Maxis

History

Maxis did not begin as a company with a plan. It began with a game nobody wanted. In 1985, Will Wright — born January 20, 1960 in Atlanta, Georgia — was working on a city-building simulation for the Commodore 64. The game had no defined victory condition, no antagonist, no score. Players built a city and watched it grow or collapse under the weight of traffic, pollution, and economic pressure. Every publisher Wright approached rejected it. The consensus was straightforward: if you cannot win, it is not a game. Wright kept building it anyway.

In 1987, Wright attended what he later called "the world's most important pizza party," hosted by Chris Doner. At that party he met Jeff Braun, an investor who had been successfully publishing font packs for the Amiga personal computer and was looking to enter the game industry. Braun had a wireframe jet fighter simulation called SkyChase that he hoped to publish. When he saw SimCity, he told Wright that the two games would give them critical mass to start a new games publisher of their own. The company they founded was incorporated as Maxis Software Inc. in 1987, in Orinda, California. The name "Maxis" came from Braun's father, who required that it be five to seven letters, mean nothing, be easy to remember, and contain an X, Z, or Q.

SimCity was released on February 2, 1989, for the Macintosh, followed by Amiga and IBM PC versions later that year. It sold modestly at first — the game was too unusual to fit into existing retail categories — but word of mouth spread, and sales accumulated slowly. By 1990, SimCity had become profitable enough to sustain the company. The game won multiple awards, including Best Simulation at the Software Publishers Association's 1989 Excellence in Software Awards. More importantly, it demonstrated that a game without traditional win conditions could hold an audience. Wright's premise — that observation and experimentation could be as engaging as competition — had been proven in the market.

SimCity 2000, released in 1993, expanded the original formula with isometric graphics, underground infrastructure layers, and deeper simulation systems. The game was among the highest-selling titles of the 1990s, achieving global sales of 3.4 million units across all platforms by January 2002. In the United States alone, SimCity 2000 sold 1.4 million copies between 1993 and 1999, ranking as the ninth best-selling computer game of that period. In 1994, following the game's commercial success, Maxis moved its headquarters from Orinda to Walnut Creek, California. The company went public with an IPO in 1995, formalizing five years of steady growth into a legal structure built for expansion.

By 1997, however, Maxis had accumulated heavy losses from a series of secondary titles that failed to replicate SimCity's success. The company's financial position had weakened to the point that acquisition became necessary. On July 28, 1997, Electronic Arts completed a stock-swap acquisition of Maxis, valuing the company at $125 million. The deal made Jeff Braun the largest shareholder in EA at the time. Nearly half of the Maxis staff were laid off in the months following the acquisition, and Braun left the company, having received a sizeable payout. Will Wright remained. Compared to other studios EA had acquired during the same period — Origin Systems, Westwood Studios — the absorption of Maxis proceeded at a slower pace. Over 1998, EA allowed Wright to finish SimCity 3000 on his own timeline. Following that, Wright's efforts were redirected toward a project that had been quietly gestating inside Maxis for years: a game about people.

The Sims was released on February 4, 2000. The game was a domestic life simulator in which players controlled virtual people — "Sims" — managing their daily routines, social relationships, careers, and household economics. There was no campaign, no final boss, no ending. Players built houses, furnished rooms, directed conversations, and watched small domestic dramas unfold in real time. The game used dimetric projection and was set in a suburban area near SimCity. The Sims had faced internal skepticism at Maxis; no one shared Wright's conviction that a dollhouse simulator could sustain commercial interest. The game launched to widespread critical acclaim and became the best-selling PC game of 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003. By March 22, 2002, The Sims had sold more than 6.3 million copies worldwide, surpassing Myst as the best-selling PC game in history. The game's success was so sustained that it was eventually dethroned only by its own sequel, The Sims 2, which became the best-selling PC game of 2004.

The years that followed saw Maxis continue to produce entries in both the SimCity and The Sims franchises, alongside experimental titles such as Spore (2008), an evolution simulator designed by Wright that allowed players to guide a species from single-celled organism to spacefaring civilization. In 2004, Maxis' longtime studios in Walnut Creek were closed, and staff were relocated to EA offices in Redwood Shores and Emeryville, California. The Emeryville studio became the principal Maxis location. In 2013, EA and Maxis released a reboot of SimCity with an always-online requirement. The launch was troubled: server issues rendered the game unplayable for weeks, and the always-online design drew sustained criticism. The failure was public, visible, and damaging.

On March 4, 2015, at the Game Developers Conference, EA announced the closure of the Maxis Emeryville studio. The studio had employed approximately one hundred people and had been the home of SimCity and The Sims development for over a decade. EA stated it would consolidate Maxis IP development to studios in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, Helsinki, and Melbourne. The Maxis brand continued to exist, but the studio that had carried the name since 1987 — the studio that had been founded to publish a game nobody wanted — was closed. What remained was smaller: a Redwood Shores team and a mobile developer in Helsinki, both operating under the Maxis name. The company that had once proven a game without a win condition could succeed had, in the end, been restructured into something that no longer resembled what it had been.