A letter from Luc Barthelet

Luc Barthelet writes about SimCity 3000 and The Sims.

A letter from Luc Barthelet, the General Manager of Maxis.

Dear Sim Fans,

Thank you for the success of SimCity 3000. In 1999, our favorite game was the top PC game in North America and an incredible success around the world. This would not have been possible without you. You made SimCity.com the most interesting game site ever, and created cities and buildings to share with all our friends and SimCity users. Thank you also for an incredible level of support from all the Webmasters that created and maintained hundreds of sites dedicated to SimCity. The strength of this community has inspired and motivated us to find even more interesting ways to support our fans.

We are now shipping The Sims, the new game from Will Wright, “The Living Legend”. This is a very exciting moment, as we all believe that this game has even more potential than SimCity. This is the most creative game to be released in a long time, and after playing it for several hundred hours already, I can say that it has more staying power than anything else I have ever seen.

While we were developing The Sims, we noticed how players would begin to tell complex stories around what their Sims were doing on screen. So we added features to The Sims to make this storytelling easier. As you play The Sims, you can take snapshots of game scenes at any time. These pictures are saved in a photo album along with comments you add. This photo album can then be posted on the Web to share with the world. We’ve found those stories to be so interesting that Maxis will soon launch a “stories” exchange to host the best houses and stories from Sims’ players.

Meanwhile at Maxis, we are continuing our development efforts. We want to continue to provide you with interesting content and downloads for The Sims on SimDay (Thursday). And of course we are working on other games. But for now, enjoy The Sims. Have a nice SimDay, I am going back to take care of my Sims.

Cheers,

Luc Barthelet
Luc@Maxis.com
MaxisLuc on AOL Instant Messenger
GM by Day, Mayor by Night