The Sims' Bing Gordon is Specifically Right

We wrote a business plan in September, October '82 and raised money from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia in November '83: $2 million on a $3 million pre-money.

It means the investors put in $2 million and own 40% of the company.

Yeah, it's kind of a make. But I was going to say, the one-person marketing department, my first hire named Nancy Fong, March 1st, '83. She had a nickname in the graphic arts in San Francisco: the Dragon Lady. And I almost hired her sight unseen on the recommendation of a friend, Michael John, who ran Pacific Lithograph at the time, went on to be a great investor. He was a sixth man on the Oregon basketball team that broke Bill Walton's UCLA unbeaten streak at like 90 games. But anyway, in February, we're about to launch the first five games in May, and Trip Hawkins, the founder CEO, comes to me and goes, 'How are the manuals coming?' And I went, 'Manuals?' And he goes, 'Yeah, games ship with manuals.' I went, 'Manuals?' And he goes, 'Yeah.' And I go, 'Um, yeah, they're in good shape. They'll all be done on Monday.' So that weekend I wrote a bunch of manuals.

In September there were seven, and when we launched in May '83 I think there were 11.

Mega hit. Yeah.

We had a studio, we were never in either. We got the studio and then pandemic hit.

Yeah. That would have been brutal. Especially when you're creating stuff or including a company, intuition and kind of flying by the seat of your pants is so important. I've learned there are people who can manage at scale because they have so much attention to detail. My favorite person managing remotely is Jeff Wilke, who was CEO of consumer at Amazon, and he had what he called 'mechanisms.' He introduced Jeff Bezos to the concept of mechanisms, and he could run a whole complicated business with tens of thousands of employees off of worksheets. But very few founders can. Most founders you want them to walk into a room and look around. I got to the point where I felt I could walk into a studio and walk on the floor and sense whether the game was going to be on time and whether it was going to be any good, just the vibe in the room. And by the way, the retailers that I met way before e-commerce, the great retailers all believed they could walk into their store, look around at customers, and tell you what that person was going to buy before they left that day. There's anecdotal evidence, a little like Nostradamus probably believed 100% of his predictions were right. Many high-ego people probably didn't pay attention to the wrong calls with no downside, but they did have that sense. I learned a lot about psychology by listening to retailers talk about the psychology of customers in the store. I was never in the casino business, but my sense is casinos figured that out a long time ago with body language. There's a book called Competing on Analytics that talks about Harrah's Casino's first move into a VIP program where they gave people extras for basically giving them all the data about how they bet, drank, and went from table to table. So the retailers were... My business hero is David Ogilvy, who founded a famous ad agency but started out as a door-to-door salesman and researcher for Roper Research, then became a copywriter, founder, and author. Some of my favorite books he wrote on advertising, like Confessions of an Advertising Man. The one thing he did in his career that I don't aspire to is he bought a castle in France and retired.

Uh oh. That's probably my end. What happened? Did you get a notification?

Well, it probably depends on what you say. Yeah, you can make America great again, but you can't make the internet great again.

Yeah. I went to Stanford Business School where I met Trip Hawkins and a professor named Peter G.W. Keane taught a math class called Decision Science. In one class he said, 'We got 10 minutes to go. Let's talk about important decisions. If money were no object five years from now, what would you do?' And we went, 'Money no object? We're all living on credit card credit lines.' And he goes, 'No, you're Stanford MBAs. In five years, money is going to be the least you're worried about. Go as if.' And he went around the room and asked everybody. A third of the people said, 'I'd like to take the company public on Wall Street, the biggest IPO of the year.' That was their fantasy. A third said they wanted to start a small business or a restaurant, and those people were all out of business 10 years later. A third had various alternative approaches. And I said, 'I'd like to create an adult Disneyland in virtual space.' And everybody looked at me like, 'What?' And he came up to me afterwards and said, 'I'm sorry, that was embarrassing.' I said, 'What do you mean embarrassing?' He said, 'Didn't you notice how awkward it seemed to everybody?' I said, 'No, I didn't notice at all. I've been thinking about this for a while.' And he said, 'Okay, I have no idea what you're talking about, but in the other class is another kid who wants to use computers to put a Dyson card football game on a computer. You should go meet him.'

