Game Design: Theory & Practice- P16 docx

If the level is not working out asyou want, now is the time to make changes until it does.. In a way, sports and racing titles have an easier time with this step, since theirgameplay is

At this point, keep in mind that you are just creating the base layout for yourlevel You are not adding niceties such as lighting or texturing, nor are you concen-trating on making the geometry as pretty as possible On this first pass you want toget the level to the point where the player can navigate through it and all of thelocations the player will be able to go are accessible This allows you to get a sensefor whether the level’s layout feels right.

step 4 Refine Architecture Until It is Fun

At this point you need to repeat step three until your level starts feeling good andnavigating it starts to be fun For instance, if you are working on a first-personshooter, you should experiment with navigating your character around the 3Dworld, and see if the corners are fun to swing around, if the jumps are of just aboutthe right difficulty, and if the areas come out at the size you had wanted them to.Take a look at the level as a whole and see if it makes sense and flows as you hoped

it would Once you actually spend time looking at and navigating the level as theplayer would, instead of just fiddling with it in the level editor, you stand a betterchance of determining if your level is working out If the level is not working out asyou want, now is the time to make changes until it does

428 Chapter 21: Level Design

level using the

Quake III Arena

engine will easily

take weeks to

Team-Fly®

step 5 Base Gameplay

Now that your level feels right in terms of player navigation, it is time to startimplementing the gameplay your level will use Certainly you had the gameplay inmind through all of the steps of this process, but now is the time to see if it willactually work out as you had hoped The best designers can come up with ideas andsketches for levels that successfully translate into fun levels in the end Others startwith a sketch, build some architecture, and when it comes time to add the gameplay,find they need to make some significant modifications to what they have alreadybuilt With experience as a designer comes the ability to predict whether abstractideas will turn out to be any fun or not Before you become experienced, however,the process involves a great deal of trial and error

A level’s gameplay consists of whatever actions the player is allowed to

per-form in that level In a first-person shooter such as Duke Nukem 3D, this means

placing the monsters the player will shoot and the items the player will pick up In

a role-playing or adventure game, this is expanded to include whatever puzzles theplayer will need to solve, the characters to which the player may talk, and thequests on which these NPCs send the player In a real-time strategy game, thedesigner will need to figure out starting unit placement and quantities for the playerand his opponent, as well as whatever reinforcements may appear later in the level

In a way, sports and racing titles have an easier time with this step, since theirgameplay is the same from level to level and therefore does not need much setupfor a particular stadium or track

step 6 Refine Gameplay Until It is Fun

Of course, the gameplay is what makes or breaks the game, so it is absolutely tial that the designer repeat step five until the level is fun to play Sometimes,refining the gameplay may take you all the way back to step number three It mayturn out that the area you thought would play well just is not suited to the capabili-ties of the AI Or that the creature you thought would be able to spring out at theplayer from a fissure in a cliff does not really have enough space to hide You mayneed to change the layout of your level to compensate for the problems you dis-cover once you start implementing the gameplay

essen-For some designers, modifying existing level architecture to suit the gameplaycan be quite a painful process For instance, suppose a designer builds some archi-tecture she is happy with from an aesthetic standpoint If the gameplay then doesnot work in that space, the designer may be reluctant to go back and rework thatgeometry and may instead settle for substandard gameplay Of course, this is thewrong choice to make As painful as it may be, in order to get the best gameplayyou may need to throw out some of your work This is why I suggested only mak-ing base architecture without refining it too much; that way making radical changes

to the level will not mean that too much work was wasted

This is the step where your level really comes together and you start to get asense of whether it is a success Now you can take this space you created and reallystart to play in it If you do not start enjoying yourself at this point, you may need totake a look at your level and ask yourself why it is not fun to play In the worstcase, you may realize that the level will never be fun, and as a result you need tostart fresh Ideally, however, this stage can be truly revelatory, as all of the workyou put into the level starts to pay off

step 7 Refine Aesthetics

Now that the level is playing well, you have an opportunity to make it look good aswell You may recall that in steps three and four we just set up base architecture,enough to allow the player to navigate and to give you a feel for the level Now isthe time to texture your level as needed, apply lighting effects, add decorativeobjects, and really flesh out your level from a visual standpoint Many level design-ers spend the bulk of their time working on aesthetics for their levels, and certainlyyou should put in the time to make the level look as good as possible But, as I haveemphasized, it is crucial that you put off finessing the level until you are confidentthat the level plays well and that it accomplishes its gameplay objectives Other-wise, you may waste your time making areas look nice which end up beingscrapped As you are finessing the level aesthetically, you must always remembernot to break any of the gameplay you have already set up

