“When SimCity Got Serious: the Story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery”, 2020-05-19 ():
[Account of little-known excursion of the Sim franchise’s owner Maxis into simulating oil refineries and national health care systems, which touched on the failed ’90s push of President Bill Clinton & Hillary Clinton for a total healthcare system overhaul. The protagonist, John Hiles, is a tragic figure: someone who kept pushing cutting-edge new ideas which ought to revolutionize the world and yet, they never quite did, always launching ahead of their time or derailed by bad luck along the way.]
Maxis didn’t want to make professional simulation games. But for two brief, strange years, they did.
1992–2199430ya, a division called Maxis Business Simulations was responsible for making serious professional simulations that looked and played like Maxis games. After Maxis cut the division loose, the company continued to operate independently, taking the simulation game genre in their own direction. Their games found their way into corporate training rooms and even went as far as the White House.
Almost nothing they developed was ever released to the public. But their software raises questions about the role we want games to play in society.
Over the past few years, I’ve spoken with employees from Maxis and the Business Simulations team to learn more about their company. For the first time, this is their story.