Midsummer Studios aims to shake the life sim genre up, and that’s no easy task. I was lucky enough to sit down and chat with CEO and creative director Jake Solomon to discuss the genre, past lessons learned, and what they hope to bring to a shockingly uncrowded table.
The life sim genre, almost exclusively defined by EA and Maxis’ The Sims series, has been a tough nut to crack for over 20 years, or so it seems. Even the long-running saga has sometimes struggled to evolve and add new elements to the mix in ways that didn’t disrupt what made the original formula so special. Now, the Midsummer team appears to have a pretty clear image of what it wants to do, and the veterans’ expertise in building critical darlings such as XCOM 2 and Midnight Suns is encouraging in spite of the genres’ differences.
Midsummer Studios is founded by creative director Jake Solomon, Game Director Will Miller (Formerly of Firaxis Games), and COO/CFO Nelsie Birch. Per the press release, Midsummer launches with $6 million raised from major investors like Transcend Fund, Tirta Ventures, Betaworks Ventures, 1Up Ventures, F4 Fund, Krafton, and Day Zero Productions. The studio has recently added Grant Rodiek to the roster, a producer and director with 18 years of experience working on Maxis Studios’ The Sims franchise.
Solomon, the man leading the charge, had been part of Firaxis for more than 20 years before departing in early 2023 to build up something new. His last game, the off-beat but extremely pleasing Marvel’s Midnight Suns, resonated with critics and vet gamers looking for a distinct take on tactical RPGs and the Marvel IP. However, it reportedly wasn’t the financial success 2K was hoping for, so a sequel isn’t on the cards.
“In Midnight Suns, you know, I made basically a superhero dating simulator… I spent way too much time designing that system and all the little things you could do there… So, I’d always been interested in that idea of exploring relationships.” Solomon comes across as equal parts proud of his extensive work on Midnight Suns and feeling partly responsible for it not finding as big of an audience as other Firaxis games.
“When I was working on XCOM, my favorite thing about it was the emergent player stories. XCOM had a narrative, but it’s very thin, right? It’s a very small narrative. And really what the player, the really attractive narrative is like, the player has created a soldier, they’ve taken them on missions, all these unpredictable things have happened, they’ve succeeded against long odds, or they didn’t, or they died, these really dramatic things happen, it felt like high stakes and unpredictable outcomes invested players in their characters,” he explains. Indeed, one of XCOM’s biggest attractions is how players develop and (try to) care for their soldiers, who can fall in battle and never come back. That level of high stakes translates into each grunt feeling more unique, especially as they level up and become more valuable.
“It’s way more interesting to me than a scripted story, even though I was involved in creating that scripted story. So… I just kind of had this idea, and this is what happened, this is why I left Firaxis, because I got infected with this idea of what if I made a game where emergent player stories are the game, like you cannot play a game without writing a story… Every decision you make will have an effect and you go ‘Oh, I’m writing my character story.’ Once I started thinking that way, there was no way to kind of walk it back because in my head I just got really excited about it.” Firaxis reportedly remains committed to XCOM but is currently working on the seventh Civilization entry. It’s hard to see the studio leaving the turn-based strategy/RPG arena, but several devs have followed Solomon into this new project.
Besides the unique premise of entire simulated towns you can tinker with and reshape as you please, The Sims has stayed healthy over the years due to its strong community of modders plus user-generated content’s impact on the most diehard of players’ experience. Of course, any sort of competitor or alternative would have to pay attention to that element, so I asked the creative director what their plans are for user-made content: “Having a connected community where people can share is essential to what we’re doing… The setting for our game is a small town… Even if we’re generating characters and we generate relationships between those characters, we want everybody to be connected somehow. What we want players to be able to do is create entirely new characters that they can add to their town or share with others. We know that there’s also a really big opportunity for fan fiction here.”
Solomon highlights the concept of ‘storylines’ and how they’re kind of the vertebrae of the game, at least at this stage. The Sims players typically like to make narratives out of thinner events that take place in their towns, but this as-yet-untitled life sim aims to turn all that into a tangible in-game system we can develop and follow:
“As you’re building a relationship with somebody, as your relationship with somebody else is falling apart, your work, all of these things generate what we call storylines, which are long-running narratives that you can navigate with your character… Every character in town should have multiple storylines they’re connected to. So the idea is that even those storylines are something you can share. And so you could give players and say ‘Hey, look, you can play in my town’… The game also has a creative mode. So I would say very much like Minecraft, where anytime when the player is playing, they can turn on a creative mode change whatever they want, and go back to the game… That is meant to allow players to create characters, stories, towns, and share them with others.”
