From SimCity to, well, SimCity: The history of city-building games

tktktktk

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[Hinton]

Cervus[/url]":hrutq7g4]I'd like a city building game that also has tech advancement. Start in perhaps the 17th century, then move forward. Incorporate new tech as invented, include difficult transitions. What happens when horses and cars share the road? That sort of thing.

I don't think that would be a huge problem in my city of Amishville.

 

[drumhellar916]

Oh, man! I still have my Sim Isle disc, still in the box. Time to see if it still works.

It was a bit hard for me when I was trying to play it 20 years ago, but lets see how well I do now...

Also, no mention of Sim Tower? It isn't quite a city builder like those mentioned, but I think building a sky scraper has at least enough of a tangential connection to Sim City that it's worth at least a mention.

 

[potato44819]

To be honest, the most fun part of SC2k wasn't the game, but being able to drive through my cities in The Streets of SimCity game. That and SimCopter were IMO major portions of the Sim landscape that were unfortunately forgotten with the march of time.

 

[DNSGeek]

bthylafh[/url]":3cdzaep8]

DNSGeek[/url]":3cdzaep8]Back in the year 2000 I got permission from George Blank to take his Santa Paravia source code from the Apple ][ (I don't even remember how I got it at this point), convert it into C and release it as OSS.

I'm pretty sure I still have the C code somewhere. It's still text based, but it's playable on any modern *nix system. If anyone wants a copy, let me know.

Why don't you post it on Github?

Ok, I dug around and found it. Here you go.

https://github.com/DNSGeek/Random-Stuff

 

[DNSGeek]

drumhellar916[/url]":1w2pjda5]Oh, man! I still have my Sim Isle disc, still in the box. Time to see if it still works.

It was a bit hard for me when I was trying to play it 20 years ago, but lets see how well I do now...

Also, no mention of Sim Tower? It isn't quite a city builder like those mentioned, but I think building a sky scraper has at least enough of a tangential connection to Sim City that it's worth at least a mention.

Man, I loved playing SimTower. Wish I could find it somewhere.

 

[mike3775]

Modern Major General Thanatos[/url]":3i3voa7n]To be honest, the most fun part of SC2k wasn't the game, but being able to drive through my cities in The Streets of SimCity game. That and SimCopter were IMO major portions of the Sim landscape that were unfortunately forgotten with the march of time.

How correct you are, I actually forgot about those two. I remember spending hours building a city, than driving through it to see how badly I did with the city design

 

[MatthewSleeman]

WHy no mention of Monte Cristo's Medieval Lords?

 

[Carewolf]

Static and Noise[/url]":3izjy8sg]SimCity was released in 1989. It had scenarios. One of those scenarios deals with global warming, as a simple fact. Not controversial at all.

Not sure what my point is, other than, 1) SimCity rocked and, 2) I think humanity is moving backwards.

In the Maxis game from the year after 1990 SimEarth, global warming was central theme, or at least one of several disasters that could happen either because you messed around too much or because you managed to get intelligent life that messed the Earth up. Though you could set a lower difficulty where the Earth was unrealistically balanced and didn't easily overheat. If you managed to get humanity to not kill themselves with global warming, they would sooner or later kill themselves off with a nuclear war instead.

 

[svgpithon]

As somebody who got SimCity well over a year after it was released, I'm pretty happy with how I spent that $20. The cities need to be connected within a region to form a metropolis, the road tools are needlessly complicated in their path modeling, and the actual Sims are a complete joke, but it's great as a sort of background game; something light I can occasionally interact with and watch while I focus on something else.

 

[Achronous]

I spent countless hours playing Outpost as a kid. I snuck in playing sessions while my relatives visited from other cities, and wondering where I was. I also spend hours trying to unlock the monorails mentioned in the manual, until I realised that the game was missing that feature
I'm still hoping for a re-release or a remake!

 

[nash076]

Missing from the list but very deserving of mention: indie-designed Rimworld.

Rimworld is part city builder, part survival, part puzzle and part combat; set on a remote planet, survivors from a space crash work to build a colony and ultimately escape ... or not, and just continue building, developing and defending their new home.

