SimCity

SimCity is an open-ended city-building video game and franchise designed by Will Wright and first published by Maxis in 1989, in which the player acts as part mayor and part urban planner to build and manage a simulated city without a conventional win-or-lose objective.¹¹⁸¹² The series ran for more than two decades across numerous sequels and spin-offs, and is widely credited with founding the modern city-building genre.¹¹¹⁰

The game originated by accident while Wright was developing his first commercial title, Raid on Bungeling Bay, a helicopter shoot-‘em-up released for the Commodore 64 in 1984 and published by Brøderbund.¹¹¹⁵ Wright found that designing the city maps the player flew over was more enjoyable than controlling the helicopter, and began expanding his world-building tools into a standalone experiment.¹¹¹⁹ He combined this city-building tool with his love of system dynamics, treating the result less as a game than as a virtual sandbox for simulating economics and population growth.¹⁵ The strong Japanese sales of the Raid on Bungeling Bay conversion for Nintendo’s Famicom — roughly 750,000 copies versus about 30,000 on U.S. home computers — gave Wright the financial freedom to spend several years developing the new game.¹⁵ The original was written for the Commodore 64, and Wright began attaching graphics to the abstract prototype after about six months of work.¹⁵

Wright drew on urban planning and computer-modeling theories, drawing especially from the work of MIT professor Jay Forrester on system dynamics.¹¹⁶ About three years before the game’s release Wright had “began reading about cities and became totally fascinated,” and Braun enlisted around twenty programmers to work on the project, with the pair describing themselves as “garage city planners”.⁸ The simulation also took inspiration from Stanisław Lem’s story “The Seventh Sally,” in which a banished tyrant is given control of a simulated city, collected in The Mind’s I edited by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett.⁸ Brøderbund licensed the title — then called Micropolis — but repeatedly pressed Wright to add a win-or-lose condition and ultimately declined to publish it.¹¹¹⁵

Antecedents

SimCity grew out of a lineage of earlier games concerned with city management. Doug Dyment’s The Sumer Game, coded in 1968 on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 in the FOCAL language, was the first computer game to address city building and management, putting the player in charge of the ancient city-state of Sumer with the goal of growing an economy against the threat of rats and plague.¹¹ David H. Ahl ported it to BASIC as Hamurabi, and George Blank’s 1978 Apple II game Santa Paravia and Fiumaccio introduced several types of buildings, assembling most of the elements of the genre — taxes, buildings, disasters, population growth, and approval ratings.¹¹ Don Daglow’s 1982 two-player Intellivision game Utopia further polished the formula by making it real-time and entirely graphical.¹¹

Maxis and the original release

Wright instead co-founded Maxis with businessman Jeff Braun, who saw the game’s commercial potential; the company was established in 1987 to self-publish the title.¹⁵¹ SimCity was released in February 1989, initially for the Macintosh and Amiga and soon afterward for other personal computers, followed by a Super Nintendo port in 1991.¹¹¹⁵ A version for the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System was announced alongside the 16-bit cartridge and shown at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in 1991, but it was canceled soon after and never released.¹⁵ A two-player networked version for Unix X11 workstations, implemented by Don Hopkins at DUX Software based on Wright’s original concept, appeared in 1993, allowing several people to coordinate zoning, power, and construction across a network.⁵ That networked edition ran on Silicon Graphics Irix, SPARC SunOS, and other Unix workstations, offered eight scenarios and pie menus, and was distributed in a free “demo mode” in which the city melted every five minutes until a license was purchased.⁵

The game gave the player a large empty plot with procedurally generated terrain on a grid, beginning in the year 1900, and required building a power plant connected to residential, commercial, and industrial zoning blocks.¹¹ Players could set tax rates, lay roads and railways, build police and fire stations, parks, and stadiums, and — at population thresholds — seaports and airports.¹¹⁸ A hallmark of the series was the ability to unleash disasters such as floods, earthquakes, plane crashes, fires, tornadoes, and amphibious monsters.¹¹ The game shunned the traditional win-or-lose conclusion, instead scoring players up to a maximum of 1,000 and letting them experiment toward an optimal city.⁸ Some of its eight scenarios re-created real and imagined disasters, including San Francisco in 1906 on the eve of the great earthquake and a Boston of 2010 facing an imminent nuclear meltdown.⁸ A Terrain Editor accessory let players generate cities with arbitrary geographic features.⁸