430 Chapter 21: Level Design

step 8 Playtesting

Now that all the parts of your level are in place, it is time to show it to some otherpeople, let them play it, and get some feedback Playtesting is a crucial part of gamedesign, and level design is no different These test subjects may include other mem-bers of your team, but should also include people less intimately involved with yourproject A lot can be said for a fresh pair of eyes looking at your game and yourlevel and giving you feedback on whether what you think is fun is also fun to them.Playtesting a level can be as easy as handing over a level to someone, askinghim to play it, and having him tell you what he thinks Another useful method,especially for level testing, is to actually be there with the tester when he tries toplay your level and observe how he plays it Does he get stuck in locations you hadnot thought of? Does he have trouble finding his way around? Do the gameplay sit-uations provide him with enough challenge? Watching other people play your levelcan be extremely educational and informative as to whether the level flows andplays well

In the worst case, playtesting may reveal that your level is not as fun to play asyou had thought, and that major reworking will be necessary to make it fun As adesigner you must not be resistant when someone tells you your level is hard tonavigate or confusing or just no fun Certainly, get a second and third and fourthopinion on it, but when you start hearing the same complaints from a number of dif-ferent people, you need to realize that there may be some truth to what they aresaying and that your level may need some serious reworking Many designers whohave invested a lot of time and energy in a level find it very difficult to then takecriticism on their work There is no denying that hearing someone tear apart amonth’s worth of work can be disheartening, but this is the purpose of playtesting.You need to take your testers’ comments to heart, recognize the problems with yourlevel, and start working on the level again Thorough playtesting can often be thedifference between a merely good level and a truly great one

Process Variations

Of course, the process for level design I outline above is not the only way to make alevel Like the “dos” and “don’ts” of level design I described earlier, each leveldesigner needs to find the method that works best for herself and her team Manygood designers use a method not entirely different from what I have outlined above,but with variations that better suit their own style of designing

One potentially useful variation is to incorporate steps three through six

Instead of laying out the entire level, you can start with a particular room or area.Then, before moving on to set up the rest of the level, try to set up gameplay in justthat area Once you are happy with how well that section plays, move on to setting

up the rest of the level, adding gameplay to the areas as you create them This way,

if an area has to be enlarged to make the gameplay work properly, less work iswasted since the areas around may not have been built yet As I mentioned before,

it is important to be careful to not design yourself into a corner You do not want tospend a lot of time working on the gameplay for a specific area only to have toremove it later since the rest of the level no longer fits in the space available If youare going to set up gameplay for particular areas before the entire level is built, itmakes the most sense to build the architecture for an entire, discrete play-space,such as a specific building or structure Then you can make the gameplay work inthat entire area before moving on to the next

Another useful idea is to incorporate playtesting earlier in the process, perhapsafter step six Once you have your level playable, have some people whose opin-ions you trust try playing the level The aesthetics may not be fully refined yet, andyou should certainly explain this to them as they play, but if you are able to getfeedback at this early stage, you may be able to make important changes before youhave spent a lot of time refining the aesthetics of the level A possible drawback totesting the level this early is that others may not be able to understand that visuallythe level is not yet done As a result they may get hung up on criticizing the appear-ance of your level instead of providing feedback about the gameplay Be sure tocommunicate what type of feedback you are looking for at this stage and hope thatthe playtesters can see beyond the lack of fancy lighting effects Testing at thisearly stage does not replace testing after the level is more final, but it may preventsome unpleasant surprises and can make the final testing go more smoothly

Who Does Level Design?

Throughout this chapter, I have spoken as if you are responsible for all aspects ofyour level Many development studios do still operate on the “one designer, onelevel” method of level design This has many advantages, of course, since it helps tokeep the levels focused That one designer is constantly aware of what his levelrequires in terms of gameplay, art, and programming, and can keep that level ontrack When it comes time to set up the level’s lighting, for instance, the designerwill remember that he thought that gameplay in one part of the level would playbest in the dark with disorienting flashing light Having one person working on onelevel from start to finish helps to ensure the level has a consistency of vision thatcan lead to great gameplay

But the “one designer, one level” technique is not the only method which maywork, and many developers have adopted more of a “team” approach to leveldesign If your team has one designer who is particularly good at making prettyarchitecture but is less skilled at getting the AI agents to work, it may make sense tohave a different designer set up the gameplay on that designer’s levels One

designer may be particularly good at lighting effects, while another may be adept at

