Arright.. so.. I worked at maxis at the time simcopter and the early prototypes that would become The Sims, were being developed. I wrote a proof of concept function to render smooth shaded terrain.. and I also indirectly contributed another ideas.. at the time there was an app called SimBush that would make simulated George Bush speeches by cutting up audio samples and stringing sections together to make Bush speeches. I think it was Bush Sr. Everybody was super amused by that.. then another thing I mentioned that I had made for a space simulation was the idea of stringing together consonant-vowel pairs to make names for alien races that sounded believable. At the time there was a really smart programmer there doing the character and behavior sim for "dollhouse" aka what became the Sims.. and he ran with the idea and showed some prototypes with audio babble construction via similar mechanisms.. but using speech chopped into small consonant vowel pairs. I think this may have been the progenitor of what was eventually formalized into Simlish.
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