montessori school, where he enjoyed its emphasis on creativity, problem solving, and self-motivation. Wright admitted to having been inspired to create certain elements of SimCity from his experiences in the school.

Montessori taught me the joy of discovery… It showed you can become interested in pretty complex theories, like Pythagorean theory, say, by playing with blocks. It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori—if you give people this model for building cities, they will abstract from it principles of urban design.

Wright later described himself as “obsessive” in his pursuits. “I would usually get very obsessed with some subject or area of interest for six months or a year, and just totally learn everything I (could) about it.” As a child, Wright was an avid builder of models, “ships, cars, planes—I loved to do that”, he told the New Yorker in October 2006. At 10, he built a scale model in balsa wood of the USS Enterprise’s flight deck. Wright later found these early experiences to be formative in his vision of game design. “Well, one thing I’ve always really enjoyed is making things. Out of whatever. It started with modeling as a kid, building models… I think when I started doing games I really wanted to carry that to the next step, to the player, so that you give the player a tool so that they can create things. And then you give them some context for that creation.” Wright would discuss with his father the possibility of life on other worlds, NASA, and the stars. His ambition was to be an astronaut, and form colonies in space to relieve overpopulation. His father was sympathetic to his ambitions. He was also a fan of Avalon Hill’s board games, which he enjoyed particularly for their propensity to descend into a form of rules lawyering.

When Will Jr. was 9, his father died of leukemia. His mother moved the family to her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Wright was enrolled in the local Episcopal High School. He enjoyed it for the chance to debate the faculty. During his time at the school, he became an atheist. Overall, he found the methods of the school inferior to the Montessori, and came off with a bad impression of conventional schooling in general. In 1994, he declared that he had   always been somewhat disillusioned with the educational system. Some people have said it was originally based on the idea that we’re training factory workers, so it was very important to teach them to do some repetitive task for eight hours a day. What’s going to be really exciting is when this Nintendo generation gets a little bit older and starts becoming teachers in schools. I think that’s going to make a bigger difference than any kind of educational reform ever will. In the future a lot more learning will happen in the home.

Games designed by Wright

• Raid on Bungeling Bay
• SimCity series: SimCity (1989), SimCity 2000 (1993), SimCity 3000 (1999) (Will Wright was not on the SimCity 4 (2003) or SimCity Societies (2007) design teams)
• SimEarth
• SimLife
• SimCopter
• SimAnt
• The Sims (Wright is credited for, but did not design most of The Sims 2, and is not designing The Sims 3)
• Spore

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