How SimAnt inspired The Sims

During an IGDA Leadership Forum dinner held last Friday, both Will Wright and the creator of Doom, John Romero, were able to conduct an interview between the two.  Will shared with John that his classic work ‘SimAnt’ helped inspire and set the foundation for The Sims due to the behavior of the ants and Sims:

“The basic engine for The Sims really ends up being one of any pheromones. Every object in the environment is sending out an ‘advertisement’ of pheromones in a particular flavor. The flavors are the eight basic needs of the Sims. So they can advertise ‘food,’ ‘energy,’ ‘fun,’ ‘social,’ ‘hygiene.’ Every object is described in those terms, being the collection of pheromones that it broadcasts,” Wright explained. “A Sim is always sitting there, smelling all of the pheromones around it saying, ‘oh I need to be clean, or I need to be fed’ — whatever — so they follow that pheromone trail to the closest object that’s producing it. The advantage of that — the whole point of that — was that we could add new objects into the game later without the Sims having any foreknowledge of what the objects were, as long as they had these pheromones.”

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