432 Chapter 21: Level Design

the scripted sequences You may want the sound designer to set up your soundeffects, since he will be better at correctly placing the audio effects he created Ofcourse, as with any task that is divided among several people, when putting multi-ple personnel on a single level, you need to make sure that they are all “on the samepage” in terms of what that level is trying to accomplish For instance, the architec-ture designer may have built a canyon that he thought would be ideal for an

ambush, but when the designer who sets up the gameplay comes along, he may notnotice that particular canyon and might set up encounters in less optimal locations.Communication between the different people working on a particular level is essen-tial, just as it is between the programming, art, and design teams

As I stated previously, as games become more complex, it becomes necessary

to divide tasks that used to be accomplished by one person between multiple ple As games continue to become more complicated, designers will specializemore and more, and having multiple people working on a single level will becomeincreasingly common Keeping the game focused on such a project will be quite achallenge, which emphasizes the importance of project leaders and lead leveldesigners However, as people specialize in a particular area of level design, thepossibility exists that they can become better at their specific area of expertise as aresult Furthermore, if one person sets up the AI and gameplay for all of the levels

peo-in the game, those levels as a whole may achieve a greater gameplay consistencythan if each level designer was setting up his own gameplay If managed correctly,these highly specialized level designers can lead to better levels in the final game

Collaboration

As games have grown in complexity, the number of level designers required for aparticular game has increased Whereas one designer used to be able to truly controlevery last facet of a game’s design, now a lead designer must find level designersshe can trust to build levels which will make a significant contribution to the game’sdesign Though a lead designer may be able to look over the shoulder of these leveldesigners and do her best to direct the efforts, in the end she has delegated a largepart of the gameplay’s creation to these invaluable members of her team This canhave both a good side, as more voices in the game’s design may make the game amore robust experience, and a bad side, as the clearness of artistic vision becomesdiluted by so many different people working on the project Such are the perils ofmost modern commercial game development

Chapter 22

Interview: Will Wright

It is hard to measure the impact Will Wright’s game SimCity has had on the

industry At the time of its release in 1989, the game was so radically ent from any other piece of interactive computer entertainment that for manyyears the project had trouble finding a publisher Now the game’s influencecan be seen in the countless “builder” games released every year Sid Meier

differ-readily admits that SimCity was one of his primary inspirations in making

Civilization With his latest game, The Sims, Wright has come totally out of

left field again with a game that he also had to fight to get made While themajority of games released today take only evolutionary baby steps of

improvement, with The Sims Wright has released something truly

revolution-ary that represents the most original game design to be seen in years.Talking with Wright is an experience in itself, as one is instantly made keenlyaware of why he has developed such brilliant and innovative games

434

How did you first become interested in game development?

I got totally into computers shortly after I bought an Apple II around 1980 Ijust got infatuated with games As a kid I spent a lot of time building models, and I

bought some of the very early games, such as the very first version of Flight

Simu-lator with the wire-frame graphics You had to write your own machine language

patch to get it to run, that was funny But just the idea that you could build your ownlittle micro-world inside the computer intrigued me So I saw it as a kind of model-ing tool At some point I just got so into these things that I decided I would try tomake one myself, and that was right around the time the Commodore 64 was firstcoming out So I bought one of those, figuring that it would be better to start on anew machine where everybody was on a level playing field, because other peoplehad learned the Apple II years before I decided to do this So, I bought a Commo-dore as soon as it came out and just dove into it, and learned it as quickly as I could.And that’s what I did my first game on

So how did you come up with the design for Raid Over Bungeling Bay?

Back then just about all the games were arcade games, you know I had alwaysloved helicopters, so I wanted to do a little helicopter game And then I was looking

at the Commodore It was driven probably more by the technology than the gamedesign side I found that the Commodore had this really cool trick where you couldredefine a character set, make it look like graphics, and then smoothly scroll itaround the screen So you could give the impression that you were scrolling overthis huge bitmap, when in fact all you were doing is moving ASCII charactersaround on the screen And when I saw that feature, I thought that would be reallycool looking, because I knew the Apple couldn’t begin to move that much in theway of graphics around the screen that smoothly So I designed the game aroundthat feature in a way

I understand the game was much more popular in Japan than it was in the States.

