GameSpot Presents Geoff Keighley: Behind The Games: The Endless Hours of The Sims Online
It turns out that vision had been percolating in Wright’s head for nearly a decade. Back in 1994, Wright told Wired magazine something that sounds downright prophetic in retrospect: “In 15 years…I can design a house that’s so much fun I can charge people to visit it online, and I’ll make a living sitting there and elaborating on it every day,” he said. In many ways, a massively multiplayer Sims Online would fulfill that prediction. Wright further refined his ideas during a 1995 conversation with author Neal Stephenson, who is credited with creating the idea of the metaverse–a virtual community of avatars not unlike today’s massively multiplayer games–in his novel Snowcrash. “In many ways I wanted The Sims Online to be like Snowcrash, where the players would create the world,” Wright explains. “In fact, the original Sims was my attempt at creating a set of tools for players so they could eventually create their own world and avatar to take online.”
A nice long article about what it took to ship “The Sims Online”