I just wish the Maxis games retained that awesome simulator feel and Win32 GDI integration that SimCity 2000 had, and not turned into full screen PlaySkool kiddie-gamer interfaces with big dumb buttons and junk.

Also like Mr. Wright I too was fond of the Care Bears, Nelvana's series particularly. Why bronies became a thing and not care bros, I will never figure out!

I'm glad to collect any questions for Will Wright and post his replies!

He's especially obsessed with cornering you at a party and telling you all about Care Bears.

The Adorable Will Wright Minutes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7G6c097oWU

Speaking of single minutes of short attention span theatre, here are a couple of one minute robot movies we made:

Servitude:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg

Empathy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE

Widget Workshop (1996) was my favorite: with a large selection of widgets (such as logic gates, switches, displays, number generators, sound and graphics modules) you build 'functional cause and effect pipelines' in a a cute drag and drop canvas. There is a puzzle mode too. Very Rube Goldberg. Great fun, and educational!

At a young age SimEarth made a huge impression on me. I think it was the inscrutability and huge manuals that spoke of a wonderful ecological secret, tantalisingly out of reach no matter how many times I tried...

I can’t even estimate how many hours I sunk into some of these Maxis games. SimCity grabbed me harder than any game had ever grabbed me before and I’m sure I spent the equivalent of years of full time work playing it. SimEarth’s manual felt like a PhD program for a kid.

This game isn’t covered in the article but SimGolf had such an impact on my sense of humour that decades later I still think “gregiscool.com” would be a great name for a startup.

I might be misremembering since it's been over 35, but the orinal Mac versions of these games would be better to play today with the higher resolution they had.