That's how I met Trip.

We did. He said, 'Do something cool, 'cause in five years I'm going to start a software company.' And I said, 'I'll be your ad agency.' I was working at Intel my second year of business school part-time, and Intel's ad agency at the time was also Apple's ad agency, called Regis McKenna. He was an early genius helper to some of the founders, and I thought he was great at PR but not good at advertising. I said I could be better than that, so give me five years. Trip and I spent a lot of time together. We lived together. We did the first consumer research project ever for a cartridge video game system for the Fairchild Channel F, which was the first cartridge video game system before the Magnavox Odyssey and before the NES. The day we walked in, the head of marketing, Mike something, had to grade us. We go in to see him the last week of the semester with our research. For the research, he'd handed us a box of postcards. Could you imagine there was a time when people bought video games and sent in postcard warranty cards to get registered? He said, 'Here, I got a shoebox full of postcards. You figure it out.' We sent him a survey asking what's wrong with the system, what games do you like, etc. So we were fired up. We go in to see him and he says, 'Not now. I can't talk.' I go, 'What do you mean can't talk? You have to grade us.' He goes, 'I can't talk. My CEO of Fairchild, Wolf Corgan, just walked in, put a pink slip randomly on every second desk, and I have to say goodbye to half the employees.' And we go, 'Well, we got to get a grade.' And he goes, 'Give me it.' And he writes 'A' and said, 'Now get out of here.' A week later, he called us up and goes, 'I feel bad. Sorry, I got a new job. I'm the founding head of marketing for this little pizza video game parlor. So I'm sending you a bunch of credits for Chuck E. Cheese.'

No. After I went to the Masters with my brother and we talked about this. He was my best friend growing up, and from him I learned about love. We played one-on-one sports. We made up games all the time. We made up weird home run derby, slow motion football, two-on-one football. We just made up game after game. And then he said, 'Well, Bing, you did a lot of puzzles and played cards.' But there was a guy in our neighborhood named Greg Oxford who was a bookshelf game guy, a hex game guy. Those were always too complicated for me. So I didn't get into those. I got into all other kinds of game-like things. And I got fascinated with games because of virtual worlds. I worked my summer out of high school at Disneyland, and they used to do inter-real sports, all these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed kids about to go to college. We did inter-real sports before the park opened, and I would see the audio-animatronics like Abraham Lincoln on Main Street and imagine, if I had gotten here a few hours earlier, I wonder if they'd get up off their pedestal and wander around. That would be so cool. That idea later became a movie and a TV show and another movie. I realized later I've thought about death almost since I could remember. We're in this one life, but life is serial. I think we're living life like a tape drive, and I want to live like I have a hard drive or better yet with flash memory. I want to save and restore it. I want multiple tracks going on. So to me, the idea captured in the brand name Second Life, but virtual worlds is you can save or restore, try stuff out, compress time, elongate time, and set up simulations as you go. That was the draw for me. I just wanted to live multiple lives in my hundred years. People now call it the metaverse, but for me, books was a metaverse. Theater was a metaverse. Watching TV was a metaverse. Any one of these worlds that you're inhabiting, either following along as a spectator. Steven Spielberg was interesting. We worked with him when he first started trying to do video games, and he was fascinated. He said, 'Movies we make to wash over you. It's a hot medium, but you sit back. TV is a cold medium, and you sit back. But video game is a hot medium, and you're leaning in.' That fascinated him, basically watching the players, the audience. He was less interested in game mechanics, but really interested in what it did to the players. Spielberg has a formula for every movie he did. He has a beat chart where every movie the same beat happens the same minute. He said something about quality, an offhand joke: 'Banning smoking from movie theaters was the worst thing that ever happened to Hollywood.' We go, 'What? Unpack that one, Steven.' And he goes, 'Here's what happened. I'd go into a preview house and watch my cut movie. If one person got up to get a smoke, I'd feel disappointed. Three people got up to get a smoke. At the moment they did it, I needed to recut the movie.' He said, 'Now we have infrared cameras and we watch for fidgets. There's something like 51 body languages that people make in movie theaters when they're bored, but it's just not as compelling as seeing somebody stand up and walk out of the theater.'

