I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring.
— Will Wright
Gamers are both extremely dedicated to and really good at preserving the history of their hobby. Seldom has a month gone by in the fifteen years that I’ve been writing for this site that I haven’t had cause to feel grateful for their efforts. During the early years, I was most thankful for their lovingly curated archives of 8-bit disk images and the emulators to run them on our modern-day supercomputers; more recently, it’s initiatives like ScummVM and the welter of patches and fixes that make it easier to experiences games that are, for all that they may be infinitely more advanced than the ones I started out writing about, nevertheless decades old by this point, designed for versions of Microsoft Windows that fell out of support before some people who are old enough to vote today were even born. More recently still, projects like Wine and Lutris have allowed me to run these games on Linux, in many cases more easily than I could under Windows. And then of course there’s MobyGames, a site I have visited and will doubtless continue to visit almost every single day that I write about gaming history.
It therefore pains me just slightly to say that, for all the good they do, these same fans can create a somewhat distorted impression of the history they work so hard to preserve. The fact is that the version of our ludic past which you find chronicled on a site like MobyGames is often markedly at odds with the real facts on the ground from back in the day. The games which get most of the attention there, and garner multiple loving retrospectives in fan journals like Retro Gamer magazine, are seldom the ones that actually sold the best. Then as now, the best way to sell a lot of games was to make ones that appealed to people who don’t self-identify as gamers, who would have no idea how to even begin to interact with a DOOM or a Starcraft, to whom it would certainly never occur in a million years to visit a site like MobyGames. For these people, games are just a way of passing the time, not a passion or a lifestyle. And there are a lot more of them than there are of us, my friends. If you’re basing your understanding of which games were the most successful in their day on the ones that have the largest quantity of nostalgic reviews on MobyGames, Steam, and GOG.com, you’ve gone badly astray.
The canonical example of this disconnect is Myst. Widely dismissed by the hardcore set as nothing more than a slideshow of pretty pictures wired together with a handful of switch-flipping set-piece puzzles, Myst was the face of the multimedia revolution in personal computing in the eyes of Jack and Jill America during the 1990s. As a result, it became the best-selling single game of the decade. There’s a surprising number of other non-core-gaming successes of almost the same magnitude to be spotted if you only pause to look, most of them without the note of highbrow artsiness that has always elevated the discussion around Myst. The most successful game ever made by Dynamix — the studio behind such hardcore classics as Articfox, Red Baron, Betrayal at Krondor, and Aces of the Deep — was a far more populist offering called Trophy Bass, which as of this writing has precisely zero reviews on MobyGames. And don’t even get me started on Deer Hunter, the schlocky big-box-store sensation of the late 1990s, a punchline among hardcore gamers that just sold and sold and sold and sold.
A subtler example of the phenomenon — also one that gives a modicum more hope than Deer Hunter for the taste and intelligence of the proverbial unwashed masses, even as it cuts across some of the boundaries behind hardcore and casual play — is SimCity. Designed by Will Wright and published in early 1989 by a company he co-founded called Maxis Software, SimCity‘s combination of compulsive playability with the serious, adult-approved theme of urban planning famously inspired Time magazine to write its first computer-game review ever within mere weeks of its release. The sky was the limit from there. The rumpled, chain-smoking, mile-a-minute-talking Wright became a minor celebrity in his own right as magazines, newspapers, and even television shows piled in to cover this game and this man that conformed to none of their preconceived stereotypes. Reflecting on those heady days in 2013, Wright called SimCity “kind of the earliest example of a game that was leaning more to a mainstream audience. They were interesting people that were not necessarily into dragons or history or sports. And so they were into games that were more about reality than fantasy.” The only game of the time that gained as much traction among people who didn’t usually play games was Tetris. But there was only so much you could say about a game of falling blocks, whereas the literally-titled SimCity, a game which really did purport to simulate an entire city, opened up endless vistas of thoughtful exposition in middlebrow media.
This discourse was frequently self-contradictory. On the one hand, SimCity’s lack of explicit goals or winning states caused it to be deemed the harbinger of a new generation of “software toys,” a frivolous-sounding description which Will Wright nevertheless enthusiastically embraced. On the other hand, the same media was full of reports of university professors and city councils who claimed to take the software toy seriously enough as a simulation to apply it to their work. Wright was more ambivalent about this sort of thing, presumably because he knew all too well just how much SimCity was not based on anything real in any but the most abstract of senses. Still, he couldn’t quite find it in himself to say that these folks were full of it either. Not until years later did he feel he could come completely clean and admit that SimCity was really “a caricature of the way a city works, not a realistic model.”
