Don Hopkins: Micropolis Developer

🐧💻🖱️🍕 Learn about the developer who worked on The Sims, ported SimCity, and developed Micropolis.

Don Hopkins is a user-interface designer and programmer specializing in human-computer interaction, simulation, and tools that empower other people to create. He ported and open-sourced SimCity, built the pie-menu and architectural editing interfaces for The Sims, and develops Micropolis. The deep, full-resolution version of this story lives at donhopkins.com.

What he's known for

  • Pie menus — directional (radial) menus, from the CHI'88 study at the University of Maryland HCIL (with John Callahan, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman) through implementations in NeWS, X11, The Sims, OLPC, the web, and Unity.
  • SimCity on Unix — ports to NeWS/HyperLook and X11/TCL/Tk, plus a cooperative multiplayer version (SimCityNet).
  • The Sims (Maxis, 1997–2000) — the pie-menu interface, architectural editing tools, internal tools (Edith/SimAntics, the 3ds Max pipeline), advocacy for inclusive relationships, and the user-creation tools (SimShow, Transmogrifier, RugOMatic) that launched its modding community.
  • Micropolis — worked with EA and the OLPC project to open-source SimCity under the GPL (2008), and is porting it to the web with WebAssembly and SvelteKit.
  • HyperTIES — the NeWS/PostScript hypermedia browser and its Emacs authoring tool, with embedded interactive applets and link-definition previews (late 1980s).
  • Other work: the PSIBER Space Deck and PizzaTool on NeWS, UnityJS, Pantomime, the "X-Windows Disaster" chapter of the UNIX-HATERS Handbook, and long-running open-source and constructionist-education advocacy.

Connections

Don's work threads through much of this About section: the pie menus and direct manipulation he shares with Ben Shneiderman, the simulation-design philosophy of Will Wright and The Sims, the reverse-engineering of Chaim Gingold, the one-page design discipline of Stone Librande, and the constructionist-education lineage that makes simulations worth building.

Learn more

The canonical, full-resolution account — projects, history, writing, and demos — lives at donhopkins.com.