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

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

Cities Are Everywhere. Billions Of Us Live In Them, And Many Of Us Think We Could Do A Better Job Than The Planners. But For The Past 26 Years Dating Back To The Original SimCity, We’ve Mostly Been Proving That Idea False.

We’ve Traveled Through Time And Space To Build On Alien Worlds, In Ancient Civilizations, And In Parallel Universes—Laying Down Roads, Zoning Land, Playing God, And Cheating Our Way To Success In A Vain Attempt To Construct A Virtual Utopia. And Now, Here, I’m Going To Take You On A Whirlwind Tour Through The History Of The City-Building Genre—From Its Antecedents To The Hot New Thing.

The Early Years And An Empty Plot

While Extremely Limited In Its Simulation, Doug Dyment’s The Sumer Game Was The First Computer Game To Concern Itself With Matters Of City Building And Management. He Coded The Sumer Game In 1968 On A Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 Minicomputer, Using The FOCAL Programming Language. David H. Ahl Ported It To BASIC A Few Years Later Retitled As Hamurabi(With The Second ‘M’ Dropped In Order To Fit An Eight-Character Naming Limit).

The Sumer Game, Or Hamurabi, Put You In Charge Of The Ancient City-State Of Sumer. You Couldn’t Build Anything, But You Could Buy And Sell Land, Plant Seeds, And Feed (Or Starve) Your People. The Goal Was To Grow Your Economy So That Your City Could Expand And Support A Larger Population, But Rats And The Plague Stood In Your Way. And If You Were Truly A Terrible Leader Your People Would Rebel, Casting You Off From The Throne.

The Game Captured Many A Player’s Imagination, And Several More Expanded Versions Soon Emerged, With Different Localities But The Same Core Systems. Of These, George Blank’s 1978Apple II Game Santa Paravia And Fiumaccio Was Perhaps The Most Notable, As It Introduced Several Types Of Buildings (Or “Public Works”) That You Could Buy/Construct.

With Santa Paravia, Most Of The Elements Of A City-Building Game Were In Place. You Had Taxes, Buildings, Disasters, Population Growth And Decay, Approval Ratings—Even A Map Of Your Kingdom That Displayed At The End Of Each Turn. But The Most Crucial Ingredient Of The Genre Was Missing (And No, It Wasn’t That The Game Was Still Turn-Based). Santa Paravia Felt As Though You Were Playing A Computerized Board Game, Not Experimenting With Wooden Blocks And Model Train Sets.

That Final Ingredient Took Several More Years To Gestate. In The Meantime, Game Development Legend Don Daglow’s 1982 Two-Player Intellivision Game Utopia Further Polished The Existing Formula By Putting It In Real Time And Making It Entirely Graphical Rather Than Partly Or Wholly Text-Based. More Than Ever Before, In Utopiayou Had To Think Quickly About Where To Spend Your Money And How To Balance Population Growth Against Factors Like Income, Infrastructure, Natural Disasters, And The Threat Of Attack. And As The Name Suggested, Utopia Was All About Proving Sir Thomas More Wrong And Developing The Perfect, Harmonious Society (An Impossible Goal, True To More’s Writing).

However, The City-Building Genre As We Know It Today Came About By Accident. While Developing His First Commercial Game, Raid On Bungeling Bay, A Shoot ’Em Up Released For The Commodore 64 In 1984, Will Wright Noticed That Designing City Maps For The Player To Fly Over In A Helicopter Was More Fun Than Actually Controlling The Helicopter And Blowing Stuff Up (I.E., Playing The Game). He Began Expanding His World-Building Tools As An Experiment. He Applied Various Urban Planning And Computer Modeling Theories, Implementing Whatever Ideas He’d Been Reading But Especially Drawing From MIT Professor Jay Forrester’s Work On System Dynamics.

After A Year, Wright Had A New Game, Though No Publisher Was Willing To Put Out SimCity (OrMicropolis, As He Called It At That Point). Wright Later Formed Maxis With Businessman Jeff Braun And Self-Published SimCity In 1989. It Was Released Initially For Mac And Amiga And Then Soon After For All The Other Personal Computing Platforms, Followed By A Super Nintendo Port In 1991.

