Lee Wilson

Lee Wilson was born in 1970 and began playing computer games in 1980. His first computer game was a dungeon crawl (with about 3 rooms) on his TI/99 4A in 1981. Unable to get the game published (though his mom liked it...), he continued to work on his game programming skills.

Eventually, he went to college and got sucked into the regular computer industry where he worked for years at such jobs as Unix System Administrator, System Programmer, Database developer, and Software Engineer. Eventually, he remembered the real passion that got him started in programming was writing computer games and so he decided to learn this new-fangled 3D programming.

In 2005, he landed a job at Electronic Arts working on The Sims 2 (PS2, Gamecube, Xbox) where he worked on the Create-a-Sim portion of the game and gleefully cut the Sims into pieces in order to be rendered efficiently and able to change multiple layers of clothes.

After that, he worked on Sims 2 Pets for PS2/Gamecube where he gleefully cut the game engine apart so it could be more efficient and draw more Sims. Apparently, his glee and ability to cut up code has not gone unnoticed and he then became a Technical Director for yet another Sims project (Sims 2 Castaway - Wii/PS2) where he was allowed to do interesting things with the database and environment/weather code... as well as cut Sims into lots of pieces again (Create-a-Sim).

Deciding on a change of pace (and suffering a bit of “The Grass is Greener…” syndrome, he moved north and joined Stormfront Studios to help them ship what ended up being their final game – Spiderwick Chronicles. The grass wasn’t greener, though, and he decided to go back to EA because he just couldn’t stay away from those fun-to-cut-up Sims. 3 days after giving notice, Stormfront sadly shut its doors. The two facts are unrelated. Really.

Back at EA, he joined the Sims 3 team with gusto and worked hard on performance and optimization as well as path planning. After recovering from the monumental efforts the entire team put in to ship that game, he did a brief stint on the first EP: Sims 3: World Adventures (where he added bridges and helped with basement routing) and then got shanghai’d into being a Technical Director for the Sims 3 Wii, where he traveled (a LOT) to Montreal and helped Artificial Mind and Movement ship the Sims 3 for the Wii. And got sick and almost died, but that’s unrelated. Probably.

Now hard at work back at the EA mothership, Lee is still working on Sims – doing what he loves: Making Sims do “interesting” things.