All this talk about user-generated content and nurturing a creative community also begets the question of whether Midsummer plans to take the early access route, and Solomon isn’t afraid of answering that: “It feels like we should start in early access, build that community, build the tools that community needs.” It also sounds like the game won’t be brought to consoles until 1.0 is done and ready. The developer teases a potential pricing window too: “We plan to target that sort of mid-premium… Games are in a really interesting spot, not just the games industry, which is having a tough time, but games themselves, you’re starting to see this growth in the middle of, like the 40-dollar game as opposed to the 70-dollar game.”
With market conditions being pretty dire right now, despite the industry’s gigantic impact, and publishers and investors looking to reduce spending wherever possible, it’s funny to think that almost no one – Paradox is working on its own approach – has tried to grab a slice of The Sims’ cake. There’s a clear market opportunity there, so I asked Solomon whether that influenced its decision to commit to this vision, and it seems that realization only hit afterward: “I think that is the reason we got funding… When I said ‘I want to make a life sim,” because I was focused on this game, like story-as-game. That was before I considered the market opportunity… They told me: ‘We’ve been waiting for this pitch for years.’… A lot of developers almost forget that The Sims exist… Oddly, you have to remind them that a successful game exists.”
When it comes to simulators and players being empowered to tell their own stories by in-game tools and systems, I can’t help but think of 2005’s The Movies, a game from Lionhead Studios all about running a Hollywood film studio and creating films that could be exported and easily uploaded to YouTube and such.
Could we see such a massive level of in-game creation tools and connectivity from Midsummer’s title? Solomon certainly loves that classic and would like to capture some of that energy: “So I love Peter Molyneux. One of the first games I ever played was Populous… I always thought he had the coolest, coolest ideas… It used to be that you would just make a game about whatever. Sid Meier and I made a game about golf together… made games about the railroad, and yes, we made games about the Civil War… There wasn’t even a point of it, ‘cause if you’re designing strategy systems you can apply that to almost anything… And so guys like Peter Molyneux and Sid and Will Wright… they used to just jump around make games about whatever.”
After talking for a bit with childlike wonder about those classics and the minds behind them, he circles back to praise what The Movies did regarding creative tools: “It was so ahead of its time. You can still go YouTube and watch people’s movies. I think the biggest success when it comes to that game’s legacy was the fact it let you upload straight to YouTube.”
Personally, I was also curious about how hard (or easy) it was to sell his collaborators on the idea of going after The Sims and putting their twist on that tried-and-tested (but not heavily exploited by others) formula. He quickly gives me a positive answer and elaborates on his creative process and how the interactions with the relatively small team go: “I come back from walks and I go like: ‘Okay, I have a new idea.’ It doesn’t mean we’re going to do it… Everybody feels the opportunity to say yes, but, or well… The design gets out of my head and starts to live in the team’s head. The most dangerous thing is… even if there’s a team of a couple hundred, the only person who knows everything is one person… I had a great executive producer named Garth on Midnight Suns, and so he did his best to kind of like disseminate information, but I didn’t do a good job of like sharing with everybody… Most people here worked at Firaxis, and so it was a conversation.”
To wrap things up, we briefly discussed the state of the industry, some surprise hits, and releases that went from disappointing at launch to becoming remarkable in the long run: “All the edges are smooth… Most gamers now, we’ve all played a lot of extremely well-done games that you can tell were probably made by 500 people, and those are fine, they’re great, but the ones that really stick with you are the weird ones… If you stay smaller and you can make something at that smaller size, then success may look like ‘Hey, we built a community around this game and we can slowly grow it.’ I’m thinking of like, you know, Hello Games and No Man’s Sky… It fell off and then they just slowly built up a community around this game. ‘Cause they’re like ‘We’re just going to keep adding to it.’ It’s great to see that that succeeded for them.”
All in all, it seems to me that Jake Solomon and his team at Midsummer Studios have both the right ideas and the talent needed to turn them into a video game that thousands (if not millions) would want to play. While the process of marketing a new alternative to The Sims won’t be easy due to the ‘brand loyalty’ of its fans, I strongly believe that there’s also enough of a unique voice in there to entice newcomers to the genre. Moreover, Solomon is passionate about the medium as a whole and isn’t afraid of uncomfortable questions about where the industry is at right now. That’s hard to come by, so we’re quite hopeful about this enterprise.
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