The Sims Creator’s Quest to Turn His Mind Into a Video Game

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When he was about 5 or 6, Will Wright nearly drowned in a vat of plastic. It was on a weekend at his father’s factory in Atlanta. His dad needed to pop in to check something, and what caught Will’s eye was a large drum of polyethylene pellets, the raw bits that get melted down and stretched into plastic wrap and plastic bags. They were whitish and tiny, as pleasing to the touch as beads or dry beans. It looked like a ball pit. Will jumped in.

“It was like quicksand,” he said. His father came around the corner in time to see his arms poking up above the rim, a cartoon character in need of rescue. “I could easily have died.” He laughed a deep smoker’s laugh. “If I’d sunk deeper to the point where I was inhaling these things” — more chuckling — “I wouldn’t have been able to breathe.”

Wright was telling this story some 60 years after the fact. He has since become a father and a stepfather himself, as well as one of the most celebrated video-game designers ever, a David Lynch of the console. He had transmuted the principles of urban planning into SimCity, the existential consumerist ennui of suburbia into The Sims, the branching complexities of evolutionary theory into Spore. And since 2015, he has been absorbed by a new obsession: how our ever-shifting library of memories forges the self.

Take the polyethylene pellets. What made that scene so memorable occurred only in retrospect. It was the one time he could recall that his father had gotten mad at him. There weren’t many other opportunities. He didn’t know it then, but his dad had been diagnosed with leukemia a few years earlier; it would come back and kill him when Wright was 9. That colored everything before and after. To Wright, the illness might have explained his father’s eternal good humor. “It was like he knew he was going to die,” he said. Why spend what little time you have left disciplining your child? They sat dreaming of space colonization and alien life. His dad took him golfing and let him drive the cart. Only when Will was blithely playing himself to death did his father’s anger emerge. That day in the plastic factory was suffused with a loss that hadn’t happened yet.

A single memory contained all of that. Wright imagined it as a snow globe, a world within a world. But that memory connected to countless others in conscious and unconscious ways. He wanted to create a game in which each player could tinker with that unending maze of inner microverses, logging their recollections for an AI to analyze and mapping their own psyche the way they had mapped a digital metropolis in SimCity. It would be called Proxi: Yesterday’s You Tomorrow. The concept was part computerized LEGO set, part RPG, part Enneagram, part transhumanist mind-uploading fantasy, part reboot of Borges and Proust for the LLM age.

What did that even mean? When Wright started working on it, he wasn’t sure. He teamed up with an old friend, Lauren Elliott, a co-designer of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Together, they started digging into the nature of how and what we remember. They interviewed NPR reporters about what made people comfortable divulging their most cherished stories. They interviewed neuroscientists about how such stories get encoded in the brain. They put together a team of 30 or so and started building a prototype. They announced Proxi at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in 2018. They set up a Discord server to create an online community both as a pool of beta testers and a proto fan base. They toyed with various AI algorithms and recruited human artists-in-residence to help.

Then, in October 2024 — after spending ten years, a million dollars of Wright’s own money, and a few million from investors; after they’d already started building out the game’s universe — they ran out of funding. Initial investors were reluctant to pour in more money until they knew this thing, whatever it was, was viable. They laid off their staff and let their artists-in-residence go. The two or three employees who stayed on kept working without pay. By the time Wright was telling me the story of the day in the plastics factory, he and Elliott had spent a year in a financial sinkhole, searching for someone who could rescue Proxi. To those awaiting it, the game could seem like a mirage. “Getting this game up and running feels like it’s never going to happen. Where can I find an update on the status,” someone asked on the Discord server in October 2025.

“The devs are probably having an existential crisis at the realization they’ve created life,” another person replied.

Wright hadn’t put out a new game since Spore launched in 2008. That was a success among reviewers but polarizing among gamers; some declared it a failure. The vision was almost impossibly grand, players guiding life-forms as they progress from single-cell organisms all the way up to complex social beings that travel through space and interact with aliens. Proxi was even more ambitious. “It’s like your favorite band from the ’70s suddenly comes back and goes, ‘We’re doing a new album,’ and you’re like, ‘Wait, what?’ And then, ‘Oh my God, that’s awesome,’” said game designer Rami Ismail. “But also: ‘Do they still have it? Can they still do it?’”

