SID MEIER’S SIM GOLF

Developer Firaxis Games Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC Release 2002

Dinosaurs wasn’t working. It just wasn’t that fun. And so Sid went away one weekend and came up with a new idea. He had this game that was about building golf courses. I wasn’t a golfer – none of us played golf except for Sid – but you could tell already that it was pretty fun. I finally got to do 3D graphics, because I wrote the terrain system – you could raise and lower it. It was just [called] Golf, and then somehow it got tied into The Sims because it was published by EA.

That was the first time I’d ever worked with Sid. We were the only two programmers on that game, so that’s how I started to understand the way that his brain works. Sid made mostly top-down games with a lot of the same elements, but he did whatever he wanted if he had an idea he thought would be cool as a game. He was playing golf a lot, so he was like, “I’m gonna make a game about golf”. As revenue and cost started to grow, risk aversion became more important and more present. And then it became like, “There’s an audience for this, so why don’t we not do the dinosaurs, Sid? Let’s drop the dinosaurs”.