It's a close relative to Prison Architect in some ways, but it's very much its own beast. Even still in alpha, the game is (in terms of base objectives and functionality) essentially complete, and as simple as it is complex. Power generation, colonist mood, environment quality, farming, skills, resources, hunting, siege resistance, layout planning and optimization ... it's insanely detailed and engrossing. And that's even before the mods!

It derives its influences more from Settlers, Caesar and Dwarf Fortress than from SimCity, but the DNA of city building is an essential part of it. A worthy (and relatively inexpensive) descendant.

http://rimworldgame.com/

 

[CppThis]

Glad to see Outpost made the list, it was one of the most innovative things in the genre but often gets forgotten since it's not part of a big brand franchise and was, as you noted, rather unfinished. The sequel was pretty decent too, albeit a very different sort of game and a good example of a fantastic core system undermined by lack of content.

I eagerly await Cities: Skylines coming to a no-DRM vendor in the future, it sounds like my kind of game. In the meantime SC4 holds up amazingly well.

 

[CppThis]

nash076[/url]":342cd6tc]Missing from the list but very deserving of mention: indie-designed Rimworld.

Rimworld is part city builder, part survival, part puzzle and part combat; set on a remote planet, survivors from a space crash work to build a colony and ultimately escape ... or not, and just continue building, developing and defending their new home.

It's a close relative to Prison Architect in some ways, but it's very much its own beast. Even still in alpha, the game is (in terms of base objectives and functionality) essentially complete, and as simple as it is complex. Power generation, colonist mood, environment quality, farming, skills, resources, hunting, siege resistance, layout planning and optimization ... it's insanely detailed and engrossing. And that's even before the mods!

It derives its influences more from Settlers, Caesar and Dwarf Fortress than from SimCity, but the DNA of city building is an essential part of it. A worthy (and relatively inexpensive) descendant.

http://rimworldgame.com/

Ohhh, good find! I'm definitely going to check that out, it sounds like the Outpost 3 I dreamed of making as a wee lad.

 

[Bhairitu]

MrHasselblad[/url]":3eckvn3s]
Also for those that still aren't quite aware... The Sim City 2000 Oakland map with fire (as also pointed out by the signs) were Will Wrights place, and all. Was it saved from the real fire?

No, in fact his house was only a block or two away from where it began.

 

[Akemi]

JimmiG[/url]":3plnapr1]

arobert3434[/url]":3plnapr1]After reading this I looked to see if there were any SimCity games on the iPad, but all I found was one of these gold-digging in-app purchase addiction traps where you can spend up to $99 a pop to buy in-game credits. Ugh! These things should be illegal.

There was actually a proper version of SimCity for iOS, (based on SimCity 2000 I believe), but after EA released the SimCity BuildIt Wait-To-Play game, they pulled it from the store :-(

God, I hate that mechanic. It's always followed by - want to build right now, just pay us $XX real dollars!

Shame really that I used to see the Maxis logo on a software box and knew instantly that I'd love the game regardless of whether it was a simulation or strategy title. I mean, who knew a game called Sim Ant could be so much fun?

Now, the last two games I've played of theirs, games I was hyped to no end to play, were just really mediocre and halfhearted releases. Those being Spore and the last SimCity. Spore promised the world, to integrate multiple game types and deliver untold hours of content and depth. Well, it definitely had multiple types of genres in the title, but absolutely no depth to any of them. And SimCity 2013 was so broken out of the gate that it took me several weeks to even find out how shallow and limited in scope it was even when compared to the original SimCity, much less SimCity 2K, 3K, or 4. At least we got Cities Skylines to hopefully remind EA/Maxis what we SimCity fans actually wanted (let's hope they listen and learn instead of just killing off SimCity due to the last games poor reception).

 

[colin1497]

Good times on the Apple ][+ that I had forgotten. Thank you. Sim City and sequels I remember well, but the really old stuff was way back in a dusty corner of my mind.