Wright lives in California at the very top of the Oakland Hills, where the city’s fanciest, curviest streets give way to the forested crest of a long-dead volcano. The place can feel like it’s at a remove — the mountain hall of the nerd king, barges reduced to the size of weevils, San Francisco little more than a squiggle. “Half the time, we’re living in a cloud,” he told me when I visited in August. Wright is now 66, his gait shuffly, his eyes rheumy. His semantic memory, though, is sharper than most: a jukebox of factoids and anecdotes.

They started almost as soon as I arrived, every object in his object-filled house functioning as a conversational wormhole. In the living room, he showed me an artwork he’d made — arrows, planetary rings, islandlike blobs — that represented “a pretty elaborate mathematical construct used to model evolution,” which had something to do with fossilized horse jaws. Nearby hung what I took to be an oozy contemporary sculpture that was actually the remains of Wright’s old car, charred and melted by the 1991 firestorm that had destroyed a previous home. In the stairwell, what looked like a yesteryear imagining of a robot turned out to be an original control panel from the 1961 Soviet mission that first sent a human being into orbit: “Most people don’t realize this. If you look at the number of cosmonauts they lost in space flight? Four, total. Americans? Fourteen.”

Every preoccupation seemed to hide another preoccupation, as if his mind were a warren of hyperlinks. When I asked him why his latest company is called Gallium Studios, he disappeared into the mini-fridge in his pantry, where he keeps tequila, corn dogs, and ice packs, and extracted a baggie of gallium — a silvery material, similar to mercury but nontoxic — and proceeded to fiddle with it while explaining that it’s one of his favorite metals; that it melts at skin temperature; that it’s the substance psychics use to seem like they are bending spoons with their minds; that for a while he was molding coins from it that said GA 42: gallium’s symbol on the periodic table, but with its actual atomic number replaced by the answer to the “Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

He’d always had this meandering tendency. After his father’s death, his mother moved the family to her hometown of Baton Rouge. Will became fast friends with Charles Steinmuller, a boy down the block. They spent their days tooling around. They used the willows overhanging University Lake to pull themselves along in an aluminum johnboat, dipnetting for turtles. Once, Steinmuller recalled, Will felt a snake under his hand on the branch he’d grabbed, took it home, threw it in a garbage can, and spent the day playing with it before realizing it was a cottonmouth. They walked along the railroad tracks to the model store. They built model ships, model tanks, model cars, model planes. They burned up a neighbor’s azalea bush while trying to build a liquid-fuel rocket. They decked out Will’s first Toyota with toy rocket launchers on the hood and windshield wipers that spattered water onto whoever might be giving chase.

Steinmuller followed his forebears into the shipping industry. Wright kept tooling around. He bounced from college to college — Louisiana State to Louisiana Tech to the New School — before dropping out for good. He could’ve taken over the family plastics business. Instead, he built robot bits and remote-control doodads on the kitchen table. He souped up a Mazda and raced it across the country. He fell in love with a painter who became his first wife.

Programming was, at first, just a skill he needed to master to make his robots move. By 1982, he was driving around the Bay Area trying to sell his first shoot-’em-up game. Most of the people he met with were stiff executives, goal-oriented and profit-minded. Lauren Elliott, though, was a designer at Broderbund Games, working in a former liquor store beneath a sign that said DEPARTMENT OF REDUNDANCY REDUCTION DEPARTMENT alongside an impish ex-Disney animator named Gene Portwood who often doodled Mickey Mouse in obscene poses. Elliott became the product manager on Wright’s debut, Raid on Bungeling Bay.

But once it was on the market, Wright couldn’t stop tinkering with the back end; he was less interested in playing the game than in building out its grainy digital landscape. He laid roads and wondered where the travelers on them were heading. So he added buildings, which in turn led to a zoning code. This puttering would lead to SimCity, in which the player is thrust into the role of mayor, balancing taxation and spending, building schools and hospitals, watching civilization unfold — and occasionally succumb to random Godzilla attacks.