Many people come to us and say, “You should do the professional version.” That really scares me because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared to reality. The last thing I want people to come away with is that we’re on the verge of being able to simulate the way that a city really develops, because we’re not.
At the time, though, few proved able to grasp this reality that, just because something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck on a computer screen, that doesn’t mean it is an accurate simulation of a duck. “When I was running Lower Gomorrah, something that looked like a city and felt like a city,” pondered tech journalist Steven Levy, “was I really manipulating anything that bore formal resemblance to a city? How relevant is the imitation of the real thing?” (The answers to these questions, for the record, are “not really” and “not very.”)
But whatever its shortcomings as a real, honest-to-God simulation of urban spaces, there can be no doubt that SimCity should be numbered among the most influential games of all time. In this respect, it makes a stark contrast to Myst, which proved to be something of an evolutionary dead end after the inevitable flurry of largely unsuccessful clones (and one almost as successful direct sequel) had exhausted themselves. SimCity spawned a new gaming sub-genre known as the city-builder, a niche category to be sure but one that proved far more popular and enduring than first-person slideshow adventure games. And yet this constitutes the merest beginning of SimCity’s actual influence. By showing how a real-time approach could benefit even a game that wasn’t particularly interested in testing its player’s reflexes, it revealed new possibilities to designers, who went on to implement real-time in a wide array of strategy games, from Railroad Tycoon to Europa Universalis. And in popularizing and legitimizing the notions of “builder games” and “software toys,” it likewise changed design aesthetics forever; after it, even games that did boast the campaigns and stories and goals that SimCity had so conspicuously lacked felt obliged to provide a “sandbox” or “free-play” mode to satisfy the appetites that Will Wright had inculcated. In all of these ways and more, SimCity’s influence extends astonishingly far afield. For example, Sid Meier has gone on record many times to say that Civilization would never have come to be absent SimCity. (He actually tried very, very hard to make the original Civilization run in real-time before finally accepting that it just wasn’t a good fit with the other parts of the design.) Whatever your favorite modern game happens to be, the odds are better than even that it bears a trace of SimCity somewhere in its DNA.
In a more immediate context, though, the success of SimCity posed a dilemma for Will Wright: what would he and Maxis do to follow up a game that was being discussed in borderline worshipful terms in such unlikely media organs as InfoWorld, The New York Times, and Newsweek? Wright was determined to keep on keeping on with his idiosyncratic vision of games as intricate systems to be tinkered with and learned from rather than competitions to be won or interactive stories to be experienced. Why should he do anything else, given the money and celebrity that SimCity was garnering him? Maxis’s co-founder Jeff Braun, the business mind to complement Wright’s creative one, thought his responsibility was “to protect him [Wright], in a sense, and create a structure where he can do his thing. It really was not about me and what I thought would be successful. It was about Will and getting his creative thing out.”
At the Game Developer’s Conference in the spring of 1990, Wright made a presentation that says as much about his way of thinking about games as it does the heady tenor of the times. He proposed an industry-wide standardized file format “so that players could switch accomplishments from one imaginary world to another. For instance, one might be able to use the road system from SimCity in order to race in Vette!, or one’s approval rating for the former might be enhanced by one’s accomplishments in, say, Ultima VI.” (Had these three games ever been mentioned together in the same sentence before?)
Naïve and ultimately pointless though the proposal may be, it demonstrates something important about Will Wright. In his mind, all of the games he would make or enable to be made in the future would be in some sense part of a single larger, overarching game, an entire simulated universe. To Will Wright it was, to paraphrase Neil Young, all one game.
The dawn of the 1990s was an important period for environmental science, when talk of temporally and/or geographically localized effects like acid rain began to shift toward wider-frame discussions of human impacts on our planet over a scale of many generations; not coincidentally, it was at this time that the term “global warming” first entered the popular discourse in a big way. The original Civilization’s inclusion of global warming as a game mechanic, one of the few drawbacks it saw to its larger theme of boundless human Progress, is very much a reflection of the period in which it was conceived. This statement is even more true about Will Wright’s SimEarth, which appeared a year and a half before Civilization, in mid-1990. Rather than just incorporating one trending aspect of environmental theory as a mechanic, it aspired to be a full-blown simulation of the Gaia hypothesis about our planet.