Yes. In the world for the last 15 years, we've had people connected to servers and we can actually see stuff going on. But the great artists of the past did it by watching body language. Steven Spielberg did it in the movie theater. John Sullivan, the buyer at Toys R Us when Toys R Us was the leading vendor of video games around the world, did it by walking in the store.

I made up the title. At the time, the internet was nascent, but I haven't found the use of chief creative officer any time before kind of '95. That turned out to be a non-operating role after operating in marketing and then trying to run a studio for a while and not being able to reverse engineer the lives of engineers. So my job as chief creative officer was for about 10 games a year, make them 5% better. A guy named Mike Maer did the analytics on this, but it turned out for about 10 years in the video game business, Metacritic for video games was a much better measure of quality than Rotten Tomatoes is in the movie business. In the movie business, there are very few '9s on Rotten Tomatoes that become box office hits. The exceptions are Godfather one and two and Pixar movies. The reason is Paul and Kale didn't have popular tastes. The movie critics became artsy-fartsy, and what people liked and what critics liked didn't match. But in games, they matched. For about a decade, after a game got to an 80 Metacritic, every five percentage points would increase sales 50 to 100%. So my job was to add 5%. We didn't know it at the time; that was intuitive. From a marketing point of view, sometimes you add the 5% by working from the customer backwards, helping them see what they expect to see. An example of that was a game called NASCAR Racing. The year before, we had done a game called Andretti. So we took the NASCAR license and wanted to get out in a year. We took the Andretti engine, put NASCAR on it with brands on all the cars, and suddenly you're always making left turns. We showed it to reviewers. I was a big fan of showing stuff to reviewers, and they went, 'You [expletive]! This is a repackage. You just put a couple logos on it.' I go, 'Well, no, there's some new physics and new engineering.' They go, 'Yeah, yeah, you suck.' All right, give us a week. We went back and said, 'We won't suck next week.' I have a concept I call 'menu toys.' So we went back and said, 'What's unique about the game?' The engineering team said, 'We built in draft.' In cycling, if you're at over about 18 miles an hour, if you have a perfect draft, you can keep speed at 27% less energy. You can see that in NASCAR when somebody can slingshot because they've got the free ride. His guy said, 'We built this in.' I go, 'We just showed it to people. Nobody sees it.' He goes, 'But it's in there.' I go, 'Oh, this is new.' So we invented something called a draft meter. It's in the lower right-hand corner. For anybody who ever played The Sims, the Sims puck was in the lower left. That was a late invention. The draft meter in the lower right showed zero to 100%, looked like a vacuum up to the perfect vacuum. Now you're playing the game, looking at the car and the controls, but you're looking at the draft meter the whole time. We went back and showed it, and the reviewers go, 'But this is awesome. This is NASCAR.'

It's lookupable. I'm pretty sure it was on PlayStation, so it could have been earlier than that.

It's already in there. If you find it, you're going to love it. But we want to make sure you see it. Sometimes in marketing you want to let people discover stuff. I'm a big fan of doing that with logos and brands. Make your logo smaller than anybody thinks it should be to make people lean in a little bit. Be modest about your logo. Similarly, we found out a long time ago that brands that said they were quality, what it means to the customer is you're cheap. So we did this with Electronic Arts. Why don't we make the logo bigger? Well, we want people to feel like they're discovering us. When people discover you, they're more likely to talk about it to their friends.

Is that too big?

No, I think something about the size of a chyron on the bottom of the screen is modest enough. But anyway, there's other stuff you want to make sure that people see. We wanted to make sure that people appreciated the engineering in here. We did the same thing with The Sims. Lucy Bradshaw and I were trying to take it to market, and we thought, well, this is positioned as a doll simulator, but it's actually a story maker. So we changed the menu system and put a camera icon on it. In Sims 2, we did a wants and fears meter and went even further, made it look like a slot machine with the first, so you can't ignore it. There's some stuff you want to make sure people don't ignore, and other times you want people to lean in. It's judgment about when is right, usually do one or the other, and you watch how the audience reacts.

