“I’d rather have a spectacular failure than a modest success”: The Sims creator spent 10 years and millions on a game no one understands

Will Wright — the creator of SimCity, The Sims, and Spore — has spent the last ten years working on a project that neither investors nor, apparently, even he fully understands. In a new Vulture profile, he рассказал, как тратит последние силы и чужие деньги на игру, которую пока никто не видел.

The project is called Proxi: Yesterday’s You Tomorrow. The idea first came to Wright back in 2016, and Gallium Studios publicly announced it at GDC 2018. Since then, Wright has spent millions — both his own and investors’ money — and in 2024 he laid off the entire team when the funding ran out. Now, a small group of developers continues working on the game on a voluntary basis, without pay.

The concept of Proxi is to let players recreate their own memories through avatar-like “proxies” and discover hidden connections between them using AI. Players can even import their proxy into genealogy websites and “interact” with their ancestors through artificial intelligence. It’s a hard sell to investors — they simply don’t understand what the game actually is. Wright himself admits he hasn’t fully figured it out either.

Despite the chaos, he has no intention of giving up.

The release date for Proxi remains unknown. Apparently, no one knows it — including Wright himself.

Do you admire that kind of persistence — or does it start to feel like obsession? Does this concept sound too abstract? Share your thoughts in the comments.