Dating back to the mid-1970s, and with philosophical and spiritual roots stretching back thousands of year further, the Gaia hypothesis was the brainchild of a former NASA scientist named James Lovelock. It proposed that all of the Earth, both its living and its non-living components, ought to be seen and understood as a single interlocking system, almost a meta-organism unto itself. By Lovelock’s own description,
Gaia is a hard-science theory about the evolution of the Earth and the life upon it. In no way is it contradictory to Darwin; it extends Darwinism to include the evolution of the rocks, the atmosphere, and the oceans. Gaia theory sees the evolution of the material world and the evolution of the organisms as a tightly coupled process. Changes in the organisms always affect the environment, and vice versa.
The problem in the opinion of most mainstream scientists was that Lovelock was never able to adequately explain just how this symbiosis occurred, how the living could so comprehensively communicate with and affect the non-living. It sounded to them more like mysticism or religion than science, a point which they hammered home again and again. Said point is probably valid enough according to the principles of hard science, but the Gaia hypothesis remains immensely appealing and even inspiring as a thought experiment, almost regardless of its literal truth. This was expressed with surprising eloquence back in 1990 by gaming journalist Rusel DeMaria:
The Gaia hypothesis helps us to see this warm, blue sphere not as a rock which happens to support life in the middle of the forbidding void of space, but as an organism that has successfully sustained its own state of aliveness for billions of years. Are we part of the evolution of a super-organism? Will we be the beings that help that organism reproduce itself in space and throughout the galaxy? These are some of the questions I’ve considered since encountering Dr. Lovelock’s remarkable theory. My view of the world is forever changed.
James Lovelock was always interested in using computers to model and teach his hypothesis, believing that it was easier to understand Gaia if one could see it in action than if one could only read about it on the page. In the early 1980s, he and a colleague named Andrew Watson developed an extremely simple simulation they called Daisyworld, which modeled a planet that was host to only two forms of life: white daisies that reflected sunlight and black daisies that absorbed it. Therefore white daises would tend to make the planet cooler, all else being equal, while black daisies warmed it up. The fun, if you chose to call it that, was in tinkering with the daisy numbers and coverage to see what kind of climate resulted. Daisyworld was partly intended as riposte to those scientists who said that the Gaia hypothesis lacked a mechanism to explain how living things could affect the planet to the extent claimed. Alas, most of them were still not convinced: they said that such a simplified model was all well and good for understanding some aspects of the environment, not least human-caused climate change, but it didn’t begin to address the full scope of the symbiosis of the Gaia hypothesis.
But the point remains that Lovelock had a well-known interest in computer modeling. On that basis, Stewart Brand, a proudly unreformed hippie with a techno-optimist bent, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, introduced him to Will Wright in the first blush of the latter’s SimCity fame. The two quickly decided to collaborate on a simulation of a living planet that would be far more sophisticated than DaisyWorld, that would model the evolution of a planet and all of the life that might eventually arise on it over billions and billions of years. This planet could be as similar to or different from our Earth as the player wished. At first, Wright and Lovelock thought to call their simulation simply Gaia, but bowed in the due course of things to the wisdom of Jeff Braun, who said that Maxis had the beginning of a wonderful brand in the name of SimCity and that they ought to exploit it. Thus Gaia became SimEarth: The Living Planet.
SimEarth was an almost achingly earnest exercise, a million miles away from what the average person on the street might imagine a videogame to be. The official strategy guide, written by the aforementioned Rusel DeMaria, included what might have been the only call to political action ever presented in this genre of books that were usually all about tips, tricks, and cheats to improve your score and impress your friends: “It is my hope that by bringing these issues to your attention, we’ll all be able to remember our priorities and perhaps take action to stop our destructive behaviors and find ways to live in harmony with our world.” Maxis promised to funnel a portion of the game’s proceeds into environmental charities. Lovelock wrote that he hoped SimEarth “might develop into something more [than just a game], a personal model that might become a guide for living right with the world. A way of testing for ourselves the long-term consequences of different ways of living.”
