SimEarth: The Living Planet, as a sandbox game based on a planet's biosphere, was adapted from the Gaia hypothesis created by English scientist James Lovelock, which suggests that the development of life influences a planet's environment to create a self-regulating system. This context was directly addressed in the game's various manuals, with several PC version manuals containing a 50-page long outline on the study of Earth science and a detailed explanation of the hypothesis. By comparison, the SNES and TurboGrafx-CD version manuals only dedicated one or two pages to explaining it. Some examples in this explanation were provided by Lovelock, as he gave advice throughout the game's development and particularly helped with geophysical modelling. He claimed that the scope of the game went beyond professional climate models of the time that focused on studying the atmosphere, taking into account clouds, the ocean, and biology of the Earth.