SimCity Was The Virtual City-Building Dream Fully Realized, And It Laid The Blueprint For All That Came Later. Part Mayor, Part Urban Planner, And Part Omniscient God, You Were Given A Large Empty City Plot With Procedurally Generated Terrain Features Arranged On A Grid And A Palette Of MacPaint-Inspired Building Tools With Which To Fill It. Beginning In The Year 1900, You Had To Build Some Kind Of Power Plant And Connect It To Three Types Of Zoning Blocks—Residential (For Housing, Religious Centers), Commercial (For Local Business), And Industrial (For Export Manufacturing). You Could Also Set Taxes For Each Zone And Build Police And Fire Stations, Parks, Stadiums, Roads, Railways, And, At Certain Population Thresholds, Also Seaports And Airports.

You Had To Balance The Budget (Unless You Cheated) And The Effects All Of These Buildings Had On Each Other As Well As The Larger System Of Population Growth Or Decay And Citizen Happiness. And If It All Got To Be Too Much For You, You Could Always Unleash Wave After Wave Of Disaster Upon Your Town Like A Child At The End Of His Playtime Joyfully Tearing Down His Tower Of Blocks. Floods, Earthquakes, Plane Crashes, Fires, Tornadoes, And Amphibious Monsters Wreaked Havoc On Cities In What Would Become A Hallmark Of The Series.

SimCity Had No Explicit Goals. It Gave You Some Interesting Systems And Tools To Play With And Let You Go To Town. Playing SimCity Helped Develop Our Understanding—Or Mental Model, As Will Wright Calls It—Of The Urban Environment That So Much Of The World’s Population Lives In, And It Took Some Of The Mystery Out Of Why Urban Planners Make The Seemingly Bizarre Decisions That They Do.

If You Thought You Could Improve Traffic Flows By Making The Roads Five Times Wider And Staggering Residential Blocks With Commercial And Industrial Ones, You Could Try It And See (Spoiler: It Doesn’t Work—Traffic Always Expands To Fill Road Capacity, And Such A Zoning Policy Would Lower Land Values And Increase Pollution). If You Believed A Nearby Rail Line Was Increasing Crime In Your Area, You Could Model Your City In The Game And Experiment With Changes.

SimCity Was A Revelation In The Games Market. It Was Arguably The First Non-Twitchy Game To Enter The Public Consciousness, And It Earned Plaudits From Such Bastions Of Old Culture AsThe New York Times And Time, As Well As Specialist Games And Technology Press. It Transcended Games Of The Time To Become A Part Of Popular Culture, Of All Levels Of Education, And Of The Very Field It Simulated—Many Urban Planners Used It To Test Existing Ideas And To Inspire New Ones.

 

To The Moon And To The Past

Maxis Soon Released Graphics Sets That Converted The Appearance Of SimCity Into Historical, Fantasy, Or Future Cities, But The Game Itself Was Unaffected By These. Those Who Were Itching For City Builders That Really Embraced The Past And Future Didn’t Have To Wait Long, However.

Wesson International Took Input From NASA Contractors In Designing 1990 Lunar Colony Simulator Moonbase. Faced With A Barren Lunar Surface, Unblemished But For The Occasional Crater, You Had To Consider Such Issues As Oxygen And Water Supplies And Heating/Cooling While Assembling A Network Of Sleeping Quarters, Research Labs, Power Generators, And Other Buildings. If SimCity Was An Ode To Contemporary American Sprawl,Moonbase Was An Epigram Of Future Restraint—Of A Time When We Will Build And Spend Only What Is Necessary Because Life Is Fragile And Prosperity Can Turn To Struggle At Any Moment. (It Was Also Fun To Watch Spacesuit-Clad People Drive Moon Buggies Around On The Roads).

Celestial Software’s Utopia: The Creation Of A Nation (1991) Made A Less Concerted Effort To Adhere To Realism. Its Simulation Concerned Itself With Building A Colony On A New Planet Without Getting Destroyed By Aliens Who Seemed Kinda Pissed That You’d Invaded Their World. You Advanced From Stage To Stage, Spreading Your Tendrils Around The Planet And Building Mini-Cities (Or Trying—The Interface Was Horrible) While Finding A Way To Produce Oxygen And Energy And Maintaining A Large Enough Army To Fend Off Alien Attacks.

Impressions Software Was First To Apply The Core SimCity Formula To History, And It Chose The Most Obvious Subject Matter. Caesar (1992) Made You A Provincial Governor In The Time Of Augustus, The First Emperor Of Rome. Challenged To Uphold The Roman Tradition Of Top-Notch City Planning And Needing To Curry Favor From Augustus, You Amassed A Network Of Straight Roads And Reservoirs Threaded Through And Around Houses, Workshops, Marketplaces, Schools, Theaters, And A Staggering Number Of Bath Houses.