I learned a long time ago I like influence more than power. I found out in my career, I keep track of my business and product catastrophes. In the first part of my career, my catastrophes usually came from taking shortcuts. An example: we did a sequel to Dr. J and Larry Bird One-on-One, and it was Jordan and Irving One-on-One. I took a shortcut and didn't mock up the package and show it to people. We made that package. Instead of looking like two famous guys down at a school playground, it looked a little more Hollywood against a big red background. I took for granted how bad could it be? What I found out with sequels, people's instinct is it can't do worse than half of the last time. The answer is it can do zero. So I've had a couple zeros. This game, the first time we went to a consumer show back when they were consumer video game shows, a little retailer had game boxes on a card table. I went over to watch what was happening. I was so proud there was our game, and watched about five people in a row touch the game to the left, go across ours, and pick up the other red package right next to it, which was Tetris. After about five of those in a row, I thought, 'Oh crap.' That was a total goose egg. Another one: we did a sequel to a game, the conquistador game, which is actually an inspiration for SimCity. It was called Seven Cities of Gold by Danny Button and Ozark Softscape. That was awesome. It had so much technology, started out with randomly generating tectonic plates and building a new world. In the game, if you headed west from Spain, you didn't know what you were going to find. Sometimes you'd find nothing but open ocean, get scurvy, run out of food, and die. Danny did a sequel called Heart of Africa, Dr. Livingstone, I presume. You start out heading down the Nile, trying to find the source. That sold, I think, three copies in the US in the first month. It turned out it was top five in Germany. Germans cared a lot about dominating Africa; nobody in America in the '80s cared about Africa. It was findable, but this is a long answer to your question. In the second half of my career, my catastrophes usually came when I couldn't convince other people of the right answer.

It's on me. I think it's my fault. I generate so much conversation that many people can tell my ideas are at one end of the bell curve; they just can't tell which. I learned in management you got to say things three times before people think you mean it. I had to propose to my wife 11 times before she said yes. Persistence is one of the three key qualities for success. So what I learned early on with game developers, the first thing to get them to listen to you is play their game. In games, they can see where your score is this month. I think I'm on a 70-day Duolingo streak, and I was on a five-year Farmville streak and a five-year Words with Friends streak. They come in to meet him, and just like somebody can listen to your last podcast and show up and go, 'Hey, Bing, we like your opinion, but where have you been lately?' And I can say, 'Well, your game bored me.' And they kind of go, 'Yeah, well, you told me that last time.' I don't know anybody who's a parent, you learned this as well. I think girls up to about age seven and boys up to about age four believe in their parents as authority figures, at least with games. We used to think girls would play the games parents bought them up to about age eight and boys up to about age four. There is an art form to get listened to. I never really was the great Santini, 'Do what I say, not what I do.' I think it's kind of fun to get in there and see how the creative people think. It was fun with Peter Molyneux, where his ideas come from, and with Deus Hassabus, where his mechanics come from, and Sid and Will and Brian Reynolds, and Matrick and Hannah Limkkey, and Neil Young. After a couple beers, 'Where are your ideas coming from? What are you frustrated about?'

In business, I try to tell people to drink two beers fast and then tell me what your business strategy is. Let's do it.

And you know, you get rid of all the long-winded stuff. And by the way, I tell people if you're doing marketing, be a door-to-door salesman. Have somebody else sit beside the door. Knock on the door, try to get them to light in your house. You can only use your marketing words and see how that goes. And strategy is either a two-beer strategy or a six-inch strategy. The six-inch strategy is get your face six inches from the other person's nose and tell them what your business is. And you get really succinct really fast. I think every Fuller brush salesman in history learned how to get the door open. At worst, they'd come in with a bag of dirt and throw it on the house owner's floor and go, 'I can clean this up for you,' and hope the cops don't get called. But when you're trying to get people to get on this, you kind of need a good one-liner. It's like we do a podcast. We've been doing it a while. I don't know. We're kind of guys. It's like, 'Hey, Frank Chi thinks we're awesome.' So you're in the door. But if you said, 'Here's a 150-page thesis written by two MIT PhDs about why podcast participation can increase your health span,' and you got it. We better get rid of that doc.