 

[Deleted member 1]

Children of the Nile deserved more than a passing mention. It's one of the few citybuilders that tries to run an actual economy, where people in the game are growing or making actual goods, that get sold for bread, which can be eaten or spent on shops & servants. You know where each brick or stone block comes from, in your city. You know who built them and how much you paid for them. You can trace their family history as they grew from farmers to shopkeepers, to specialty craftsman who children are being educated to become scribes and nobles, until - oops! Bread shortage! Pharaoh spent too much upgrading his palace and now can't afford to pay his scribes! Busted back down to servants!

It's got a slow pace and it's maybe not for everyone, but imo, it's the best game on the list. The one thing that bothers me about Windows 8 is that I can't get COTN to stop crashing any more.

Oh, and Emperor deserves a nod, too.

 

[bb-15]

brionl[/url]":3qn3g5u6]The more money cheat code for The Sims (1) was Klapaucius. I had to look that up every time I used it.

Anyway, back in '89 I had a Mac SE/30. I went out one weekend morning and donated blood and they told me all the standard stuff, "Drink liquids, eat a light meal, blah, blah..." Then I went over to the Apple store in the same mall and bought this new game Sim City that looked interesting. I went home, installed it and figured I'd play a little bit, then eat lunch. A while later, I noticed my room was getting dark and I was feeling a little woozy. I looked outside and the sun was going down. I'd sat there for 8 or 9 hours, without drinking or eating or even having to get up to go to the bathroom.

This article (very good BTW) brought up those kinds of memories for me.
- In 89 I got Sim City and often would play it until sunrise (on my Mac Plus).
(I can still hear the helicopter pilot talking about traffic.)

I got Sim City 2K when it came out and I repeated my obsession with it.
I kept trying to keep the airliners from crashing into my mega sky scrapers. I put the buildings in a valley and the airport high on a cliff. It didn't matter.

I played Sim City 3K and it was OK.
I got excited again when Sim City (2K) was released for the iPad and played that for years.
Now the game is gone and EA came out with some strange crippled version.
I tried it for an afternoon and deleted it.

Overall though, good memories.

 

[NelaK]

JimmiG[/url]":11b63vpw]

NelaK[/url]":11b63vpw]There are also tons of things that the game desperately needs. Mods are fine, but first party support for various things is important (autosave, auto bulldozer, etc).

Auto-Save was added in one of the patches quite a while ago. Auto-bulldoze is more of a cheat than a feature. If you don't bulldoze abandoned/burnt down buildings, they lower the land value around them, which might cause a chain reaction of problems. This never happens with auto-bulldoze. Also if abandoned buildings just auto-bulldoze, you wouldn't be able to open the info panel and find out why they got abandoned in the first place.

CO have been very open about the fact that the base game is not "finished" and is just the bare essentials. That's also why the game costs $27.99 and not $80 like the Deluxe edition of SimCity 5 did at launch.

While I agree that auto bulldoze does remove a game mechanic... I also feel that the game mechanic adds too much micromanagement to a game about macro management.

Maybe a compromise? Add a policy that deals with abandoned buildings but in exchange has some sort of penalty? Maybe something like the city taking over keeping the building's basic maintenance so having abandoned buildings costs you money but doesn't reduce land values...

Or as a much more drastic approach... allow unhappy resident be able to take some other action against the mayor rather than just packing up and leaving. Maybe they can sue the city if the situation gets too bad...

I don't know if those are good ideas but I do know that they need to rethink the mechanic especially if they intend to fix the game balance.

 

[DOOManiac]

So many fantastic comments here that I have nothing to add, so I'll just say:

Great article!

 

[jdsmith575]

Afterlife condemned itself to oblivion by failing at every turn to execute on its clever concept.

That's a great description. I thought it was a really cool game, but could never figure out how to succeed.

Did anyone else play SimCity 3000 on a Mac? It was terribly unstable for me, and was a huge letdown after SimCity 2000.

 

[ardent]

Cities: Skylines is such a great game. There's obvious ways forward for improving it ("states," for example, where your friends team up to compete against other states for resources) but on the whole it's entirely satisfying as is.

 

[ETbyrne]

Static and Noise[/url]":3ktew28o]SimCity was released in 1989. It had scenarios. One of those scenarios deals with global warming, as a simple fact. Not controversial at all.