Caesar Was Far More Than A Reskinned, Muddier-Looking SimCity. But It Incorporated A Key Trapping Of Ancient Rome: War. You Had To Conscript Plebeians For Duty To Help Defend Against Barbarian Attacks, And You Had To Pay Them Fairly Or They’d Revolt Against You. Your People Would Also Turn Against You If You Failed To Build Everything They Wanted Within Walkable Distance From Their Homes, And You’d Be “Promoted” To A More Challenging Map Once Your City Reached A Certain Standard. This Meant You Had Much Less Room To Experiment Than In SimCity, Though The Extra Layer Of “Game” Served As A Strong Motivator And Provided A Clear Metric Against Which To Measure Your Skill.

The Settlers (1993 On Amiga, 94 On PC), Or Serf City: Life Is Feudal, As It Was Called In Its Initial US Release, Carried This Tiered Progression System Further With A Set Of 50 Missions, Each More Challenging Than The Last.The Settlers Was A Very Different Kind Of City Builder, Mind You.

In The Settlers, City Planning Took On A Greater Sense Of Purpose. Buildings Weren’t Related To Each Other Through Abstract Zones Of Influence But Rather Through The Resources That They Processed. You Needed A Farm To Grow And Harvest Wheat That Could Be Sent To A Windmill To Turn It Into Flour So That The Baker Could Make Bread To Feed To The Iron, Coal, Gold, And Granite Miners (They Could Also Eat Fish Or Pork). Even Construction Relied Upon A Forester To Plant Trees That A Woodcutter Would Chop Down So That A Sawmill Could Make Boards. Oh, And You Needed A Toolmaker To Produce Appropriate Tools For Everyone.

All City-Building Games Are Fun To Just Watch And Observe, But The Settlers Was Especially Delightful For These Charming Little Dudes Who Cheerily Skipped Along Their Slice Of The Road Network Carrying Resources One Unit At A Time As Though They Had All The Time In The World.

It Was Especially Heartwarming To Admire Them In Conflict. If Your Expansions Brought You In Contact With The Border Of A Rival, You Could Fight For More Territory. This Involved A Group Of Your Soldiers Waltzing Out Of A Tower/Castle/Hut And Knocking Politely On The Door Of A Rival Military Building. The Soldiers Queued Up In An Orderly Fashion And One After Another Engaged In A Round Of Combat Until Only One Side Was Left Standing. Defeated Soldiers Wouldn’t Die, Either—They’d Just Sulk Away With A Few Dents In Their Armor.

“Cop Nabs Cow” And The Boom Years

When Will Wright Re-Entered The Genre, He And Fred Haslam Designed SimCity 2000 In Much The Same Vein As Its Predecessor—Only This Was Much, Much Better. The Four Years Between The Two Titles Brought Enormous Technological Gains That Allowed A Dimetric (Like Isometric, But The Z-Axis Is Flatter) Viewpoint, Rather Than The Top-Down One Of Old. The NewSimCity Title Also Offered Multiple Simulation Layers And A Boatload Of Other New Features.

Most Noticeably, SimCity 2000 Did Away With The Original Game’s 3-By-3 Zoning Blocks And Instead Let You Freely Zone Gridpoints In Either Of Two Densities (Light Density Meant Nice Houses And Mom And Pop Shops, While At The Other End Of The Spectrum You’d Get Big Office Towers And Apartment Buildings).

It Also Added Water Pipes (For Better Or Worse), Subways, Educational Institutions, Arcologies (Which Ran The Gamut From Dystopian Eyesores To Gorgeous Utopias That Would Eventually Launch Into Space), A Marina, A Jail, And A Number Of New Kinds Of Power Plants That Unlocked When They Were Invented Or, In The Case Of Fusion Power, When They Might Be.

The Best Addition, For My Money, Was The Newspaper. As In All Cities Prior To Broadband Internet, The Newspaper Was Your Window Into The Mundane And Extraordinary Happenings Of Daily Life In Your City. Each Of The Dozen-Plus Newspapers In The Game Kept You Abreast Of The Big Issues Bothering Sims Via Polls, Jokey Headlines, And Hilarious Articles That Took Typical Complaints About Things Like Traffic, Education, And Taxes To Their Silliest Extreme. My Favorite Was About A Policeman Taking All Day To Rescue A Funky Cow Called Leila From The Top Of An Oak Tree.

