John Seabrook of The New Yorker calls Will Wright — creator of SimCity, The Sims, and the upcoming Spore — the Game Master. Wright is certainly an interesting individual:
When Will was nine, his father died of leukemia, and his mother took him and his younger sister, Whitney, back to Baton Rouge, her home town. Will went to Episcopal, a conventional prep school. He didn’t like it as much as the Montessori school, although he enjoyed discussions about God with the faculty. “That’s where I became an atheist,” he said. He started at Louisiana State University when he was sixteen; two years later, he transferred to Louisiana Tech. He excelled only in subjects that he was interested in: architecture, economics, mechanical engineering, military history. He had impractical goals — in addition to starting colonies in space, he wanted to build robots. He dropped out again after two years, drove a bulldozer for a summer, and then, in the fall of 1980, went to the New School, in Manhattan, where he studied robotics. He lived in an apartment over Balducci’s, in Greenwich Village, and spent a lot of time on Canal Street scrounging parts from the sur-plus electronics stores that used to line the street and using them to build a robotic arm.In the spring of 1981, Wright answered an ad in a car magazine: Richard Doherty, a rally enthusiast, was looking participants to compete in a point-to-point race between Farmingdale, Long Island, and Redondo Beach, California. Wright had a Mazda RX-7, which he and Doherty modified with a larger fuel tank and a roll cage. They wore night-vision goggles so that they could drive fast in the dark without headlights and avoid the cops. “Will said we should take the southern route, even though it was longer, because if we got stopped he’d be able to talk to the cops,” Doherty told me. “We did get stopped in Georgia. We were doing a hundred and twenty, with no headlights, but it didn’t take Will more than a couple of minutes to make the officer see why he had to let us go without a ticket.” They won the race, establishing a new record of thirty-four hours and nine minutes.
One of the best aspects of the article is that it cites so many of Wright’s influences. Jason Kottke has compiled an annotated bilbiography of the works.
Addendum: I’ve written about Will Wright before.