SimCity became a commercial and cultural phenomenon, drawing notice from The New York Times and Time as well as the specialist press, and it was adopted by urban planners and educators as a teaching tool.¹¹⁸ Academics including faculty at Ball State University, Louisiana State University, and consultants in city planning praised its sophistication as a model and intended to use it in courses on urban and regional planning.⁸ By 1992 it had sold a million copies, and Maxis grew from a company of two into a publicly traded firm with more than two hundred employees at its peak.¹⁵⁶ Maxis’s later SimCity and other Sim titles together sold in excess of seven million copies worldwide.⁶

SimCity Gameplay TrailerIGN

Sequels and the Sims spin-off

A succession of sequels followed: SimCity 2000 in 1993, SimCity 3000 in 1999, and SimCity 4 in 2003, the last released as a Deluxe Edition bundling the Rush Hour expansion.¹⁴¹⁸ SimCity 3000 reached the top of the U.S. PC sales charts on release.⁶ Electronic Arts? acquired Maxis in 1997, after which Wright turned to developing The Sims.¹¹⁵

Released in February 2000, The Sims let players create and control a neighborhood of simulated people.⁷ It surpassed Brøderbund’s Myst — released in 1993 — to become the best-selling PC game of all time, with more than 6.3 million copies sold; combined with its expansions, sales exceeded 13 million units.⁷ The Sims was the best-selling game of 2000 and 2001 and was translated into 13 languages, with EA reporting that over 50 percent of new players were female.⁷ EA later split the team into The Sims Studio and moved development to its Redwood Shores and Salt Lake City offices.¹

Through the 2000s EA commissioned numerous console and mobile spin-offs, among them SimCity DS, SimCity Creator, and the free-to-play mobile title SimCity BuildIt, released in December 2014.¹⁴¹⁶ SimCity BuildIt, developed by Electronic Arts, became the publisher’s best-selling city builder on mobile and continued to receive seasonal events and updates years after launch.¹⁶¹⁷

The 2013 reboot and the closure of Maxis

Maxis brought the franchise back with a full reboot, again titled SimCity, released on March 5, 2013.¹¹⁴ According to creative director Ocean Quigley, the game suffered from a clash of vision between Maxis, which wanted a first full-3D SimCity focused on graphics, and EA, which wanted an always-online, multiplayer platform.¹⁰ The compromise retained a full 3D engine but confined the world to a few small plots in a region with only loose collaboration between them, and required a connection to backend servers.¹⁰ At launch hundreds of thousands of players were locked out as the servers failed to keep up, in what has been described as “one of the most disastrous launches in history”.¹⁰ The multiplayer elements proved shallow, plans to develop the game into an evolving platform were scrapped, and city sizes were never enlarged.¹⁰

SimCity (2013) Official TrailerGameSpot Trailers

After the failure, the city-building genre’s top spot was taken by Cities: Skylines, an independently developed game from Colossal Order published by Paradox in 2015.¹⁰ Its lead developer Karoliina Korppoo said the team set out to make a game like the older SimCity titles, and that had Maxis done so, Skylines probably would not exist.¹⁰ Where EA and Maxis largely discouraged modding, Colossal Order embraced it, assigning a developer solely to building tools for modders.¹⁰

On March 4, 2015, EA closed the Maxis studio in Emeryville, California, consolidating Maxis intellectual-property development to its studios in Redwood Shores, Salt Lake City, Helsinki, and Melbourne.¹ Longtime staffer Guillaume Pierre, who had worked as a designer and lead gameplay scripter on the 2013 game, tweeted that “it’s time to turn off the lights and put the key under the door,” adding the hashtag #RIPMaxisEmeryville.¹ The shutdown effectively ended new development on the SimCity line, though EA continued to support existing titles, and SimCity BuildIt remained in operation on mobile platforms.¹¹⁶