SimCity 2000 Set The Tone For A Strong Decade In The City-Building Genre. The Remainder Of The 1990s Saw A Few More Experimental Offshoots And Lots Of Consolidation. SimCity 2000 Was Ported To Every Console Under The Sun, With Mixed Success, While Maxis Tried To Further Capitalize On Its Own Good Fortune With The Kid-Friendly, Shrunken-Down SimTown (AkaSimCity Jr.) And The Externally Designed SimIsle In 1995.

SimTown Presented A Blank Canvas Upon Which You Could Add Terrain Features Such As Lakes, Grassland, And Trees, As Well As Sidewalks, Small Businesses, And Homes. A Preachy “Protect The Rainforest” Game With A Dark Twist, SimIsle Gave You Control Over A Tropical Island In Which You Hired Agents To Act As Middlemen In Developing Your City, Exploring The Jungle, And Engaging In Criminal Activity. Agents Could Be Assassinated, Too.

At The Height Of Its Power, Pioneer Adventure Gaming Company Sierra Made One Tentative Step Into The World Of City Builders With 1994 Sci-Fi Title Outpost—Which Followed In The Footsteps Of Moonbase By Taking A Hard Science Approach To Proceedings. The Seven-Minute Animated Introduction Explained That A Massive Asteroid Had Wiped Out The Earth And Humanity Would Be Extinct Unless A Plucky Corporation Could Colonize An Alien World.

It Was Your Responsibility As Colony Leader To Manage Scant Resources And Guide Scientific Research As Your Underlings Worked To Squeeze Life Out Of A Hostile World. You Could Either Follow The Tech Tree Deep Enough That Your Colony Could Leave For Greener Pastures On Another Planet Or Slowly Terraform The Planet You Were Already On. Either Way, The Game Stuck Close To Plausible Near-Future Technology. And Really The Only Thing That KeptOutpostfrom Being A Brilliant Interactive Thought Experiment Was That It Was Released Unfinished—Both Full Of Bugs And Missing Features Described In The Manual.

LucasArts Tried To Put A Quirky Heaven-And-Hell Twist On SimCity 2000 With Afterlife In 1996. It Had You Building Twin Cities For The Damned And The Righteous Among A Civilization Of Weird Alien Monster Creatures Called Ethically Mature Biological Organisms. You Zoned Areas According To The Seven Deadly Sins And Whatever The Pious Equivalent Is, Built Various Ugly Buildings, And Tried To Make Sense Of The Awkward Manner In Which The Game Dodged Direct References To Christianity. It Had Wit And Charm And Two Endearing Voice-Acted Advisors, ButAfterlife Condemned Itself To Oblivion By Failing At Every Turn To Execute On Its Clever Concept.

System 3’S Constructor Did A Slightly Better Job Of Following Through On A Novelty Twist. Here The Idea Was To Run A Construction Company In A City Filled With Unsavory Types And A Council That Held Power But Rarely Intervened. A Real-Time Strategy/City-Building Hybrid,Constructor Allowed You Direct Control Over Individual Workers—Who You Could Send Not Only To Build Stuff But Also To Capture Rival Companies’ Buildings And To Make Life More Stressful For Your Tenants. The Game Was Stuffed Full Of Great Humor And Personality, But Its Repetitive Missions, Fast-Paced Turf Wars, And Finicky Micromanagement Soon Wore Thin.

The 90s Introduced One Other RTS/City-Building Hybrid Series. Released In 1998, Anno 1602Asked You To Build Colonies On A Series Of Small Islands That Were Linked Together By Trade Ships. While It Had A SubstantialSettlers-Like Colony Building Element, The Emphasis Of AnnoWas More On Discovery And Economic Trade Routes (With A Side Helping Of War). That Mercantile Focus Puts It Largely Beyond The Scope Of This Article, But Suffice To Say That Anno 1602 Was A Very Good Game, And Its 90-Or-So Building Types (Including The Upgrades) Made For A Satisfying Colony-Building Experience.

Not As Much So As In The Settlers II, However. Blue Byte’s 1996 Follow-Up To The OriginalSettlers Game Perfected The Slow-Paced, Multi-Resource-Dependent City-Building Formula. Several New Buildings And A Well-Written Roman Campaign Topped The List Of Additions. And Unlike In The Settlers III (1998), Which Ditched The Roads And Greatly Expanded The Warfare Elements, The Developers Resisted Messing With The Core Systems Of Resource Gathering And Road-Based Transport.