What made it original also made it hard to sell. The game didn’t necessarily have a clear aim or point. It was about poking around in a branching universe of possibilities: What happens if you cram in as many skyscrapers as possible? What happens if you pack your city with landfills like a garbage patchwork quilt? It might never have come out if an investor named Jeff Braun hadn’t coaxed the idea from Wright at a game-pitching pizza party. Braun remembered their initial conversation for Chaim Gingold’s book Building SimCity:

“You’re not going to like mine. It’s really awful,” Wright told Braun.

“Why wouldn’t I like it?”

“No one likes it.”

“Why doesn’t anyone like it?”

“Well, it’s not a game.”

“Really? What do you do?”

“Well, you build a city.”

That idea, a game that isn’t a game, would make Wright famous. He would become known as the eccentric master of sandbox games, “the god of God games,” as The New Yorker once called him, creator of vehicles for open-ended play. There was SimEarth in 1990, in which the player tunes a planet’s atmospheric conditions, sculpts its landmasses, plunks down life-forms. There was SimAnt in 1991, which involves tunneling out the chambers of an anthill, forging insect alliances and attacking enemies. Then, right around the time SimAnt was coming out, Wright’s house burned down. He found himself having to replace all his family’s earthly possessions, marveling at the crazy amount of stuff — at once necessary and absurd — that made up a life.

He’d already been fascinated by watching his daughter, Cassidy, play with a dollhouse. Those twin inspirations became, in 2000, The Sims: a game in which players dressed up digital avatars and decorated their houses, pushing them to seek fulfillment in work, music, friendship, and sex. As Jacqueline Singer, one of Proxi’s former artists-in-residence, said of her own eight-hour Sims days as a child, “I can make myself, or something like myself, or maybe a cooler version of myself. I was practicing a lot of things through play, just figuring out What do I want to do? How do I want to make sense of my life?” It was an experimental dreamworld, a place in which to try on selves.

To Wright, these games were all mirrors for our future-focused minds. The brain, he told me, is a prediction-making machine, constantly running scenarios on imagined models of the world and plotting out various possibilities. In a game, players could tinker, start afresh, tweak a few variables, and run the model again. Real life involved just going with it, trying to pick the path most likely to yield satisfaction or meaning. Easy enough in the short term: a craving satisfied with a burger, loneliness quelled with a phone call. Longer term, the algorithm was trickier. Wright had been married three times. He knew that what made love worthwhile was the very fact that it was unpredictable.

The past, however, could be just as inscrutable. Even less weighty decisions were sometimes inexplicable to him. When I asked about the impetus for one of his projects, he laughed. “I don’t know. I thought it would be cool. I don’t always sit down and self-reflect to that degree.” Whenever he reads about himself — in academic papers or newspapers or magazines — he thinks about the parable of the blind men and the elephant. “Everybody gets one little perspective correct, but it’s not the whole picture,” he said. He can tell they’re missing something, though he can’t say exactly what. “That’s what I want Proxi for. Because I don’t know the whole picture. I think a lot of the picture is locked away inside of me somewhere, and I would like to have better ways to visualize it.”

Memory is a malleable thing. Details get swapped out, whole scenes implanted, emotions revised in retrospect. One famous example comes from psychologist Ulric Neisser, who remembered exactly where he was when he’d heard about Pearl Harbor. He could see himself sitting in his living room, listening to a baseball game on the radio, when a newscaster interrupted to say that the Japanese air force had bombed an American base. Only decades later did Neisser realize this couldn’t be: The attack occurred on December 7, months after baseball season. He must in reality have been listening to football, though he could almost hear the announcer crowing about balls and strikes.

This hints at a view held by cognitive scientists. A memory doesn’t exist as a fully formed movie in the brain, ready to be selected and replayed. Instead, it’s constructed anew with each remembering. How it’s reassembled can depend on how it’s labeled and classified in the mind. Neisser hadn’t just gotten the sport wrong. He’d subconsciously transposed a national pastime into a national emergency.