I think that was right when piracy was probably at its peak We sold around30,000 copies in the U.S., which was average for a game like that But then every-body I’ve talked to who had a Commodore back then had played it Whereas thesame game on the Nintendo in Japan sold about 750,000 copies It was a cartridgesystem, so there was no piracy

Do you still look back on the game positively?

Oh yeah I look back on it with fond memories, it was a learning experience Itwas one of those times where you realize that the last ten percent, getting the gameout the door, that’s the really hard part And unless you plan for that last ten percent,it’s just a killer So I learned a lot of lessons from it And back then programmingwasn’t nearly as elaborate as it is now Every game was written by one person and

that game was about eight thousand lines of machine language So you could totallycontrol the memory and totally control the machine It was a good learning vehicle.It’s kind of a shame that the programmers who learn to program nowadays are com-ing at it from a totally different point of view.

You mean because they’re using higher level programming languages?

Oh yeah Which isn’t necessarily bad, I guess But you still have the old hackslike myself There were eight bytes of memory free on that machine when I finishedthat game, and I felt bad that I didn’t use those last eight And there are a lot oftricks you do when you’re running out of memory, because the memory was theultimate concern There were some cool little tricks for that

I read that the level editing tool for Bungeling Bay was your inspiration for

SimCity.

It was a character set that actually described a bunch of islands with little roadsand cities on them And so there was such a big area that I developed my own littlecharacter editing program to draw this scene that I could scroll around reallysmoothly, like a paint program I found that I was having so much more fun with thepaint program than I was with the game that after I finished the game I kept playing

with the paint program And it eventually evolved into SimCity.

So you wouldn’t cite any other games that inspired SimCity?

I’d say the gest inspiration, ifthere had to be one,was the work of JayForester, who is con-sidered the father ofsystem dynamics,and one of the veryfirst people to use acomputer for simula-tion So when Istarted getting the

big-idea for SimCity, I

started going to thelibrary and reading

He did a lot of hiswork back in the

’50s, working with very primitive computers and very primitive models, but yet hewas the first person to try to simulate a city And he did it with like twenty

436 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright

SimCity

variables: one was population, one was production, one was birth rate, stuff likethat Very simple models.

System dynamics is a way to look at a system and divide it into, basically,stocks and flows Stocks are quantities, like population, and flows are rates, like thedeath rate, the birth rate, immigration You can model almost anything just usingthose two features That was how he started system dynamics and that was theapproach he took to his modeling I uncovered his stuff when I started working on

SimCity and started teaching myself modeling techniques I also came across the

more recent stuff with cellular automata, and SimCity is really a hybrid of those two

approaches Because his approach was not spatial at all, whereas the cellular ata gives you a lot of really interesting spatial tools for propagation, network flow,proximity, and so forth So the fact that pollution starts here, spreads over here, andslowly gets less and less, and you can actually simulate propagation waves through

autom-these spatial structures So SimCity in some sense is like a big three-dimensional

cellular automata, with each layer being some feature of the landscape like crime orpollution or land value But the layers can interact on the third dimension So thelayers of crime and pollution can impact the land value layer

What made you think that such scholarly techniques could lead to something that people would find fun?

At that point I wasn’t trying to build something that people would play forentertainment value It’s more like I was just having fun doing this on my own Atthe same time I was reading about urban dynamics, just on the theoretical side Andhaving this little guinea pig city on my computer while I was reading about the sub-ject made the subject so much more interesting So I could read a theory and thentry to figure out how to formalize it, code it, put it in the model, and see what theresults of it were

At what point did you start to think it might be something that other people could have fun with?

After about six months or so I started attaching some graphics to it It was fairlyabstract to begin with And then I started thinking, you know, this might be an inter-esting game I had actually done my first game with Broderbund Software, and Ishowed it to some people there and they thought it was pretty cool They agreed topick it up, and we had a contract for it and everything And I worked on it for about

a year to the point where it was where I wanted it to be And they kept thinking itwasn’t finished They kept saying, “When is it going to be a game? When is it going

to have a win/lose situation?” It was very unusual for its time, and this was aboutfive years before it was actually released This was around 1985, and we didn’tactually release it until ’89

They didn’t think it was enough of a game to fit in with their other products?

They just didn’t see how they could possibly sell it And I just left it there, andthey left it there, and that was that

So were you pretty discouraged?

I always thought it was a cool little thing I did, I never really thought it would

be a mainstream thing But I thought it would be worthwhile getting it on the ket So later I met my eventual partner, Jeff Braun, and I showed it to him And hethought it was really cool He really, really was into it He, in fact, thought there wasprobably a big market for something like that At that point, the two of us decided tostart a company ourselves, and that’s when we started Maxis

mar-So it had sat around, unpublished, for a number of years?