Impressions Meanwhile Followed Up On The Original Caesar With Two Fantastic Sequels. Caesar II (1995) Offered Gorgeous Graphics And A Much-Improved Interface, Plus Extra Buildings, “Walkers” Who’d Wander Your City Streets, A Built-In Combat Mode, And The Option To Invade Unfriendly Settlements On The Provincial Map, WhileCaesar III (1998) Brought The Simulation Further Into Life By Giving Your Walkers A (Very) Basic Level Of Intelligence. They Re-Evaluated Their Task And Destination At Every Intersection (With Sometimes Hilarious Consequences).

Caesar III Also Introduced Wild Animals, Which Frequently Got In The Way And Were Infuriating Right Up Until They Got In The Way Of Invading Forces, And It Doubled Down On Complexity By Introducing A Religious Component. You Had To Honor Five Gods With Festivals And An Equal Share Of Temples And Oracles (If You Got The Balance Wrong, They’d Make Your Life More Difficult).

Impressions Refined The Caesar III Engine And Repurposed It For Ancient Egyptian And Greek Cities With The Exceptional Pharaoh (1999) And Master Of Olympus: Zeus (2000)—Both Of Which Earned Glowing Reviews At The Time Of Release And Still Hold Up Well Today.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

After Nearly Six Years Of Waiting And A Badly Mangled Attempt At Shifting To A Fully 3D Simulation, Maxis Finally Dropped A Third SimCity Game On The World In January 1999. It Made A Strong First Impression On Anyone Who Played It, With Beautiful Graphics And Animations That Made Your Cities Appear Teeming With Life. It Earned Glowing Reviews And Sold Five Million Copies Worldwide, But It Was Arguably A Step Backward For The Series.

Out Went The Newspaper And In Came A Constantly Scrolling News Ticker That Tried To Carry Across The Classic Headline Humor But Ultimately Bungled The Whole Thing—Most Of The Time You’d Wind Up Catching The Tail End Of A Joke Headline And Miss The Important News Altogether, Rendering Both Functions Of The Ticker Useless.

SimCity 3000 Added Its Share Of Good Features, Such As Business Deals With Neighbors (You Could Sell Excess Water Or Import Electricity, For Instance) And Petitioners Who Requested Policy Changes. But With All The Good Came An Awful Lot Of Bad, And Where SimCity 2000 Was A Carefully Balanced, Well-Thought-Out Masterpiece, It Seemed Maxis Couldn’t Figure Out What The Hell It Wanted SimCity 3000 To Be.

In Practical Terms, The Problems Were Many: The Terrain Tools Were Frustrating To Use, Water Management Became Even More Of A Nuisance Than Before (Because Facilities Decayed), The Zoning Process Was Needlessly Complicated By A Third Density, Seaports Had To Be Zoned Just Right Before They’d Function, The Option Of Building Historical Landmarks Was Hopelessly Half-Baked (As Was Waste Management, For That Matter), And Your Advisers Constantly Contradicted Themselves.

SimCity 3000 Failed To Set The Tone For The Next Five Years Of City Builders, And This Was Great News For A Little Company Called PopTop Software. PopTop Had The Genius Idea Of A Caribbean Dictator Game In The SimCityvein. Tropico Wound Up Being One Of The Freshest Games Of 2001, And Eventually It Grew Into A Thriving Franchise With Four Sequels And Several Expansions (And Counting). 

Tropico Critiqued Such Serious Issues As Electoral Fraud And International Politics Through The Guise Of A Tongue-In-Cheek Banana Republic Simulator. Beginning In The Cold War 1950s As The Dictator On A Small (Fictional) Island, You Balanced Relationships With The Two Global Superpowers On A Knife Edge—If You Could Curry Favor With One, They’d Support You, But If You Upset The Other They’d Launch An Invasion.

The Highlight Of Tropico (And This Applies To Its Sequels As Well) Was How It Snuck Humor Into Everything. It Didn’t Matter Whether You Played As A Kind And Benevolent Dictator Or If You Preferred To Command Respect Down The Barrel Of A Gun. Either Way, The Game Took Every Opportunity To Mock You. Propaganda Flew In From All Sides As Several Factions Vied For Power And Tried To Manipulate You Just Like You Manipulated Them With Policies And Construction Projects. Your Avatar, The Semi-Controllable El Presidente, Could Give Speeches From A Balcony And Be Shot By Rebels. And You Could Order The Assassination Of Any Random Citizen (Though That Seldom Went Down Well With People).

