Earth: A Primer is like a geology textbook for the Diamond Age: an iPad app in the style of Neil Ardley and David Macaulay's The Way Things Work that explains and simulates the ways in which lava, wind, temperature, and water shape our planet. It even has a built-in simulator that lets a reader play god, channelling millennia worth of unfathomable geological forces through their fingertips as they carve out canyons, grow volcanos, smash continents together, and more.
Designed by programmer Chaim Gingold, is so effortlessly beautiful that as I messed around with it, I thought it was bound to show up in an official Apple ad one day or another. That's how perfectly it realizes the promise of a truly interactive textbook. Yet Earth: A Primer did not start as a book at all. It started as a galaxy-spanning game—someone else'sgalaxy-spanning game.
The path to Earth: A Primer begins with Will Wright, a legendary game designer responsible for EA's classic SimCity games. Wright, hot off of his creations of the first Sims game, was looking for a new idea for a game in 2002. After watching Charles and Ray Eames's classic short film, Powers of 10, Wright had an epiphany: what if you modeled life in a video game the same way, simulating single-celled organisms in the primordial ooze and then expanding the scale, layer by layer, until you were modeling an entire galactic civilization?