In 2016, that idea — that there is some tacit mental taxonomy shaping our analysis of the world — became a little more concrete. A team of neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, had slid seven volunteers into an MRI machine and played them hours of podcasts, tracking blood flow in the brain word by word across some 50,000 pea-size chunks of gray matter. The resulting paper described the cerebral cortex as an atlas of meaning. When hearing terms related to accidents and crimes — victim, killed, confessed — a tiny patch above the left ear blazed with activity. Words related to family and time passing seemed to stimulate a region higher up and on the right. Other spots lit up in response to these words too, which made sense: Each place was a node in a network; each word could have multiple contexts, connotations, and associations. The study wasn’t perfect. The sample size was small and relatively homogeneous. Still, the maps of all seven brains had striking similarities.

Alex Huth, the first author, was on a plane just after the paper came out. He’d splurged on Wi-Fi to watch it take off on social media — it had been picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, NPR — when a wild email showed up. “holy fuck will wright just emailed me im freaking out,” he wrote to his wife. Huth had grown up on a steady diet of Will Wright, leaving pheromone trails to food caches in SimAnt, calibrating the temperature to make his SimEarth suitable for life. He credited Wright with getting him interested in science in the first place. Now, Wright wanted Huth’s input on his latest idea for a game.

This is how Wright described it at that point. Players would enter descriptions of significant memories from their lives and tag them with words that fit into six categories: people, places, time, feelings, activities, and things. Once they’d added enough memories, the software would look for trends, diagramming the associations and leitmotifs of the psyche like the traffic pattern of a city. In his email, Wright had attached some of the graphs he’d made for himself. They looked like word-sprinkled galaxies. But it was in layering those diagrams, one on top of the other — “people” overlaid with “feelings,” say — that patterns began to emerge. His old partner in mischief Charles Steinmuller floated somewhere between exciting and scary. His father sat off in a distant corner of frustration and sadness.

Did Huth want to meet Wright and his partners? He did. “They were really interested in whether their layout of concepts is related to what’s happening in the brain,” Huth recalled. To him, the vision seemed right — not in the specific locations activated by various themes but in the sense that our neuroanatomy did seem to parse the world by subject, tangles and folds of neurons lighting up in response to clouds of ideas. He just had no idea how it would actually become a game. After their meeting, he didn’t hear anything else. He assumed it had amounted to nothing.

But shaped or at least encouraged by Huth’s work, those strange graphs did slowly become something. By the time Wright was showing me Proxi nearly ten years later, it began with a map of bays and islands. Click to implant a memory, type in a few salient details, and watch as an AI algorithm brings it to life — a Pixar-ish short of what had, until a few seconds ago, existed merely in the mind’s eye. When not being revisited or tweaked for accuracy, the scene sits in the landscape like a fishbowl. A player has to think carefully about where to place each story: Its geography helps determine its meaning. “Maybe it’s my Injury Island, or my Death Island, or my Education Island. Everybody’s going to organize their world differently,” Wright explained.

But a player can also label a memory beyond the thematic landmass it lives on —  it might rest on Death Island but also involve dogs, or whiskey, or embarrassment, or Catholicism — and the AI picks up those tags as well as other keywords and themes not explicitly named, and with a click the algorithm can reveal the connections between memories the way a detective might draw links on a conspiracy board.

“This is all subject to design change,” Wright told me recently. He’d just been working on the game’s economy. By adding memories that share conceptual links, players would accumulate points — an enticement to input enough data that it might reveal unseen patterns in one’s own thinking. The team was also prototyping another element: a human form into which that web of memories and associations would transfer, its personality shaped by what the player had logged. “This world becomes the brain of your Proxi, and now your Proxi, kind of like Frankenstein, gets up off the table, starts walking around,” Wright said.