Each Tropico Entry Tweaked The Formula In Some Big Or Small Way. Perennial Series FavoriteTropico 2: Pirate Cove (2003) Turned From Cold War-Themed Banana Republics To Pirate Islands Manned In Part By Enslaved Workers Captured During Raids. Bulgarian Developer Haemimont Games Took Over In 2009 And Returned To The Series’ Roots For The Third Game, With A Fully 3D Engine That Proved, At Long Last, That City Builders Could Work Both Without Fixed Viewpoints And On A Game Console (In This Case, An Xbox 360). Tropico 4 (2011) Brought In A Decent Narrative Campaign And Natural Disasters, And Tropico 5 (2014) Added Loads Of Variety With A Greater Mix Of Building Styles And Multiple Starting Eras—Colonial, Post-World War I, Cold War, Or Post-Soviet Collapse.

Tropico 5 Also Attempted To Move The Series Into More Of An Anno Style With Exploration And Trading Fleets. By This Point, The Anno Series Had Seen Five Entries Plus Three Handheld And Browser-Based Spinoffs, The Most Interesting Of Which Looked To The Future—The Year 2070—Rather Than The Past And Considered Just How We’re Likely To Build Cities And Trade Resources After We Mess Up The Planet’s Ecosystems.

One Game To Rule Them All

Community Activity In SimCity 3000‘S Building Architect Tool Had Barely Subsided When The Enormous, Insanely Deep SimCity 4 Came Out In January 2003. Even Before The Rush HourExpansion Incorporated Microanalysis Of Traffic And Public Transport Routes That Let You See How Sims Traveled To Work, SimCity 4 Was A Mess Of Complexity That No Novice Could Make Sense Of.

If You Could Deal With The Learning Curve, You Were Rewarded With A Rich And Vibrant Simulation Of Modern-Day City Planning And Management. The Big New Features Were 3D Graphics (Albeit Paired With A Fixed Camera Angle), Day/Night Cycles, Building On A Slope, A Separate Agricultural Zone, Regions, More Fine-Grained Distribution Of Funding To Special Buildings, And A MySim Mode That Used Your City As The Base For A Simplified Game Of The Sims.

You Still Couldn’t Build Curved Roads Without A Mod (Though With Mods You Could Even Build Roundabouts), And The Game Continued To Favor Urban Grid Structures Where All Zones And Services Were Neatly Arranged And Carefully Planned In Advance. But You Could Basically Build Any City You Could Imagine, And, With Community Mods Installed, You Could Go So Far As To Recreate Your Hometown To The Finest Detail Or Build Cities On Mars. If You Had The Time, Patience, And Knowledge To Bend The Simulation To Your Will, You Could Build A Thriving, Growing, Income-Positive Metropolis. If You Didn’t… Well, You Could Always Cheat.

At A Dead-End With The Series’ Depth, SimCity Publisher EA Soon Hired Caesar IV (2006) AndChildren Of The Nile (2004) Developer Tilted Mill To Try Something Different. SimCity Societies(2007) Was Partly A Back-To-Basics SimCity And Partly A Totally New Approach. It Largely Failed, Both Critically And Commercially, But Not Without Proving That City Builders Still Had Plenty Of Room To Grow And Evolve.

Societies Made The Character Of A City—The Way It Looks And Feels And The Types Of People It Attracts—A Central Gameplay Component. Every Building Or Decoration You Plopped Down Affected One Or More Of Six Societal Values—Creativity, Authority, Prosperity, Productivity, Spirituality, And Knowledge. Cities And Their Inhabitants Took On Qualities And Behaviors That Fit Whichever Values You Emphasized. It Was Fascinating To Play As A Metaphor For How Readily Cities Become Like Living Organisms, But Unfortunately Technical Issues And A Disconnect Between Sim Happiness And Societal Values Marred The Experience—Even After Five Rounds Of Post-Release Updates.

Full Circle

Monte Cristo Tried To Fill The SimCity-Sized Gulf In The Market With The Easy-To-Learn But Surprisingly Deep Cities XL (2009), But Both It And Its Two Focus Home Interactive-Developed Sequels Failed To Make An Impression—Probably Because They Lacked The SimCity Air Of Silliness And They Just Weren’t Very Interesting Simulations.

