Will Wright Is Not A College Graduate - Just Like Me!

There is a nice big profile of Will Wright in this week's New Yorker which, true to the style of the magazine, is also a brief history of video games and a peek at the industry at large.

Also contained in the article is this little piece of trivia:

In the spring of 1981, Wright answered an ad in a car magazine: Richard Doherty, a rally enthusiast, was looking participants to compete in a point-to-point race between Farmingdale, Long Island, and Redondo Beach, California. Wright had a Mazda RX-7, which he and Doherty modified with a larger fuel tank and a roll cage. They wore night-vision goggles so that they could drive fast in the dark without headlights and avoid the cops. “Will said we should take the southern route, even though it was longer, because if we got stopped he’d be able to talk to the cops,” Doherty told me. “We did get stopped in Georgia. We were doing a hundred and twenty, with no headlights, but it didn’t take Will more than a couple of minutes to make the officer see why he had to let us go without a ticket.” They won the race, establishing a new record of thirty-four hours and nine minutes.

... I cut and pasted that from their online version of the article, though I had a hard time finding it because the print version of the article says "In the summer of 1980..." versus the online version's claim that it happened "In the spring of 1981..." (I was searching for "summer".)

Anyway, you can read the whole damn thing without paying for it, but I suspect it'll be gone next week when the new issue comes out, so step to it.