Will Wright, Sims and SimCity Legend, is Building a Metaverse NFT Game on Blockchain

Legendary game designer Will Wright, who led development on not just SimCity but the original Sims as well, hasn’t really made a big video game since 2008's Spore. However, he’s back in 2022, working on something called VOXVerse.

VOXVerse is a social game where you mine, build, and talk to people, who are squat little voxel-based characters. Also, everything will be real estate that you buy and own, so you can see where this is going.

The project ticks every box for something that should have been announced in May 2021 then quietly shelved 12 months later when harsh conditions hit the. It’s on the blockchain, it’s throwing licenses at it, it’s using the word “metaverse,” and its overall design sounds like something pitched solely to impress individuals sitting at a Web3 startup’s boardroom table.

Moreover, it’s also helping to sell NFTs. The game has been designed at Gallium Games, a studio focused on blockchain gaming and is founded by both Wright and Carmen Sandiego, the co-creator Lauren Elliott. Nonetheless, the “Vox” characters at the heart of the project aren’t new characters, they’re an existing line of NFTs, which include licensed tie-ins from Trolls and The Walking Dead. The Vox characters are sold by crypto firm Gala Games, who have spent $25 million funding VOXVerse.

In an interview with Axios, Wright slightly distances himself from the NFT side of things, saying, “I don’t really want to be in the business of selling NFTs,” and that his main interest in the blockchain is because “I want to have secure transactions for content creators.”

 Axios’ Stephen Totilo adds during this portion of the interview that Co-founder Elliot amiably interjected that some aspects of the VoxVerse project technically are NFTs.