Not sure what my point is, other than, 1) SimCity rocked and, 2) I think humanity is moving backwards.

Civilization II also had climate change, which would be triggered by using a bunch of nukes.

 

[Cy_Starkman]

MeghanAJH[/url]":2licpkke]Children of the Nile deserved more than a passing mention. It's one of the few citybuilders that tries to run an actual economy, where people in the game are growing or making actual goods, that get sold for bread, which can be eaten or spent on shops & servants. You know where each brick or stone block comes from, in your city. You know who built them and how much you paid for them. You can trace their family history as they grew from farmers to shopkeepers, to specialty craftsman who children are being educated to become scribes and nobles, until - oops! Bread shortage! Pharaoh spent too much upgrading his palace and now can't afford to pay his scribes! Busted back down to servants!

Sounds like Pharaoh the other game that got a brief mention in the article which I really enjoyed, it had that kind of detail of things being made.

Edit: Oh I see, Children of the Nile was the sequel to Pharaoh.

 

[shevaberg]

SiberX[/url]":1lzbwk6m]Great article, I really enjoyed it - there's a lot of nice detail here about how the various city building franchises differ and have evolved over time.

I appreciated the reference to Outpost; this was a game I loved years ago despite the fact that it was fatally broken, and it's a real shame that it never got finished because it had some really great ideas. You're not exaggerating when you're calling it bug-filled by the way; in its released form, the game was literally unplayable/unbeatable on anything except the easiest difficulty. Harder difficulties used a "trucking" system for moving raw materials from your mines back to your colony, and this system was broken/nonfunctional/not-implemented in the retail release. If you played on anything higher than easy (where trucking was "automated") you would simply never get any resources into your colony and it would eventually inevitably collapse.

A patch was released later that fixed the above bug (barely) and some of the more frequent crashes, but the game still lacked many of the features described in the manual included in the box (monorails simply didn't exist, for example) and it ultimately doomed what was otherwise a pretty deep colonization simulator.

Your mention of Hamurabi also reminded me of an ancient Palm Pilot game I played hours of called Empire. It had similar text/menu based mechanics for feeding your populace and managing land, and is almost certainly a derivative of some sort. It also included multiple countries you fought against, and I distinctly remember that the AI-controlled countries weren't subject to petty things like actually feeding their populace, so you could get into ugly situations where you overrun a country with 10,000 citizens and 3 acres of land.
Most of those citizens now became your citizens, and good luck feeding them with twice the populace per arable acre. Games like these were not city-builders in the SimCity sense, but certainly provided a historical precursor and included some of their systems and resource management elements. I'm glad you included a reference to these, even if they don't truly fit under the city simulation umbrella.

I loved the idea of outpost and the graphics were oh so good... bit yeah you were playing it and all of a sudden colony dead or just wtf do I now... outpost could have been a franchise but they messed it beyond fun at. ... same with freelancer...

 

[foetusinc]

Carewolf[/url]":1wa489s3]

Static and Noise[/url]":1wa489s3]SimCity was released in 1989. It had scenarios. One of those scenarios deals with global warming, as a simple fact. Not controversial at all.

Not sure what my point is, other than, 1) SimCity rocked and, 2) I think humanity is moving backwards.

In the Maxis game from the year after 1990 SimEarth, global warming was central theme, or at least one of several disasters that could happen either because you messed around too much or because you managed to get intelligent life that messed the Earth up. Though you could set a lower difficulty where the Earth was unrealistically balanced and didn't easily overheat. If you managed to get humanity to not kill themselves with global warming, they would sooner or later kill themselves off with a nuclear war instead.

Which would result in roving bands of feral robots, which if you were very careful, could be nurtured into a sentient machine race. As all enthusiastic players understood, this was the true end goal of the entire game.

I eagerly await SimEarth 2: Fear of a Bot Planet.

 

[Balderstrom]

MeghanAJH[/url]":2gkza14i]Children of the Nile deserved more than a passing mention. It's one of the few citybuilders that tries to run an actual economy, where people in the game are growing or making actual goods, that get sold for bread, which can be eaten or spent on shops & servants. You know where each brick or stone block comes from, in your city. You know who built them and how much you paid for them. You can trace their family history as they grew from farmers to shopkeepers, to specialty craftsman who children are being educated to become scribes and nobles, until - oops! Bread shortage! Pharaoh spent too much upgrading his palace and now can't afford to pay his scribes! Busted back down to servants!