Then After A Decade In The Wings, Maxis Finally Returned To The Fray With A New SimCity In March 2013—This One Confusingly Titled SimCity Just Like The Original, As Was The Trend At The Time Of Whitewashing The Past With Unnumbered “Reboot” Sequels. Naming Conventions Were The Least Of 2013 SimCity‘s Problems, However.

Maxis Was Raked Over The Coals For Including An Always-Online Requirement Despite It Being A Single-Player Game And For Broken Promises And Server Issues That Took Months To Resolve. The Problems Ran Deeper. Where SimCity Had Always Been About Building An Entire City, Here There Was Only Enough Space For A District Or Borough.

For The First Time, The Underlying Engine Guiding The Simulation Was Agent-Based. Every Resource Was Modeled To The Point Where You Could Watch Things Like Electricity And Water Travel To Homes. It Was Incredible To Watch And Learn From. But When It Came To Your Sims, They’d Pop In And Out Of Existence Every Day As Entirely New People—As Though Houses Weren’t Homes But Rather People Factories, And Workplaces Weren’t Jobs But An Elaborate People Recycling Program (Like Soylent Green, Perhaps?).

The Artificial Intelligence Guiding The Agents Was Wonky, Too. Electricity Agents Could Get Stuck Going Round And Round In Circles, For Instance, While Several Firetrucks Would Race To Put Out The Same Fire While Other Buildings Burned To The Ground.

SimCity‘s Problems Were Great News For Colossal Order, The Developer Of Transport Management Series Cities In Motion, However. This Presented The Perfect Market Environment For The Finnish Studio To Finish And Release Its SimCity 2000/3000-Inspired Cities: Skylines.

Skylines Has Been Doing Everything Right Since Its Initial Release In March. Offline Support, Large City Plots, Mod Support, Great Community Interaction, Mass Transit Systems, And, Most Importantly, An Agent-Based Simulation That Actually Works The Way You’d Expect—With So Much Thought Put Into It That Your Citizens Have Kids, Grow Old, Die, And Then Get Cremated Or Buried In A Cemetery. By Default The Simulation Favors Standard American-Style Cities, But The Community Is Extending And Changing The Game In Myriad Ways, A La SimCity 4‘S Long-Lived Modding Scene, And The Developers Are Taking Note—So Who Knows What Skylines Will Look And Play Like A Year Or Two Down The Road.

City Builders Of Tomorrow

It’s Strange To Consider How Healthy The Market Is For City-Building Games Today, Given How Squalid It Was Just A Few Years Ago. Besides The Flawed SimCity 2013 Edition And The Exemplary Cities: Skylines, We Have The Anno, Settlers, And Tropico Series Trucking Along Nicely. And Today, The Majority Of Older Games Discussed In This Article Are Available On Digital Distribution Service GOG.

There’s Also Banished (2014), A Clever (And Dark) Survival-Themed Twist On The OldSettlersformat That Requires You To Not Only Build A Great Town, Isolated In The Middle Of Nowhere, But Also Keep Your People Alive Long Enough To Make It So. Steampunk City BuilderClockwork Empires Is On Steam Early Access And Appears Set To Be Another Strong Addition To The Genre, And Further Afield Dwarf Fortress (In Public Alpha Since 2006) Continues To Be A Brilliant But Nigh-Impenetrable City Builder Cum Roguelike That Is Always, Endlessly In Development And Apparently Still Decades Away From The Version 1.0 That Normally Denotes A “Finished” Game.

On Mobile, City Builders Have Adapted Easily To Free-To-Play Conventions, With SimCity BuilditGoing Gangbusters, While Lesser-Known Alternatives Such As Virtual City AndTownsmen Are Also Thriving.

Meanwhile Another Game In Development, Block’hood, Which Will Have You Building A City Upward From A Small Base Almost Like A Tree, Shows There Could Be A Rich Future In City Builders That Experiment With Ideas Closer To The Fringes Of Contemporary Urban Planning.

But Similarly To How The Originals Meshed With Reality, The City Builders Of Tomorrow Will Likely Be All About Exploring The Future Of Real-World City Design. After All, City Builders Were Always—Right From The Very Beginning—About Building A Utopia, And Our Best Hope Of One Day Achieving A Perfect Built Environment Is To Practice In Simulations First.

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