Under the status update "...it's as though millions of llamas suddenly cried out and were suddenly silenced," one of my Facebook friends posted this sad news:
Maxis—the developer of SimCity, and a studio I’m comfortable calling one of the most influential of all time—is closing shop. The news was confirmed by designer Guillaume Pierre over Twitter.
“Well it was a fun 12 years,” wrote Pierre, “but it's time to turn off the lights and put the key under the door.”
Founded by Will Wright and Jeff Braun in 1987 to work on SimCity, Maxis’s Emeryville, Calif.-based studio took the simulation genre in every possible direction and every imaginable scale,from the whole SimEarth to tiny SimAnts. There were flubs—SimCopter and The Streets of SimCity come to mind—but in 2000, Wright and Maxis would create the best-selling PC game of all time: The Sims.
This doesn't mean the end of SimCity, but it may not be the best thing that ever happened to one of my favorite computer games. Of course, I haven't really played it in a while...