Maxis is an American video game developer and a division of Electronic Arts (EA). The studio was founded in 1987 by Will Wright and Jeff Braun, and acquired by Electronic Arts in 1997. Maxis is best known for its simulation games, including The Sims, Spore and SimCity.
The Sims is a social simulation video game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts in 2000. The game allows players to create and control virtual people, called "Sims", and manage their daily lives in a suburban setting. The game features an open-ended gameplay, where players can choose their own goals and objectives, and customize their Sims' appearance, personality, skills, relationships, and environment. A series of expansion packs were also released that add new content and features to the game, such as new careers, items, locations, and scenarios.
William Ralph Wright is an American video game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis, which later became part of Electronic Arts. In April 2009, he left EA to run Stupid Fun Club Camp, an entertainment think tank in which Wright and EA are principal shareholders.
SimCity 2000 is a city-building simulation video game jointly developed by Will Wright and Fred Haslam of Maxis. It is the successor to SimCity Classic and was released for Apple Macintosh and MS-DOS personal computers in 1993, after which it was released on many other platforms over the following years, such as the Sega Saturn and SNES game consoles in 1995 and the PlayStation in 1996.
SimGolf is a video game created by Maxis in 1996. The game allows players to design their own golf courses and play them.
In linguistics, a nonce word—also called an occasionalism—is any word (lexeme), or any sequence of sounds or letters, created for a single occasion or utterance but not otherwise understood or recognized as a word in a given language. Nonce words have a variety of functions and are most commonly used for humor, poetry, children's literature, linguistic experiments, psychological studies, and medical diagnoses, or they arise by accident.
SimCopter is a 1996 flight simulator video game developed by Maxis. It puts the player into a 3D city. Like Streets of SimCity, SimCopter lets the player import SimCity 2000 maps into the game. It is also the first game to use the Sim language Simlish.
Gerri Lee Lawlor was an American actress, voice actress and homeless advocate. She was the co-creator, along with Marc Gimbel and Stephen Kearin, of the fictitious Simlish language used in The Sims.
SimCity 64 is a city-building video game developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64DD. The game and its peripheral were released only in Japan.
A pseudoword is a unit of speech or text that appears to be an actual word in a certain language, while in fact it has no meaning. It is a specific type of nonce word, or even more narrowly a nonsense word, composed of a combination of phonemes which nevertheless conform to the language's phonotactic rules. It is thus a kind of vocable: utterable but meaningless.
The Humble Brothers are an electronic music duo consisting of Canadian Ken "hiwatt" Marshall and Tanzanian-born Traz Damji. They gained fame with their involvement in Electronic Arts soundtracks, starting with 2002's Freekstyle, which is followed by Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 and Maxis' SimCity and The Sims franchises. Most of their original compositions for The Sims contain lyrics in Simlish, the fictional language used within the games' universe, and encompasses various popular music genres. In addition, they made remixes of other artists' songs as their production skills were noticed by the mainstream music industry. Their notable remixes include Linkin Park's "One Step Closer" and Static-X/Mephisto Odyssey song "Crash" which was featured on the soundtrack of Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. The Humble Brothers have also remixed the Dry Cell song Body Crumbles. They are also responsible for producing "Terror Is Reality" for the Capcom video game Dead Rising 2.
Speech segmentation is the process of identifying the boundaries between words, syllables, or phonemes in spoken natural languages. The term applies both to the mental processes used by humans, and to artificial processes of natural language processing.
Tsou is a divergent Austronesian language spoken by the Tsou people of Taiwan. Tsou is a threatened language; however, this status is uncertain. Its speakers are located in the west-central mountains southeast of the Chiayi/Alishan area in Taiwan.
The Sims 3 is a 2009 life simulation video game developed by the Redwood Shores studio of Maxis, and published by Electronic Arts. Part of The Sims series, it is the sequel to The Sims 2. It was released on June 2, 2009, for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and smartphone versions. Console versions were released for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo DS in October 2010 and a month later for Wii. The Windows Phone version was released on October 15, 2010. A Nintendo 3DS version, released on March 27, 2011, was one of the platform's launch titles.
SimCity is an open-ended city-building video game franchise originally designed by Will Wright. The first game in the series, SimCity, was published by Maxis in 1989 and was followed by several sequels and many other spin-off Sim titles, including 2000's The Sims, which itself became a best-selling computer game and franchise. Maxis developed the series independently until 1997, and continued under the ownership of Electronic Arts until 2003. EA commissioned various spinoffs from other companies during the 2000s, focusing on console and mobile releases. A 2013 EA-Maxis reboot was subject to what has been described as "one of the most disastrous launches in history", which may have triggered the 2015 shutdown of Maxis Emeryville and the end of the franchise.
SimCity 4: Rush Hour is the expansion pack for SimCity 4 created by EA Games and Maxis, where the player builds a city from scratch. It was released on September 22, 2003, simultaneously with a deluxe edition of SimCity 4 which also contains the expansion pack built-in.
"Hot n Cold" is a song by American singer Katy Perry. The song was written by Perry, Dr. Luke, and Max Martin and produced by Luke and Benny Blanco for her second studio album, One of the Boys (2008). It was released as the album's second single on September 9, 2008. The lyrics address an unstable romantic relationship caused by a partner's mood swings.
"Whistle (While You Work It)" is a song by British recording artist Katy Tiz. It was written by Tiz, Kinetics & One Love, and songwriter Emily Warren for Tiz's debut studio album. It was released onto iTunes on 10 February 2015.
The Sims 2: University is an expansion pack for the 2004 life simulation video game The Sims 2, developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. The first expansion pack for the game, it was released 1 March 2005. University introduces a new "young adult" life stage who live in separate college towns and attend university; with its dormitories, the expansion pack marks the first time in the Sims series where player sims are able to live with non-player characters. Sims who attend university gain access to new careers and interactions. University also introduces new items, interactions, and gameplay elements, such as the ability to bring deceased sims back to life, the ability to play musical instruments and use mobile phones, and the ability to turn sims into zombies.
