Icon interviewed Will Wright, veteran computer games designer and the creator of SimCity and The Sims, for our February issue. Here is the full transcript of that interview, which appeared in the magazine in condensed form.
Next week’s free game from Epic is a sci-fi city builder
Sure, sci-fi has all those fancy laser guns and giant military starships, but sometimes it’s more fun to build than destroy. That’s why we got the genre of city-building games in the first place (look up Will Wright and Raid on Bungeling Bay sometime). If you’re looking for a sci-fi take on that particular genre, Surviving Mars is an excellent option, and it’s about to be available for free.
Surviving Mars will be available for free via the usual Epic Games Store promotion page starting March 11 at 8:00AM PST / 11:00AM EST / 4:00PM GMT. You’ll be able to grab it and add it to your account until March 18 at those same times, when it’ll be replaced by yet another selection of Epic’s free PC games.
Packaging for the Asciiware Sphere 360 PlayStation controller (photo courtesy of Hock Wah Yeo)
When Hock Wah Yeo was hired by the game publisher Velocity, the head of the company gave him an unusual order: “Scare me.”
1
Let’s say you go to the store and buy a video game. What does it look like? Chances are, it comes in a plastic box, roughly the size of a DVD case, and there’s a logo on the top that tells you what platform it’s for Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo. It’s easy to understand, and it’s easy to fit on shelves. Retailers like it. The platform owners like it. This is the way it’s been for decades simple, predictable, and safe.