Comment by chaimgingold

That’s a fascinating idea! One of the surprising things I learned while researching this book was that Maxis was actually trying to do that at one point, and in fact more. They had an initiative called SimWorld that would allow all their sim games to link together and even be open to third party development. This very ambitious OS-like architecture meant that The Sims really was seen as zooming into SimCity, and in fact early prototypes of what became The Sims let you do just that. And SimCopter did let you open SC2k save files and fly through them. While SimWorld didn’t take off it seems that without it we wouldn’t have The Sims, which introduced an innovative object-oriented architecture that underwrote its cutting-edge AI, UI, and business model (modular expansion packs).

Some fun primary sources:

[1] Will Wright interview for SimCity 2000 CDROM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcgV4YolDkg

[2] Game Developer magazine piece on SimWorld and early The Sims: https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/GD_Mag_Archi... (An old Game Developer magazine piece)

[3] Will Wright shows a very early The Sims demo at Terry Winograd’s Stanford seminar: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999