It's got a slow pace and it's maybe not for everyone, but imo, it's the best game on the list. The one thing that bothers me about Windows 8 is that I can't get COTN to stop crashing any more.

Oh, and Emperor deserves a nod, too.

Give this a go, (if you haven't already)
<Right Click> on the [Start] button, <Click> on System, then on the left side panel of the explorer window, "Advanced System Settings". A new dialog opens, and in the first block "Performance", <click> on [Settings], and on the third tab [Data Execution Prevention] - <click> on [Add...] near the bottom of the dialog, browse to the COTN .exe and add it as an exclusion to DEP.

 

[Ape_Man]

Great article and so many great comments taking me down memory lane.

I was hoping that the game that started it all for me would have been mentioned mentioned by now. Fortune Builder on the ColecoVision. I spent so many hours as a 9 year old in that game.

It even had split screen 2 player mode.

Off now to find my Coleco emulator files.

 

[Decade]

SiberX[/url]":31dvd0wf]I appreciated the reference to Outpost; this was a game I loved years ago despite the fact that it was fatally broken, and it's a real shame that it never got finished because it had some really great ideas. You're not exaggerating when you're calling it bug-filled by the way; in its released form, the game was literally unplayable/unbeatable on anything except the easiest difficulty.

Ooh, yes, I remember that game. I spent so many hours trying to unlock the AI colony managers, and the monorails, and the geothermal power generators, and the additional colony landers, and the terraforming; and the resource trucking system never worked as I expected. It made so much sense when I later read that all of that was non-functional.

I especially liked the feature where students would work only when all the adults were gone. Sometimes all the adults would die or defect, leaving only students and babies. If my colony went into that state, whenever any student grew into adulthood, work in the colony would halt. I would be forced to send the adults to the rebel colony to die of starvation, to inspire the remaining students to go back to work.

It was also funny when all the working population would die, leaving the babies. Then, I would get regular reports from the assistant AI, “The people hate you.” Yeah, too bad for the hundreds of babies who hate me, but nobody is alive to work on the farm.

That game had a fun premise. I would like to see a functional version.

 

[A&amp;K]

The fact that EA still sells SC4 for 10$ in the origin store is a testament to it's longevity (or their greed). The depth, complexity and the frustratingly steep learning curve for using some of the advanced mods made it a hugely rewarding experience. I expected Simcity 2013 to alleviate those problems and support the fan community, and boy was I wrong.

Very tempted to buy Cities: Skylines, if not just to get me over until Fallout 4 comes out so I can lock myself in my studio for the coming winter. Thanks for the article, brought back tons of memories from playing Settlers and the older Sim titles.

 

[mrochester]

Why does the article abruptly end after mentioning Tropico 5? There doesn't appear to be any mention of Sim City 4 or Sim City (the newer one).

 

[ChrisSD]

mrochester[/url]":31lmuyb8]Why does the article abruptly end after mentioning Tropico 5? There doesn't appear to be any mention of Sim City 4 or Sim City (the newer one).

Try page 3

 

[leonwid]

CppThis[/url]":mb73m8h0]Glad to see Outpost made the list, it was one of the most innovative things in the genre but often gets forgotten since it's not part of a big brand franchise and was, as you noted, rather unfinished. The sequel was pretty decent too, albeit a very different sort of game and a good example of a fantastic core system undermined by lack of content.

I eagerly await Cities: Skylines coming to a no-DRM vendor in the future, it sounds like my kind of game. In the meantime SC4 holds up amazingly well.

I'm personally waiting for Planetbase, which will be released this week. It's a base building game in space, and seems to be a mixture of resource management, disaster management and the occasional anguished cry when your management skills turn out to be less than stellar.

And no, I'm not associated with the publisher, just looking forward to the game.