Wright and Elliott knew the interactions between different players’ Proxies would be central. They wanted their game to explore those Neisser-like discrepancies: How two siblings might remember the same story differently, be it the color of a pair of shorts or the valence of a childhood scene. What we got wrong could be as revelatory as what we got right. Like Wright’s past games, this one would be about tinkering, about trial and error, about classifying and reclassifying and watching as one’s psyche-map changed. The self is made of memories but can also shape them — an animate sculpture able to rework its own clay. To play Proxi could be an act of both discovery and rewriting.

In practical terms, the task was huge. Proxi’s aim was to represent any memory on earth. That meant convincingly rendering almost any object imaginable. Some “assets” players could fashion themselves once the game was out, but in order to be initially playable, the game needed a head start. Wright and Elliott turned to Proxi’s Discord server, where they contracted fans to serve as artists-in-residence who’d animate the physical artifacts players would use to decorate their memory fishbowls.

“The idea was: Players would want to use all sorts of stuff!” said Jacqueline Singer. “So they were like, ‘If you have something specific to your life, or something you don’t want to see the game without, just make it.’” For her, that was a lifeline. She was 21 and studying in Hamburg when something had happened to her memory. It wasn’t amnesia — she wasn’t sure what it was. She’d be in the middle of a conversation and forget what the conversation was about. She kept getting lost. She wound up on leave from school, alone in her room, doing automatonlike gigwork training an AI to transcribe TikTok videos. Then suddenly she was making 3-D art for one of the greatest video-game designers in the world.

Singer could still remember her mother asking her to read tarot when she was a child, so she sculpted a digital tarot card. She made a gaming chair. She made a raw chicken and an avocado and a sushi platter and an apple pie. She was often tormented by the now-mysterious objects in her room — this beautiful necklace: a gift, perhaps, but from whom? — so she made a room divider like the real-life one that helped her momentarily forget her own forgetting. She went to therapy, but the work was a kind of therapy, too. Hearing again and again in meetings with Wright, Elliott, and the team that memory was not a one-to-one reflection of experience helped her feel as though she could patch over the fraying bits in her own mind. The game was about rendering a person with a limited palette of supplies. “That was kind of what I was doing,” she said.

Wright had deliberately kept the Proxi crew small. Spore had a staff of more than 200 people within the behemoth of Electronic Arts, which acquired Wright’s first game-development company in 1997. He’d chafed at the inertia, the rigidity. At one point during his EA years, the higher-ups had reprimanded him for putting up a salt lick among the cubicles, but he didn’t take it down; he just put up a sign that read EMPLOYEES ONLY, as if further highlighting the comparison to a factory farm. Once Spore came out in 2008, he left EA and vowed he’d never work that way again.

His allergy to the corporate came with him to Proxi. Early on, in 2016, walking back from an evening out with the team, he produced a single yellow diving flipper and dropped it from an overpass onto the street below. At another point, he lit a Dorito on fire during a staff Zoom. Then there was the time he, programmer Adam Lopez, and Elliott were supposed to meet some potential partners at Apple. “We’re waiting for Will. We’re there, ready to pitch. Then five minutes before the meeting, he texts Elliott a short thing: ‘Hey, Lauren, I found myself in Hawaii. Sorry I can’t make it. You guys can manage,’ or something to that effect,” Lopez said. (When asked about this episode, Elliott said, “That is very true. I appreciate his — ” he paused searching for the right word. “I appreciate his faith in me.”) Wright told me he finds Proxi’s financial issues “a distraction.” He still had other toys he wanted to make, races he wanted to race before he got too old. Business was a distraction from the existential business of distraction itself.

“I’d much rather have a glorious failure than a mild success,” he told me. His last few projects had been cases in point. In 2010, he co-created a TV show about a paranormal bar where one lost soul wanders in at a “karmic crossroads” and the staff use their space-time-defying abilities to peek into the person’s past and possible futures to help them make a life-altering decision. It lasted for one season. A few years later, he envisioned an app through which a user could turn on their location and an avatar could go explore different possibilities nearby — the vintage-car show, say, around the corner from a business meeting. It lasted a matter of months. “We made a social platform nobody wanted,” said Lopez. He had followed Wright to Proxi even so. He found this sort of thought experiment irresistible: “If you and I switched all our memories, would you really be me and would I really be you? Or is there some ineffable part of our soul, or whatever you call it, that makes us unique? Or is it just a sum of data?”