Yeah, for a couple of years About the time we decided to start Maxis, theMacintosh had just come out, and the Amiga was coming out, and we decided wewould rewrite the game for those computers So we hired a couple of programmers,and I recoded the simulator in C It had all been in assembly before We had theseother programmers helping on the graphical front ends on the Mac and on theAmiga, and those were actually the first versions that were released We actually did

go back and release the Commodore version about a month after we released those

So originally SimCity didn’t have a mouse-based, point-and-click interface?

No, actually it did The Lisa had come out while I was doing it on the dore, and I actually

Commo-had implemented acursor-based systemwith icons The inter-face was on a

Commodore, but itstill had that iconic,paint-program kind

of feel It looked likeMacPaint in a way

So, in fact, it didhave a similargraphic front end but

at a much lowerresolution

438 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright

SimCity

Team-Fly®

Did the design change much from what you had originally done?

It got more elaborate, more layers were added, and there was higher resolution

on the map, but it had the same basic structure for the simulation and the same basicsets of tools But, for instance, there were only roads, there weren’t roads and high-ways The map was 80 by 90, instead of 128 by 128 Of course, the graphics weremuch lower resolution; they were about four pixels square for a tile, instead of theeventual sixteen But the core of the model and the tuning of the model didn’t actu-

ally change that much And it actually didn’t change all that much for SimCity 2000

or 3000.

So Maxis finally got it out to the market by self publishing it?

It’s actually kind of interesting After we had redone it on the Mac and theAmiga, we knew we could afford to produce it in the boxes and all that, but we had

to have a distributor And in fact we came back to Broderbund and showed it tothem, and when they saw the Mac and Amiga versions they were much moreimpressed Plus it was years later, at which point the market was getting into muchmore interesting games At that point they offered to become our distributor, and so

we had an affiliate publishing relationship with Broderbund We were incurringmost of the financial risk because we were the ones paying for the boxes and allthat, so they weren’t really risking that much on it The people at Broderbund werereally nice people and I hold no grudges against them at all They helped us a lot ingetting Maxis off the ground And the Carlstons, the people who started

Broderbund, were my role models for business people They were just really nicepeople to deal with

Did you come up with the term “software toy”?

I think I did, because I was giving a talk at the Game Developer’s Conference,way back, and I decided that would be the name of my talk It was “Software Toys:The Intersection of Creativity, Empathy, and ” something Some high-falutin’sounding talk

How would you distinguish between a software toy and a game?

Toys can be used to build games You can play games with toys But you canalso engage in more freeform play with toys It doesn’t have to be a goal directedactivity I think of toys as being more open-ended than games We can use a ball toplay a game such as basketball, or we can just toss the ball back and forth, or I canexperiment with the ball, bouncing it off of different things So, I would think oftoys as a broader category Also, toys can be combined I can strap Barbie to myR.C car and drive her around, thus making up a new activity by combining toys.Games tend to be isolated universes where there’s a rule set, and once you leave thatuniverse the rule set is meaningless Another way to think about it, and this is a

more recent version of the same idea, is that I tend to think of the games we do inmore of a hobby kind of way, whereas most games are thought about more in terms

of a movie or cinematic form Movies have a beginning and an end, there’s a max, there’s one particular story line, and a lot of games are built more on thatmodel

cli-Our games are more like a hobby, which you approach in a different way Likewith a model train set, some people get totally into the scenery and the details on thecliffs and the hills Other people get into the little village in the middle Other peo-ple get into the switching on the tracks And sometimes these will play off of eachother when a community builds around a hobby You’ll have certain people in thecommunity who are very into certain aspects of the hobby and they have expertisewhich they can teach to other people And you have sub-specializations within thecommunity People can create things and trade them, or they can just share ideas Itend to think of hobbies as being a bit more community based than the cinematicmodel That’s more of a shared experience, it’s a kind of cultural currency “Oh, didyou see that movie last night, what did you think?”

But with a software toy like SimCity, only one person is really playing it at any

one time.

The community I’m referring to now more than ever is the online community Ican go online and I can start trading strategies with people, or I can upload my city

or my family or my stories, or I can make skins for The Sims And if someone gets

really good at it they can have a standing in the community: “Oh, he makes the bestskins.” So there’s this whole community on the web that develops around the game,with people creating things and sharing things

Which is more possible now than when SimCity originally came out.

