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When Is A Game Not A Game?
Who would have thought that building roads and zoning land would be fun? From the cool reception the concept received from publishers in the mid 1980s, the answer is apparently "nobody." It must have been maddening to pitch a game like SimCity. Not many people think of urban planning as a potential recreational activity, and fewer still would leap at the idea of a game that cannot be won or lost, with no predetermined goals or high scores to shoot for. In fact, SimCity really wasn't a game at all. Because of its lack of actual goals, SimCity is often accurately described as a "software toy" -- which certainly makes it no less fun, but at the time made it a lot harder to put confidence in.

Lots of computer games had focused on fussy details, but SimCity was the first to make them fun.

The concept behind SimCity first came to designer Will Wright when he was working on a Commodore 64 helicopter game called Raid on Bungeling Bay. He found himself having a lot more fun creating islands with the game's editor than he did shooting them up afterward. After Raid he began working on this new project on his own. When he felt it was ready he set out to find a publisher, which turned out to be an exercise in futility. Undeterred, he began selling a C64 version of the game on his own. It wasn't until he co-founded Maxis with Jeff Braun that the game would see a PC and Mac version.

At first, even that wasn't enough. Like many truly innovative games, SimCity didn't sell a million copies overnight. Rather than moving quickly within the first six months of its initial release and then slowly petering out, its sales began slowly and gradually grew over the course of months and years as word of mouth spread. Eventually, it became the most celebrated game of the year and was even the subject of an article in Time. By the time its first actual sequel was released, four years later, it had sold millions.

You Shall Be As Gods
Central to the game's success was the oddball design philosophy that made it so hard to publish in the first place. The idea that a player can be given an assortment of toys with which to make their own fun was unheard of at the time; only recently have concepts like emergent gameplay and the sandbox world pioneered in SimCity begun to be widely embraced.

SimCity showed up everywhere, including a slightly gimmicky version for Nintendo's Super NES.

Just as important to SimCity's appeal was the kind of control it offered the player. It wasn't mere omnipotence that they were handed. They were given absolute control over a city, but not over the people themselves. The player was ostensibly God, but the people didn't have to obey.

Players could zone land for industrial, commercial, or residential use. They could build transportation systems and networks of utilities and adjust tax rates all to further their goal of... whatever they wanted, really. Outside of predetermined scenarios, players were free to try to accomplish whatever they desired, whether they wanted to achieve a certain bank balance, create a bigger population, or even walk the knife edge of chaos, keeping the populous perpetually at the edge of revolt. In addition to acquiring an understanding of urban planning and economics, the player needed to be prepared for disasters like earthquakes, riots, flooding, and (in one version of the game) Bowser. It was a setup that required a more subtle approach than direct manipulation, and a would-be mayor who was too heavy-handed might find himself thrown out on his ear by an his angry citizenry.

SimFranchise
After establishing itself with SimCity, Maxis went on to produce nearly a dozen Sim spinoffs, ranging from clever games like SimEarth and SimAnt, to excerable experiments in 3D like SimCopter, to the absolutely inescapable The Sims (which in turn spawned its own tree of sequels and spinoffs).

Want to see what you're missing? Check out SimCity Live, an online version of the original available for free from Maxis' site.

Of all of the game's progeny, it was 1993's SimCity 2000 that is still considered the definitive version of the game. It was the game that introduced the isometric view to the series, as well as giving the land elevation and allowing underground construction of water pipes and subway lines. New buildings including schools, hospitals, prisons, and stadiums were added, along with the ability to zone docks and airports.

After a disastrous flirtation with 3D most of the work on Sim City 3000 was scrapped and it ended up becoming little more than a graphical upgrade to SimCity 2000. The game was mostly unchanged until the release of SimCity 4 in 2003, when the series finally made the mostly unnecessary plunge into 3D. SimCity 4's most remarkable addition was the inclusion of trading between cities, allowing several different settlements within a region to become dependent upon each other. Other features included the ability to import characters from The Sims to live in a player's cities, as well as giving players a chance to drive around the streets of their own creations. (Though this had been possible in 1997's Streets of SimCity, horrible graphics and sloppy controls made it an experience best left forgotten.)

It's fun to wonder if, without our 20/20 hindsight, a game as innovative as SimCity could make it today. Long gone are the days when commercial games were typically made by a lone designer/programmer, and as production costs of games rise it only becomes less likely that such an unmarketable concept would ever even see realization. On the other hand, computers have become exponentially more accessible since then, and self publishing over the Internet is possible for almost anyone. Wright's latest project, the recently-revealed Spore, could well become the most epic game ever created despite being the work of a small team of coders. Maybe it just means that now, as ever, the most likely place to find innovation isn't in a large production studio, but with a lone visionaries who are more concerned with fun than marketability.

[ Article by Scott Sharkey | March 17, 2005 ]