The legendary game designer behind The Sims wants to turn your deepest memories into a playable world

Will Wright, the legendary designer of The Sims, has spent more than a decade working on Proxi, an AI-based simulation game based around people’s memories.

Wright began designing games back in 1984, but found fame in 1989 when he developed SimCity. 

Since that original Sim game, Wright has worked on a slew of other titles, including SimAnt, SimEarth, and, most famously, The Sims series. 

However, since 2015, Wright has been quietly working away on a new video game called Proxi: Yesterday’s Tomorrow’s You, that’s quite unlike any other game out there.

AI-based simulation game Proxi has been in the making since 2015

Within the gaming industry, Will Wright is a name that needs no introduction, having worked on some of the world’s best-selling games.

Wright hasn’t released a new video game in almost 20 years, and that’s partly because for the last decade he’s been working away on Proxi: Yesterday’s You Tomorrow, and the concept sounds completely wild. 

Rather than building a new society, like in SimCity, or creating your own digital family, like The Sims, Proxi will turn your real-life memories into a vast navigable world. 

In an interview with Vulture, Wright explained that the AI-powered game will allow players to share their deepest memories and have them transformed into a rich digital world, populated with avatars known as Proxies that represent real people from the player’s life. 

On the official Proxi website, it explains that players will be able to create their own world and fill it with memories, which can be experienced and shared with others.

The Proxies you build will ‘evolve’ and become a ‘living part of your game world’, you can then train and mold them to ‘embody the personality you envision’. 

So, if you were building a Proxi of your grandma, you’d train it so it reflected the real-life grandma you know. 

Once gameplay kicks off, it becomes even more interesting with players being able to discover hidden connections between their memories and uncovering ‘deeper meanings’.

Things have hit a stumbling block for the game, but The Sims creator Wright isn’t giving up

To build Proxi: Yesterday’s You Tomorrow, Will Wright joined forces with Lauren Elliott, who co-designed Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? to co-found Gallium Studios. 

Wright and Elliott carried out extensive research, speaking to journalists to understand how to get people to open up and share their memories, as well as neuroscientists to learn how memories are made. 

However, despite spending years working on the game, and Wright pouring a million dollars of his own cash into it as well as millions from investors, the game is still ‘nowhere near’ ready. 

In 2024, Gallium Studios ran out of funding for the game, and Wright is currently on the hunt for backers to help make it a reality. 

Although the game won’t be hitting shelves anytime soon, Wright doesn’t seem overly concerned. 

“I’d much rather have a glorious failure than a mild success,” he told Vulture. 

Which is one way of looking at it, we guess.