I've been doing this for 20 years and have reached the point where I'm ready to email my list to him - with a gallery of screenshots. In fact, I like to play SimCity 4 as much as possible so I can make a list of all the things he got wrong (as I have with all the previous versions). I only think about it once or twice a day and sometimes I don't even think about it at all. Before you know it Will Wright is a multi-millionaire game designer whereas I. I know because I saw it on WarGames.Īnyway, during one particularly drunken multiplayer session when the two of them were bemoaning the state of online 8-bit gaming, Mr Wright the teacher must have let slip the genius of my GCSE project to Will.
As techy types they probably had futuristic means of communication using a powerful computer and a phone line. The fact that my teacher lived in Portsmouth, England and Will Wright lived in America isn't relevant. Now, whilst he wasn't the Mr Wright, I have my suspicions they were related. Mr Wright, my teacher, obviously saw something there. It was a terrible, unwieldy thing - but incredibly I got an A for it. Written in BASIC, you could move around the screen with the cursor keys and place a section of road with the 'R' key or a house by pressing 'H'. I programmed a little utility on the BBC Micro called, rather inspirationally, Housing Estate Planner.
Back In 1987 was working on my GCSE Computer Studies project.