If there was a goal to be found in SimEarth, it must be to guide one’s personal Gaia along until it yielded intelligent life capable of surviving and thriving in harmony with the planet. Johnny L. Wilson, an ordained Christian minister who also happened to be the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine, took on the task of reviewing SimEarth himself. One might have expected him to be hostile to the very idea of a game where Darwinian evolution took such pride of place, but he declared that in the end SimEarth only reaffirmed his faith, by showing him that life could only evolve if he, in the role of the God of this simulation, tinkered with the system constantly to ensure that the fragile flora and fauna on his planet could progress from stage to stage. It wasn’t the dramatic creation narrative of the Book of Genesis, but it was good enough for him.
Of course, we shouldn’t get too carried away by SimEarth, any more than we should by SimCity. It may have been created with a more serious intent than SimCity, but all of the same caveats about its accuracy as a simulation apply; if anything, they’re amplified by the absurd vastness of its scope. Yet that need not have mattered so much if it could convince its players to think differently about our delicate planet and our relationship to it. Sadly, however, it never found anything like the same audience as SimCity, because it just wasn’t as relatable. Even colossal failures of urban planning could be fun in SimCity — in fact, sometimes the most fun of all. But if you failed to twiddle the knobs just right in SimEarth, you just wound up with a dead lump of rock rather than a cataclysmic fire or an epic traffic jam to gawk at. It was all so very slow and abstract, so divorced from real life as its players knew it.
This would prove to be something of a problem for Will Wright and Maxis going forward. Their earnest simulations of big ideas weren’t always all that obviously fun. Although SimEarth sold well initially, its momentum petered out as it became clear that this software toy was less joyously playful than its predecessor. The same fate would befall almost every Maxis game that didn’t bear the name of SimCity for a long time to come.
That said, Wright’s next game did include more whimsy and humor than were to be found in the stolidly portentous SimEarth. Like so many of his other games, 1991’s SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony was inspired by his readings in popular science: in this case, by the book The Ants by E.O. Wilson, the dark-horse winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. This time, however, Wright was not able to work directly with the man whose theories he was trying to bring to interactive life on the computer. Wilson neglected to read closely the letter Wright sent him proposing a collaboration, and was thus left to find out about SimAnt after it was finished, just like everyone else. But when he did, he praised its “sophistication and precision,” so it was all good.
E.O. Wilson was the man who first discovered that individual ants, although each possessed of only the most rudimentary forms of awareness, communicate over amazingly long distances using pheromones, resulting in a group intelligence that enormously transcends that of its constituent parts. Seen in a certain light, then, Wright’s first three Sim games were all grappling with what he liked to called “distributed,” communal forms of sentience: SimEarth on a macro level, SimAnt on a micro level, and SimCity somewhere in between. In SimAnt, you have to find the right ratio of breeders to workers to soldiers in the colony you build around your all-important queen. You also have to contend with a rival ant colony and other, bigger creatures that can wreak havoc on your insect society, such as a marauding tarantula.
Wright and the slowly growing team around him at Maxis did look for ways to make this simulation more relatable than SimEarth. If you need an action fix, you can take direct control of one of your soldier ants and charge into battle. Maxis even deigned to include a score and a high-score table. The ultimate achievement is to drive a hapless human and his dog right out of their house. Observing all of this, Computer Gaming World noted that there weren’t actually all that many differences between the life of your ant colony and “an exciting space-opera story line”: “The horrible, nearly indestructible insect-like monster in the movie Alien was, after all, a souped-up, acid-puking, survivalist ant from a mixed marriage with a scorpion.”
But, for all that ravenous insects — not to mention hive minds — had been a staple of science fiction since the very beginning, the answer to the question of whether people wanted to spend hours on end seeing the world through insectoid compound photo-receptors proved mixed. Although SimAnt did considerably better than SimEarth in the long run, selling over 100,000 copies, Wright was vaguely disappointed that its primary demographic wound up being “ten-to-thirteen-year-old” boys, the group best primed to respond to its squishy sound effects and shadings of the grotesque: “I was expecting it to be more older people that would appreciate how amazingly interesting ants are as an example of distributed intelligence. But in fact, I ended up appealing to twelve-year-olds who just loved playing with ants.” Ah, well… it’s better to have the “wrong” customers than no customers at all. The latter would be the case to an alarming degree for the two games after SimAnt.