 

[JimmiG]

A&K[/url]":e72smgxi]The fact that EA still sells SC4 for 10$ in the origin store is a testament to it's longevity (or their greed). The depth, complexity and the frustratingly steep learning curve for using some of the advanced mods made it a hugely rewarding experience. I expected Simcity 2013 to alleviate those problems and support the fan community, and boy was I wrong.

Very tempted to buy Cities: Skylines, if not just to get me over until Fallout 4 comes out so I can lock myself in my studio for the coming winter. Thanks for the article, brought back tons of memories from playing Settlers and the older Sim titles.

It wouldn't have been hard for Maxis/EA to make the game fans wanted and make everyone happy. Fans were very clear about what they wanted. Unfortunately that didn't fit with their "vision", so we got SC2013 instead.

Too bad you missed the weekend sale of Cities Skylines. Still it's very cheap at the regular price. The added day/night cycle in 1.2 goes a long way toward making the cities feel as dynamic and alive as SC2013. The paid DLC content adds even more but it's not essential. If you aren't a hardcore fan you might wait until it drops to $9.99.

 

[tedbundy]

The author left out Fortune Builder for the Colecovision, which came out in 1984 and was more of a precusor to SimCity than anything that came before it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXHYTcXApBo

 

[Balrog]

Another vote for the Skylines is what I wanted from Simcity 2013. I haven't bought an EA game since I bought 3 copies of SC2013 so me, a close friend and my wife could play together.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Anno is a very different sort of city building game. Whereas Sim City has always left RCI to build on its own, anno is sort of an absolute power simulator where every piece of the city works with other pieces like a huge clock.

 

[Demento]

So what were the peak versions of our favourite series?

SimCity undoubtedly peaked at 4 (+Rush Hour)
I think Caesar 3 was the best iteration of that game.
Tropico 4 was quite good, 5 not-so-much
Settlers definitely started to go downhill quite severely at some point, but there's so many of them it's hard to say where...

 

[pehash]

arobert3434[/url]":362opkwz]After reading this I looked to see if there were any SimCity games on the iPad, but all I found was one of these gold-digging in-app purchase addiction traps where you can spend up to $99 a pop to buy in-game credits. Ugh! These things should be illegal.

Take it as an opportunity... a void to be filled...

 

[Larsz]

JimmiG[/url]":1gjrj6b6]

NelaK[/url]":1gjrj6b6]There are also tons of things that the game desperately needs. Mods are fine, but first party support for various things is important (autosave, auto bulldozer, etc).

Auto-Save was added in one of the patches quite a while ago. Auto-bulldoze is more of a cheat than a feature. If you don't bulldoze abandoned/burnt down buildings, they lower the land value around them, which might cause a chain reaction of problems. This never happens with auto-bulldoze. Also if abandoned buildings just auto-bulldoze, you wouldn't be able to open the info panel and find out why they got abandoned in the first place.

CO have been very open about the fact that the base game is not "finished" and is just the bare essentials. That's also why the game costs $27.99 and not $80 like the Deluxe edition of SimCity 5 did at launch.

CO has been very open that they do not have any plans to enhance or improve the simulation. They do not have the resources to test.

Skylines simulation is a lot of smoke and mirrors angled at expected play. If you step out of the expected play, it falls apart. Sure workers are agents but it doesn't matter if they actually get to work, they still get a pay check even if there is no road connecting them to work. The industry they supposedly work at doesn't need workers to produce goods. Happiness is completely based on service existence, not service performance. The relationship between education and industry is broken once you provide your first educational service (and it doesn't actually matter if students make it to school). The traffic simulation is the best out of any city builders but it is a simulation without time or place parameters. The result is an unlifelike distributed network of traffic. If anything, the simulation is a step back from SimCity 4 and certainly not deserving of being called an agent simulation.

Skylines excels at what the majority of city builder players want, it is pretty and it knocked player created content out of the park. CO is doing an awesome job of supporting those aspects with free and paid additional content. The game is beautiful. It has never been easier to share mods and custom content. I can lose hours in the map editor tweaking and sculpting the land for my cities. And then spend more hours following my train through the city through a first person camera mod. Skylines does not scratch the mayoral, successfully running a city simulation itch. The simulation serves the pretty and the workshop.