> algorithms governing that were closely-guarded secrets
[citation needed]
I am not sure how you derived that conclusion from the article. The passage seems to imply little else than a company spokesman declined to divulge proprietary information to some random dude who cold-called them.
I know Yoot Saito (creator of SimTower) from my time at Maxis, so I just gave him a cold call out of the blue and asked. ;) I caught him drinking Jack Daniels in a Japanese bar, but he had some time to chat.
He said he once did a big interview with BBC about SimTower (which would be worth looking up and watching if you can find it), and had a friend who worked in the elevator industry, who told him generally about how elevators worked, but much of it was secret and proprietary, so he had to come up with how they worked in the game himself, based on the general ideas he learned and his own experience and imagination.
He also said he's interested in releasing the original source code of SimTower as free open source software, like I did with the original SimCity Classic source code, so I volunteered to help him and find other people who could help. Anybody interested? ;)
nodesocket on March 17, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Railroad Tycoon
Somewhat of a competitor, but any Sim Tower fans here? I was obsessed with everything Sim* but especially loved Sim Tower. Maxis was an amazing gaming company and actually my first entry into Macs. My friends dad had a Macintosh II, then classic, then LC, and I would spend hours playing games on them.
xxr on March 17, 2017 | next [–]
Interestingly, SimTower was published by Maxis but developed by OpenBook (later Vivarium), the Japanese developer that would later make Seaman for the Dreamcast.
DonHopkins on March 18, 2017 | parent | next [–]
Yoot Saito just presented a classic game postmortem of "Seaman" [1] at the recent GDC.
Unfortunately I wasn't there to see it, but I saw him talk earlier about Seaman at GDC 2000, and it was fascinating to learn how he was able to pull off such an unprecedented original design, even supporting speech recognition on the Dreamcast!
Announcement: Yoot Saito is coming to GDC 2017 to present a Classic Game Postmortem of Seaman! [2]
"Yutaka "Yoot" Saito, the talented game designer known for his idiosyncratic approach to game development, will be delivering a Classic Game Postmortem on his remarkable Dreamcast game 'Seaman' at GDC 2017! Saito's game development career took off in the early '90s when he created the game that was published by Maxis as 'SimTower', but it was after he founded his own studio Vivarium that he really came into his own. Under the Vivarium banner, Saito developed the groundbreaking virtual pet game 'Seaman' (lending his own face to the titular Seaman), its striking sequel 'Seaman 2', the pinball strategy game 'Odama', and the airport baggage management puzzle game 'Aero Porter'. Now, Saito is coming to GDC 2017 to speak at length about his work creating 'Seaman', a game that left an indelible mark on the fabric of both the game industry and pop culture at large. Don't miss it!"
I just found the video of his GDC 2017 talk: Classic Game Postmortem: 'Seaman'! [3]
>Sega’s Dreamcast was ultimately a failure, as Sony came to dominate the early-2000s market with the PlayStation 2. But Sega’s machine left behind a library of uniquely innovative and influential software. And perhaps no title was as memorable as Yutaka “Yoot” Saito’s iconoclastic Seaman, a virtual pet simulator that had you use a microphone to converse with a moody, sarcastic man-fish, with help from a narrator voiced by Leonard Nimoy.
[citation needed]
I am not sure how you derived that conclusion from the article. The passage seems to imply little else than a company spokesman declined to divulge proprietary information to some random dude who cold-called them.