Inducted: 2024
Simulations are some of the oldest forms of video games, but few have had the popularity, influence, or staying power of SimCity.
The germ of the idea for SimCity came from designer Will Wright’s earlier work on the game Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984), in which he found playing with the map editor he made as much fun as playing the game itself. Fueled by an interest he developed in the ways cities grow and evolve—and the impact city planning has on that—Wright set out to create a game (though he often used the term “toy”) that let players share in his discoveries about urban development.
The premise is simple. Players must try and build a city and respond to its ever-changing problems and needs, which themselves change depending on the player’s decisions. There was no clear goal. As Wright himself noted, “Instead of telling the player how to win or lose, we left it up to the player to decide what the desirable outcome was.”
Several factors made the game so successful. For one, it was intuitive and easy to learn. With a couple of clicks, players were laying down roads and constructing buildings. The computer did the rest, spooling out the consequences as populations surged or cities crumbled from overcrowding or bad transportation. The programming and algorithmic designs were brilliant—in part because Wright based them on intensive reading in books on urban functioning and system dynamics such as Jay W. Forrester’s 1969 text Urban Dynamics—but they were always operating beneath the surface, driven by an algorithmic structure that harkened back to cellular automata-based programs like John Conway’s Game of Life, in which each individual unit has an effect on the others to which it is connected. The game’s open-endedness fitted it to a variety of player goals. And the cheeky humor, such as the marauding giant Gila monster that wreaked destruction, kept the content fresh.
Of course, the God-like perspective of the player meant that the consequences for the imagined people who might have lived in the game are never considered, thus sidestepping issues like racial discrimination that have long plagued city development and planning. Today we are reckoning with the legacy of decisions made by politicians and bureaucrats like Robert Moses who bulldozed neighborhoods (usually the poorest and least white) to create new highways and parks. In SimCity, no one cries when their home is torn down; it’s all numbers and abstractions.
And yet the game’s distance from the dust and dirt, tears and fears of real life accounted for part of its appeal. It was a chance for older kids and grown-ups to play, as they might have built block cities as children. Wright himself likened it to creating a model train layout. The game was instantly popular and recognized as a masterpiece. Developed by Maxis (co-founded by Wright and Jeff Braun) and distributed by Brøderbund, it earned game of the year honors from Computer Gaming World in 1989. The game was also instrumental in expanding the audience for video games. At a time when many people thought of video games in terms of arcade shooters or console platformers, SimCity appealed to older players who wanted intellectually stimulating fun on their newly bought personal computers. First the New York Times and then Newsweek ran stories on it; the magazine headline calling it, “Big fun in a small town.”
The game sold millions of copies as a personal computer game (in 1991 it was still the best-selling computer game of the year) and then as a port to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super Famicom in Japan, where it was also very popular). A series of sequels followed, including SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 4, with millions of additional sales.
It also had incredible influence on the course of video game development. In addition to the direct SimCity sequels, Maxis released other Sim games, including SimAnt, SimEarth, and (most successfully) The Sims. Other companies have made innumerable city simulation games as well, such as Cities: Skyscrapers. All descend in large measure from SimCity. The non-stop nature of SimCity also influenced the development of real-time strategy games such as Command and Conquer and Age of Empires in the 1990s. In short, SimCity proved that when the play was right, almost any subject could be a fit subject for a game.
Did You Know?
According to March 2019 Los Angeles Times story, SimCity inspired a generation of real-life city planners who grew up playing the game.