At one point, as Wright was telling me about Proxi — and Japanese gardens, and ants’ ability to “dead reckon navigate by the polarization of the sunlight,” and plenty else — his son, Parker, bounded into the dining room. He’s 15 and provides the primary structure of Wright’s days: school drop-offs and pickups, family dinners, game nights. The fatherly pride was audible when Wright told me Parker had taught himself enough math from YouTube to test out of his classes and into college-level ones. But it didn’t take long for Wright’s inner 15-year-old to come out.

“He’s not very good at video games,” Parker told me of his dad. “He’s got too slow of a reaction time, and for games like Scrap Mechanic, which are more about strategy and thinking, he just doesn’t know the game mechanics.”

“Oh, come on,” Wright growled. “Who built the best autonomous car?”

“Mine is much better than yours.”

“Yours didn’t work. Mine worked.”

A few minutes later:

“Star Wars 2, which is actually episode five — that’s considered the best,” Wright said.

“You call that your favorite. I think it’s one of the worst ones,” Parker said. “Nothing big happens in it, really.”

Wright’s voice went up an octave: “What do you mean? He finds out Darth Vader is his father!”

Wright came by his space enthusiasm honestly. He remembers his family and their neighbors plugging their TVs in side by side to watch the moon landing on all three major networks at once so they wouldn’t miss anything. Part of the inspiration for Proxi was a 1992 Star Trek episode that had been jangling around in Wright’s head for decades. In it, Captain Picard gets zapped by an alien device and all of a sudden is living a whole other life on a different planet. He gets married, has kids, watches the sun’s radiation intensify and worsen a terrible drought — only to wake up 25 minutes later on the Starship Enterprise with someone else’s memories living alongside his own. He’d received a cultural time capsule from a now-defunct society: one person’s inner library loaded onto a piece of hardware and launched toward an unsuspecting host. It was a tool this civilization had used to preserve a little piece of itself.

That idea is everywhere now, more tangible than ever before. There are YouTube videos of someone who looks and sounds like Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, but is actually an AI avatar “based on 20 years of Reid talking and making content.” Tech is abuzz with companies wanting to license likenesses. Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov has spent 15 years trying to transfer a person’s “personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier” to achieve cognitive immortality.

Put another way, though, this was just a fancy heirloom, a diary left to be found. Wright liked the idea of passing down his own Proxi to his children — and for once Parker was almost convinced. His father’s previous creations, he told me, were just “boring old games,” but Proxi struck him as revolutionary. “I think I’ll actually interact with it myself,” he said. But then Parker’s teenage self came back out. “The one concern I do have is that with the rise of corporations collecting data and whatnot, it feels like this sort of thing would be iffy,” he said. “It gets a bunch of data from you and then uses that to create this character that has all the personal features of you.”

Such AI unease was coming from both inside and outside the house. Whether Proxi would turn out to be creepy or a commentary on the creepiness was hard to say. It could be both, as scholar and Spore co-designer Chaim Gingold pointed out: “The Sims is a celebration of consumerism but also a critique of it, right?” It carried the twin possibilities of fulfillment and emptiness. A prosperous Sim could end up drowning in its own pool. A satisfied Sim could still seem hollow, its satisfaction tabulated like the balance of a bank account.

Proxies would be more emotionally complex. But they would remain models, revealing in their imperfection. A simile works precisely because of the distance between the objects being compared; in that space, imagination takes root. In a way, the impossibility of Proxi was the point. It would show a particular variant of one’s self — revisable but never entirely whole. Once Wright was gone, the Proxi version of him that Parker might inherit would still feel like little more than a glimpse.

