Will Wright
Creator of The Sims
The designer of SimCity, The Sims, and Spore is betting his late career on AI: his Gallium Studios is building Proxi, a life-sim that uses AI to map the player’s own memories and mind.
In his words
Right now, we’re just seeing the earliest uses of AI in the gaming industry. But it is going to be huge, I’m sure.
We’re trying to basically reverse-engineer the model that you have in the world. And then from that, we can start looking at patterns, and that’s a lot of what we want to use AI for.
Biography
Will Wright (born 1960) is one of the most influential game designers alive: co-founder of Maxis and creator of SimCity (1989), The Sims (2000) — for years the best-selling PC game ever — and Spore (2008). His specialty has always been simulation: games that model cities, families, and evolution rather than telling fixed stories.
Simulating the player’s mind
AI is the natural endpoint of that trajectory, and Wright has embraced it without hedging. His company Gallium Studios is building Proxi, a life-sim in which players deposit real memories so AI can assemble a playable model of their own psyche — “it’s not exactly building an NPC, it’s more about building a PC,” as he put it at GamesBeat Summit 2024. The studio partnered with Numenta to run Proxi on NuPIC, a brain-inspired AI platform pitched as radically more power-efficient than mainstream LLMs, and was the only company invited to demo live at Intel’s “AI Everywhere” launch event in December 2023.
It’s not just going to be NPCs having interesting conversations, but simple things like voice cloning, synthetic voices, not having to write a billion lines of dialogue because it can be generated … then building 3D models, building out worlds dynamically.
The bet has been costly — Proxi has consumed roughly a decade and millions of dollars, and Gallium laid off its development team in 2024 with the game still unfinished. Wright is unrepentant, telling interviewers he would rather have a glorious failure than a mild success. Where peers like Yoko Taro forecast AI doom for game creators, Wright treats it as the next simulation substrate.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/will-wright