Back when SimCity came out, it was really just a few sporadic message boards

on some of the online services like CompuServe or later AOL It was mostly justchat discussions and things like that There wasn’t really a forum, where peoplecould meet It wasn’t really a very involving online community But even before wehad our first web site, people were already uploading their cities to AOL and tradingthem There were big sections with hundreds of cities trading CompuServe was thefirst place where large collections of cities started to appear, not too long after thegame came out

The biggest complaint I’ve seen about SimCity, and I’ve seen this mostly from

other game developers, is that since it is not a game and there aren’t any goals, it doesn’t hold the player’s attention very well.

I think it attracts a different kind of player In fact, some people play it very goaldirected What it really does is it forces you to determine the goals So when you

440 Chapter 22: Interview: Will Wright

start SimCity, one of the most interesting things that happens is that you have to

decide “What do I want to make? Do I want to make the biggest possible city, or thecity with the happiest residents, or the most parks, or the lowest crime?” Every timeyou have to idealize in your head, “What does the ideal city mean to me?” It

requires a bit more motivated player What that buys you in a sense is more

replayability because we’re not enforcing any strict goal on you We could havesaid, “Get your city to 10,000 people in ten years or you lose.” And you wouldalways have to play it that way And there would be strategies to get there, and peo-ple would figure out the strategies, and that would be that By leaving it moreopen-ended, people can play the game a lot of different ways And that’s where it’sbecome more like a toy

Simulations in general give you a much wider game-space to explore There are

probably no two cities in SimCity that are identical and created by different people Whereas, if you look at a game like Zelda, I’m sure there are tens of thousands of saved Zelda games that are identical Computationally you can look at this as the

phase-space of the system, or how many variables does it take to describe a currentstate of the system

Another way of

look-ing at that is it’s how

much creative

explo-ration the player is

allowed How unique

is your game from

my game? In some

sense that implies a

certain level of

cre-ativity available to

you In some

situa-tions that can also be

interpreted as how

many different ways

there are to solve a

given problem So if

we start with the same exact city that has a lot of traffic, there are a huge variety ofways that we can attack that problem successfully In a lot of games there’s a lockeddoor and until you find that key you’re not going to be able to unlock that door

So it provides the player with a lot more variety.

There’s a lot more variety, but also, because every player can take a uniqueapproach, they can be more creative And the more creativity the player can realize

in a game, the more empathy they tend to feel with that game Especially you see

SimCity

that in The Sims If they spend all this time building up a family and running their

lives for months, people really start to empathize with those characters because theyhave invested so much time in the creation of them And the characters, in thatsense, are a reflection not only of themselves, but it’s a reflection of their current

understanding of the game Same with SimCity You can look at somebody’s city in

SimCity at any time, and the design of the city is a reflection of what they

under-stand about the model From their underunder-standing that was the best way to build aroad network at that point

But once they come to understand the game better .

It changes, exactly You can go back to an old city and say, “Oh, right, that’swhen I thought highways really worked well, before I learned that they didn’t.” So

in some sense it reflects your mental model of the game

But if you play Zelda a second time

Your mental model doesn’t really evolve that much You learn the surprises, butyour model of the underlying mechanisms isn’t really all that different once you’veplayed the game through

I’m a bit curious about the disaster feature in SimCity It seems strange that

play-ers would want to spend a lot of time building something up and then just destroy

it with a tidal wave or a fire.

Yeah, I always thought that was kind of curious myself

You must have anticipated it, though, since you put it in the game from the very beginning.

No, actually, it wasn’t in the original Commodore version I later added it,though When I first started showing the Commodore version, the only thing thatwas in there was a bulldozer, basically to erase mistakes So if you accidentally built

a road or a building in the wrong place you could erase it with the bulldozer What Ifound was that, invariably, in the first five minutes people would discover the bull-dozer, and they would blow up a building with it by accident And then they wouldlaugh And then they would go and attack the city with the bulldozer And they’dblow up all the buildings, and they’d be laughing their heads off And it reallyintrigued me, because it was like someone coming across an ant pile and poking itwith a stick to see what happens And they would get that out of their system in tenminutes, and then they would realize that the hard part wasn’t destroying it, butbuilding it back up And so people would have a great time destroying the city with

a bulldozer, and then they would discover, “Wow, the power’s out Wow, there’s afire starting.” And that’s when they would start the rebuilding process, and that’swhat would really hook them Because they would realize that the destruction was

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