“I’m going to go to the world here, guys, and then you’ll see something glorious,” Lopez was saying. He was screen-sharing on Google Meet, and with a click, the memory timeline on his monitor gave way to an island landscape that represented the hollows of his mind. There, on a little cartoony hexagon of green, sat what looked like a fishbowl or snow globe. “Look at that. That is in the world. That is my memory that I placed,” he said, showing off his handiwork. “That is all functional — well, mostly functional. And if I want to remove it, it’s rough for now, but just right-mouse-click on it, little sound effect, and — ”

He made a sound like a wounded animal. “Awwwww, you’re killing me. It broke. Well, it was working.”

It was September 2025, nearly one year since the rest of the Proxi team had been laid off. This was the unpaid skeleton crew: Wright and Elliott plus Lopez, the lead and now only developer, and Jenna Chalmers, the product manager. Chalmers has a 15-year-old and, at some point, would have to look for paid work, but for now, she was supporting herself by selling off the Electronic Arts stocks she’d acquired when she worked there with Wright from 1999 to 2008 and “just tightening the belt in all the ways that I can”: reducing the number of cable channels; more religiously turning off the lights in her house; making and selling leis; putting old games and DVDs on eBay; considering selling the beloved Casita trailer her grandmother had helped her buy. She hadn’t yet sold off the memorabilia she had from working on SimCity and Spore, but it was in the queue. “It’s not listed, yet,” she said.

Some of the scrappiness has been by choice. Wright and Elliott have been picky about their partners to preserve Proxi’s auteur weirdness. The troubles coincided with larger changes in the industry. The COVID boom, people at home wanting distraction from the end of the world, had given way to a return-to-work bust. Layoffs were rampant. Other giants — John Romero of Doom and Glen Schofield of Dead Space — have had to rethink games because of business hurdles and deals falling through.

But Proxi had a Catch-22 all its own. Even after years of iterating, the vision Wright articulated was hard to picture. “The investor is like, ‘That sounds great, but I partially have no idea what you just said,’” Chalmers explained. “ ‘What actually is the player doing here? I’m not entirely sure. I heard memories. I heard playing on a map. I heard a proxy. But how are they playing on a map?’” To get more funding, they needed a playable demo — but it was hard to make a playable demo without funding.

That was what the skeleton crew had been working on for months. But every week could bring a new philosophical-technical tangle. “I have a much bigger strategic problem to bring up, but it’s nothing that we’re going to deal with in this demo,” Wright said one Tuesday during a meeting with Gallium.

A family member had recently had a medical emergency while traveling in Ireland, and he’d dropped everything to fly there. Wright’s trip had been full of specific, stand-alone memories — his first taste of black pudding; his attempt to drive on the wrong side of the road; his painful recognition that his family member was still unwell when she said her dog would help her remember to take her meds — but they all fit into the larger file of the visit. “Nested memories, basically,” he said.

“How would you categorize them? Would you put them all on an island?” Elliott asked.

“In the timeline, I can imagine having, you know, my trip to Ireland as one bubble, and maybe little bubbles coming out around it, fanned out radially,” Wright said. “In the world, that’s where I’m kind of struggling.”

“We anticipated that. We talked about having multiple memories in your childhood kitchen. And you don’t want your childhood kitchen being the size of Greenland because you’ve got a bunch of memories,” said Chalmers. “We talked about consolidating them into an object in the world, where you could then expand that object and see all the memories that it contains.”

They were trying to use the water between islands as a kind of placeholder, where a memory bubble rests before a player knows on which bit of conceptual ground this experience rightfully belongs. Lopez had programmed that, though currently the bubble just sort of sat there as if on a tabletop. Wright wanted the metaphor fleshed out: “There could be a little splash sound, and it could breathe up and down like the oceans.”

Within half a year, that detail — obsessively imagined, harped on, even — was up for debate again. The team had brought on an old compatriot from EA as well as some AI specialists who were rewriting all of Proxi’s code. They too were all unpaid for now. “If they’re excited enough to be doing that, it’s a good sign,” Elliott told me. “Typical start-up mode.” The rapid improvement of AI had expanded their horizons, and they were imagining a more flexible Proxi. The character you and the algorithm had co-constructed — the “You” of the title — could be imported into other games or even genealogy websites, where you could conjure up and converse with your forebears. Elliott said he was expecting funding news in the next six weeks.

