Engineering Spore

The software engineers, artists, and others who work at Maxis, now owned by video game giant Electronic Arts, have migrated here because Wright is a legend. Over the past two decades, the 48-year-old Wright, who studied architecture and mechanical engineering at Louisiana Tech University has utterly transformed his industry with hits like SimCity, in which players build virtual towns, and the best-selling computer game franchise of all time, The Sims, in which players create virtual people and then watch them interact. In the process, Wright has helped forge a new, more toylike frontier in computer gaming, where the main goal is not so much to score points or kill bad guys but to create cool stuff.