Will Wright blazed through the early video game industry like a comet – he co-founded Maxis, created the very first SimCity, The Sims in 2000, and released the ultimate life sim Spore in 2008. Much more quietly, Wright has spent the last decade on an AI-enabled, psychoanalytic thing with huge ambitions and zero budget, but he’s determined to keep it breathing.
“Kind of like Frankenstein,” Wright tells Vulture in a new profile. It’s called Proxi: Yesterday’s You Tomorrow, and Wright’s studio Gallium Studios revealed it at Game Developers Conference in 2018, though the idea of it has been nagging at Wright since 2016. In the years since, Wright has spent millions of his and investors’ dollars, laid off his staff in 2024 when the money ran out, and is now retaining a few unpaid developers to make it happen. One day.
Gallium’s website advertises a few cutesy shots of its pea-headed avatars, or Proxies, getting married, having sandwiches at a picnic table, and observing a fish fly off a campfire grill and get stuck in a UFO’s alien beam. The game part of it is to “experience and share memories” through simulacrum, Proxies of people you know in real life in an effort to “discover hidden connections between your memories” – like the thread between a good, spring day at the park and the time you swear you got probed on Mars, seemingly.
To help you thoroughly analyze all these likely fuzzy memories, Proxi uses an AI algorithm to create and sort your inputs, and players also earn points for adding memories with conceptual throughlines.
Investors don’t get it. Even Wright hasn’t fully decided on what Proxi should be, 10 years later. He worries about “nested memories, basically” – multiple memories made in the same location – and importing your Proxi into genealogy websites to communicate with your ancestors through AI. The Sims creator has made a real mess. But “I’d much rather have a glorious failure than a mild success,” Wright says.
The Sims turns 20: Creator Will Wright reflects on the battle he waged to get one of the best games of all time made.
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