One afternoon in late summer, Wright pulled up his personal Proxi prototype. We were sitting in his bedroom at the desk where he works, facing a wall that is a kind of cabinet of curiosities: worthless Zimbabwean bank notes for a $1 vigintillion or $100 trillion of the sort he used to give out as playful rewards to employees, a piece of rusted green metal with bullet holes from target practice with a WWII rifle on Charles Steinmuller’s land in rural Mississippi, a memorial card from a friend’s funeral, a patch that said IN MY DEFENSE I WAS LEFT UNSUPERVISED.

The memory timeline on his screen had a similar quality. Treasured, life-defining moments mingled with tiny sense memories and barstool anecdotes. Here was the pizza party where he met Jeff Braun, with whom he’d published SimCity; there was a sunburn on the tops of his feet, so bad he couldn’t bear the friction of bedsheets. Here he was 5 years old and the only boy in figure-skating class; there he was 31, losing the family home and nearly everything he owned in the Oakland Hills fire. He was golfing with his father and about to repair to the clubhouse, beer for the adults, a cold Snickers bar for Will; he was getting married; he was in a ditch after practicing bootlegger turns on a dirt road in Louisiana.

His cursor hovered over the bubble that said, “First moments with Cassidy.” “I had Cassidy so long ago,” he said. “I’ve seen how fast it happens, really. So with Parker, I’ve tried to stop and appreciate — even when he’s being a pain in the ass, he’s not going to be that kind of pain in the ass for very long. He’ll be a different kind of pain in the ass later. Two-year-old pain in the ass, as it turns out, is really fun and cute. You’re changing diapers; they’re knocking crap over. Watching this thing go from a squeaky little helpless blob to learning to crawl, then walk, and then talk, then operate things — it’s amazing.” He began to tear up. Soon, he would teach Parker to drive, one of the few things he didn’t think his brilliant kid would be able to teach himself.

When he needs a break from Proxi and remembering, he often swivels his chair to the right, away from his computer and toward whatever drawing or painting is on his drafting table just then. That day, it looked vaguely like the aerial view of a reservoir, blue interspersed with islands and peninsulas of green, some of which surrounded brown blobs. But when I looked closer, I noticed that every color contained a pattern, like the brickwork array of squarish cells in a plant. Above everything were white lines connecting different places, a network of cables or beams.

When I asked Wright what was in that drawing, he said, “I don’t know. I call these ‘Chasing Zeller.’” It was one of many studies he’d made based on the work of an artist named Daniel Zeller. Zeller’s canvases mystified him. They looked to him both improvised and cartographic. Wright wanted to know exactly how they were constructed — not only what pen strokes were involved but also what mind-set one had to inhabit to make such movements possible. He was figuring it out in the best way he knew how: by making model after model.

“Mine are crap,” he said as he opened an umpteenth tab to show me some of Zeller’s. He clicked on one in black-and-white. It had the precision of a Renaissance anatomical drawing but the unnerving abstraction of a Rorschach blot: a byzantine mixture of textures and scales, at once inviting similes and defying them. In the middle was a dark squiggle that might have been a river. There were proliferations of bulbs that looked like something a pathologist might worry about and striations that might have been crops seen from above. There were small cavities that might have been the angular pits of a granite quarry or the chambered innards of a wasps’ nest or the myriad facets of a compound eye. There were tangles of tubing that looked like ear anatomy gone berserk or a brass band in deep, deep trouble. One bit looked like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle and another like the stitching on a football.

“I like the fact that they look like they have so much meaning and yet I know they don’t,” he said. After a little while, he added, “Well, maybe they do. I just don’t know it.”

This, Wright imagined, was one way Proxi might display its analysis of players’ minds, an aerial map of loves, phobias, triumphs, losses, pets, and near misses plus all the associations connecting them. “Almost like a fingerprint of your psyche,” he said — Zelleresque but more legible.

He looked for a little longer at the drawing in front of him, as if any second he might crack the code.