Hearing Will's words, Ethan was stunned.
Wasn't the original SimCity released on DOS in 1989?? It was only 1986 now, and MAXIS hadn't even been founded yet, so how could there already be a demo?
The moment MAXIS came to mind, Ethan suddenly realized what was going on. Right, when MAXIS was first established, it was created to sell SimCity for home computers.
If MAXIS co-founder Jeff Braun hadn't hit it off with Will and decided to work with him, this game might have vanished without a trace, forgotten before anyone ever had the chance to see it.
It wasn't until 1989, when MAXIS reached a partnership with PC game publishing giant Broderbund, that SimCity was finally officially released.
Judging from the timeline, SimCity should already have a prototype at this point.
Will looked at Ethan with teary eyes, his nose tingling.
'Finally! Finally, someone who recognized its value! No wonder he had become one of the biggest names in the gaming industry.'
"Yes! Ethan!"
He led Ethan over to his "workstation."
The area was piled high with all sorts of strange blueprints and handmade crafts. From scale aircraft carrier models to wooden city dioramas, it looked like a child's paradise of toys. In a sense, Will was an obsessive model-building enthusiast.
"My father owned a plastics manufacturing company."
Speaking of his father, Will's face filled with unconcealed pride, mixed with unmistakable longing.
"Although he passed away when I was nine, he taught me a great many things. He taught me how to look at the world."
"..."
Unlike most game developers who came from traditional computer science backgrounds, Will's career path was much closer to that of Jon Caneghem, who had switched from medicine.
He studied mechanical engineering and architecture and was interested in everything.
Even now, Will had never earned a college degree. He was like an artist immersed in his own world, left with nothing but creations that no one seemed to appreciate.
"Ethan, this is the game I designed. I call it SimCity."
It was crude and primitive, but everything that needed to be there was there.
"It's hard to imagine that a game like this is actually running on a DOS system."
Ethan stared at the screen, momentarily lost in thought.
Will was unquestionably a genius. He had perfectly fused his own ideas with video games.
Whether it was SimCity, The Sims, or Spore, every one of them was filled with his unmistakable style. It could be said that if not for EA, MAXIS would have never ended up being dissolved.
After all, the king of city building simulators in later generations, Cities: Skylines, wouldn't be released until 2015.
Even if SimCity truly couldn't compete with Cities: Skylines, it was still an outstanding game with plenty of unique systems. It never deserved to be swept straight into the trash heap of history.
Its downfall was a tragedy orchestrated by EA.
Thinking of this, Ethan narrowed his eyes. EA's business-first philosophy, which completely ignored MAXIS's distinctive creative style, was nothing less than wasting the IP.
For the 2013 reboot of SimCity, EA forced the game to require a constant internet connection in order to combat piracy and promote social features, but they couldn't even get that right.
On launch day, the servers crashed, and players couldn't even get into the game!
This wasn't Diablo or World of Warcraft.
When players couldn't even launch a city-building game, it became an absolutely catastrophic disaster.
Overnight, MAXIS's reputation completely collapsed and hit rock bottom.
If that had been the only problem, all they would have needed to do was restore the servers, and perhaps everything would have returned to normal.
But the truly idiotic part came next, to push its social features, EA required MAXIS to optimize the game for low end computers as much as possible and implement its "regional" design philosophy.
As a result, each individual city's buildable area became pitifully small, even less feature-rich than the original game.
Worse still, to attract a broader audience, EA ordered MAXIS to abandon its traditionally deep, hardcore design philosophy and simplify as many gameplay systems as possible.
For a city building simulation game, that was a fatal mistake. It was as stupid as making a pizza and forgetting to add the dough. Then a new game arrived in the gaming industry.
Cities: Skylines
Ethan's thoughts returned to the present as he looked back at the screen. Will had just built a police station in the new district and connected it to both the power grid and the road network.
"Fantastic!"
Ethan suddenly let out an excited shout, startling Will so badly that he nearly jumped.
"Report to GAMENOVA tomorrow, actually, forget tomorrow. We're leaving right now!"
Damn it! A talent like this absolutely couldn't be allowed to end up in EA's hands.
Ethan immediately pulled out his mobile phone and dialed the office landline.
"Sam, prepare the contract. I've just recruited a real talent."
Will was completely bewildered by Ethan's decisiveness.
"That fast??"
Far too many things had happened today, and his brain simply couldn't process everything.
Ethan grinned and prepared to take him back to the company. Just as he was about to leave, his gaze suddenly fell on the Commodore 64 that hadn't yet been shut down.
More precisely, it landed on the device plugged into it.
A flat, rectangular box, a cable extended from the front and connected it to the computer. On top were three gray plastic buttons arranged side by side.
"The Logitech C7..."
A retail mouse produced by Logitech, priced at only ninety-nine dollars.
While ninety-nine dollars was hardly a small amount of money, compared to other mice of the era, it was unquestionably an affordable one. It was also one of the key devices that helped drive the widespread adoption of the computer mouse.
The SimCity franchise had always been aimed at the PC market, so that wasn't surprising.
Its gameplay was naturally a perfect fit for keyboard and mouse controls. No analog stick could ever match a mouse's speed and precision when it came to positioning.
And this wasn't limited to city-building games.
RTS games like Command & Conquer: Red Alert, first-person shooters...
Not every game was suitable for controllers or arcade joysticks, so the mouse was absolutely an essential input device.
"Maybe... NovaBox should make its own mouse peripherals?"
Ethan stroked his chin thoughtfully.
Once Carmack solved the graphics library issues, they were bound to move into the 3D market sooner or later.
Wolfenstein 3D wasn't true 3D. It lacked concepts like height and depth, allowing it to be played comfortably with only a joystick.
But what about when they advanced further? What about Quake? Not to mention that SimCity was already close to becoming a reality.
"If I remember correctly, Logitech is also in the Bay Area?"
Compared to building an entirely new hardware division from scratch, partnering with the technologically experienced Logitech as an OEM manufacturer seemed like an excellent alternative.