In 1989, Will Wright convinced a publisher to release a game where you built a city and… that was it. No winning condition. No enemy to defeat. Just urban planning and zoning laws. SimCity shouldn’t have worked. It became a genre-defining hit.
In 2000, he did it again with The Sims: a game about the tedium of domestic life. Pay bills. Make friends. Don’t die of starvation because you forgot to buy food. Also a massive hit.
In 2008, he tried Spore: evolution from single-cell organism to galactic civilization. Ambitious. Divisive. Interesting.
Now Wright is back with something that makes all of those look straightforward: a video game built from your actual memories. It’s called Proxi, he started working on it in 2015, and it’s nowhere close to finished.
A profile in Vulture (March 25, 2026) digs deep into Wright’s decade-long obsession, and it’s one of the more fascinating reads about game design philosophy in recent memory.
What Is Proxi, Exactly?
Here’s the concept: you type in memories. Real ones, from your actual life. A road trip with a friend. The first time you ate something that made you sick. Your childhood bedroom.
The game turns those text descriptions into animated scenes. You place those scenes into a 3D environment called a “mind world” — a space made of terraformable hexagons that grows and changes based on the emotional weight of what you’ve put in it. Happy memories might make the landscape brighter. Darker ones might create weather patterns, shadows, strange terrain.
Then here’s where it gets weird: the game builds a character from all of that. Your Proxi — a digital entity whose personality, fears, and decision-making are shaped by the memories you’ve fed it. Put it in a game scenario (Wright showed an early demo of a desert island escape) and it behaves based on who you are. If you logged a childhood memory of being afraid of the dark, your Proxi might refuse to follow another character into a cave.
Wright described it this way in the Vulture profile: “This world becomes the brain of your Proxi, and now your Proxi, kind of like Frankenstein, gets up off the table, starts walking around.”
Frankenstein’s monster built from your diary entries. Sure, Will. Let’s do this.
Why It’s Taken 11 Years (and Counting)
This isn’t a case of vaporware or feature creep. Proxi sits at the intersection of three genuinely hard problems: AI-driven character simulation, procedural world generation, and the incredibly personal nature of memory.
The Sims worked because it was about generic human behavior. Eat, sleep, socialize, pursue aspirations. Universal stuff. Proxi is attempting the opposite: a game that’s specifically about you, that’s only interesting because it’s personalized to one person’s interior life.
That’s a much harder problem to solve. What makes a memory meaningful? How do you map emotional weight onto physical space? How does sentiment analysis — the same blunt tool that tells marketers whether a tweet is “positive” or “negative” — translate into something nuanced enough to represent actual human experience?
Wright has been wrestling with these questions for over a decade, and the honest answer, based on the Vulture profile, is that he’s still working it out. The game has no announced release window. It was first revealed at a Unity keynote at GDC in 2018. It’s now 2026.
Which, for the record, is not a criticism. Some ideas take time. Some ideas are worth taking time on.
The Sims Connection That Makes This Fascinating
Wright’s quote in the PC Gamer piece from a few years back is worth repeating: “No game designer has ever gone wrong by overestimating the narcissism of their players.”
That’s the engine behind The Sims. Why is it so compelling to watch a virtual person do laundry? Because it’s your virtual person. You named them. You chose their personality traits. You built their house. You care about their laundry in a way you’d never care about a fictional character’s laundry in a novel.
Proxi is trying to amplify that feeling to an absurd degree. Not “a character you created” but “a character made from the actual substance of your memories.” The narcissism engine cranked to 11.
The question is whether that’s a game, or a therapy tool, or some third thing we don’t have a word for yet.
Possibly all three at once, which is exactly what makes it interesting.
What It Says About Where Games Are Going
There’s a certain irony in the fact that Proxi has been in development longer than most live-service games survive. In 2015, when Wright started this project, Fortnite didn’t exist. The gaming industry has spun up and burned through entire business models in the time Wright has been refining this concept.
But that’s also kind of the point. Proxi isn’t competing with Fortnite or Call of Duty or even The Sims 4. It’s trying to answer a different question entirely: not “how do we make a game that keeps players engaged for as long as possible” but “what if the game was fundamentally about you?”
In an industry currently dealing with rising dev costs, studio closures, and the ongoing problem of games competing for shrinking attention spans, that feels almost radical. Wright is building something that can’t be copied or franchised, because by definition every player’s experience will be completely different from every other player’s.
The Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection shipped last week, and people were excited about a 2006 DS game getting a second chance. There’s something there about what players actually want: games that meant something, games that were about something. Proxi is betting that “about you” is the most compelling something of all.
The Uncomfortable Question Nobody’s Asking
Proxi asks you to type in your memories. Real ones. Personal ones. Your childhood fears, your formative experiences, your embarrassing moments, your grief.
And then it uses AI to analyze them. To extract emotional content. To map sentiment. To build a character from them.
Who owns that data? What happens to it? Could Wright’s game company sell those memories to a marketing firm? Could the emotional profile derived from your memory log be used for something you didn’t consent to?
Wright hasn’t said much about the privacy architecture of Proxi. Maybe it’s all processed locally. Maybe it’s encrypted. Maybe he’s thought through all of this carefully. But in 2026, when we’ve all watched what happens when games and apps start hoarding personal data, it’s worth asking the question before the release date gets announced.
The most intimate game ever made might require the most careful privacy protections ever built into a game. That’s not a reason not to make it. But it is a reason to ask.
Where Things Stand
According to the Vulture profile, Proxi exists as a working prototype. Wright has a small team. They’ve built the memory-logging interface, the mind-world environment, the early character simulation. The Proxi entity can walk around and make decisions influenced by what you’ve fed it.
It’s not a finished game. It doesn’t have a release date. It’s been in development for 11 years and counting.
And it’s still the most interesting game concept I’ve read about in a long time. In a landscape where most “revolutionary” game announcements turn out to be slightly different battle royales or live-service sequels, the idea of a game that knows your fears because you told it about the time you nearly drowned in a vat of plastic pellets as a child feels genuinely strange and genuinely new.
Whether Wright finishes it is anyone’s guess. Whether it’ll work when he does is an even bigger question.
But the fact that someone is trying? That’s worth paying attention to.
Source: Vulture: The Sims Creator’s Audacious Quest to Turn His (and Your) Mind Into a Video Game (March 25, 2026)
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