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.

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software.

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 refugee…