Boy 'Bimbos' Too Much for Game-Maker Maxis

The pre-Christmas shipment of SimCopter - an action game from the makers of SimCity 2000 - contains a hack by an in-house programmer who supplemented the game's cast of pulchritudinous female "Sims" with broad-shouldered male "Sims" in swimsuits. The manufacturer of SimCopter, Maxis Inc., discovered programmer Jacques Servin's provocative hack only after more than 50,000 copies of the game had been shipped. Servin was terminated last week. The game is being re-coded "as we speak," says Maxis spokesman Patrick Buechner.

SimCopter aims to amp SimCity 2000 up to another level, by allowing players to fly through complex 3-D landscapes on rescue missions. By extinguishing fires, quelling urban riots, and stopping street crimes in progress, players earn points that allow them to purchase faster and more efficient rescue helicopters. Landscapes can be imported from SimCity 2000, which is widely acknowledged as the defining classic in its genre of games combining cybernetics with real-time engagement.

"My job was to make the little people with a body and animation editor," says Servin. "The artist who used my editor to make the bodies ... was aggressively heterosexual, and made several 'bimbos,' which was my boss's term," recalls Servin, who is gay. "At a certain point I wondered, 'Bimbos - why not studs?'"

Servin stripped one of the male Sims, producing, in his words, "a muscleboy in swim trunks." He then altered the game code so that "should you encounter one of these youths, you must kiss him. He will kiss you back." The act of kissing a male Sim - as when kissing a female character - triggers loud smooching noises on the digital soundtrack.

Some players find many of SimCopter's sound effects - which are accompanied by perpetual, lambada-like gyrations of the Sims' torsos - annoying. "The moaning and cooing got on my nerves instantly," says Dave Grund, a flight-simulation enthusiast who has played computer games for 15 years. Grund, however, thinks SimCopter "would be a great game for kids, because there aren't a lot of games out there that don't ask you to kill people."

Servin claims that he coded the "muscle boys" to appear only "every few months" of play. But "unfortunately," says Servin, "my random-number generator didn't work as I'd planned," and the hunky Sims appear more often, especially in the final level of gameplay. The modified Sims, however, haven't been noticed by players since the game's 20 November release, not even by hard-core devotees like 12th-grader Matt Barbato, who maintains a SimCopter fan page - including an archive of performance-enhancing cheat codes - on the Web.

It was SimCity creator Will Wright himself, Servin says, who discovered the hack, which will churn out more Speedo-sporting youths at certain times of year, like Friday the 13th and Servin's birthday, 30 September. Then, Servin claims, "everywhere you look," you'll see "muscle studs kissing everything in sight, especially one another." Servin also used the animation editor to thicken the legs and arms of some of the female Sims "to try to make them into drag queens," he says, but admits that they still "weren't noticeably anything but hot chicks."

Maxis spokesman Buechner said Servin was fired solely "due to the insertion of unauthorized content." Servin says he's "actually delighted" to be unemployed, and stresses that he didn't intend to harm his former employers, who he describes as "very enlightened" about gay issues. He was, however, trying to make a point about how "heterosexual content is always implicit" in computer games.

"I've always wanted to be an activist," says Servin, "but activism is so moribund now. Do you think these heads of corporations are going to walk into an art gallery and say, 'Oh, wow - I was wrong'? Symbols are so much more powerful where you don't expect them."