Those two games marked the first times that Maxis applied the Sim branding to the work of other designers than Will Wright. By now, the studio had developed into a utopian collective of thinkers and dreamers, who barely felt they were a part of the commercial games industry at all and definitely didn’t feel like they had to abide by its usual rules. SimCity, that gift that kept on giving, ensured that, funding whatever esoteric experiments they wished to pursue.
A former Apple hardware engineer named Ken Karakotsios was responsible for SimLife, Maxis’s most esoteric simulation yet, which abandoned all of the concessions to accessibility that were to be found in SimAnt. SimLife was responding to yet another buzz in popular science, in this case over the prospects for digital “cellular automata” — or, to use the title of a popular 1992 book by Steven Levy, Artificial Life.
This notion of self-replicating digital organisms was an old one in computer science even then, having originated in the 1940s with John von Neumann. It was given a practical spin circa 1970 by the mathematician John Conway, whose Game of Life allowed the user to set up collections of “cells” in different configurations on a computer and then watch to see what patterns they created as they lived and died. The claims that were made on the basis of simple experiments like this one were either boldly visionary or wildly overblown, depending on your point of view. The Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, for one, was all-in, being convinced that this was the path to computer sentience.
To declare that the personoids are somehow “handicapped” with respect to us, inasmuch as they do not see or hear as we do, is totally absurd. With equal justice one could assert that it is we who are deprived with respect to them — unable to feel with immediacy the phenominalism of mathematics, which, after all, we know only in cerebral, inferential fashion. They live in it; it is their air, clouds, water, and even bread — yes, even food, because in a certain sense they take nourishment from it. To say they are imprisoned inside the machine is mere journalism.
But, as so often happens in fields of or adjacent to artificial intelligence, the boosters found it hard to explain how genuine consciousness was going to arise from their crude imitations of life.
This isn’t to say that cellular-automata couldn’t be useful and intriguing. Will Wright himself had employed some of these approaches in all three of his Sim games. Ken Karakotsios’s implementation of them was at bottom a dramatically expanded version of The Game of Life, which permitted the single cells to evolve into all manner of plants and animals, then compete and cooperate in various simulated environments while the player tinkered from on-high as much or as little as she preferred. It was interesting enough conceptually even if one hadn’t drunk all of the artificial-life Kool Aid — it was a decent simulation of the way that evolution is believed to work in the non-digital world as well — but the things that had made SimEarth problematic as a marketplace proposition were exaggerated even further here: it was all just so attenuated, so very abstract. And it didn’t help that, on a superficial level at least, it was plowing so much of the same ground as SimEarth, which had also allowed you to watch lifeforms evolve, albeit in the context of a grander world simulation.
Computer scientist Christopher Langton, the most prominent academic booster of cellular automata at the time, said that SimLife was “awfully close to being a useful tool for scientific research.” Yet it was competing with games, not with scientific tools. It became Maxis’s worst-selling release to date.
SimFarm, which was conceived and designed by a former Maxis playtester named Eric Albers, was more down to earth in all respects. As Maxis’s marketing copy put it, it was “SimCity’s country cousin,” simulating the life of a farm. But it turned out that digging irrigation ditches was less exciting than building roads, and that watching cows graze was less entertaining than watching human commuters go about their day. SimCity was kinetic; SimFarm just sat there baking in the sun, succeeding mostly in demonstrating why fleeing the farm for the bright lights and big city has long been such a staple of fiction and nonfiction. It didn’t sell much better than SimLife.
A meeting of great gaming minds. Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, and Jeff Braun in Japan, October 1989.
Indeed, SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, and SimFarm combined struggled to come within an order of magnitude of SimCity’s total sales. Defying the usual logical of the computer-game marketplace, SimCity’s sales increased rather than decreased year by year, as more and more people who weren’t traditional gamers, hackers, or nerds brought computers into their homes, thanks to the excitement about CD-ROM and multimedia, the user-friendliness of the latest versions of Microsoft Windows, and, soon enough, the chatter about the burgeoning World Wide Web. SimCity subsidized everything else that Maxis did.
It had been widely ported from its first home on the Apple Macintosh. First it had made its way to the Commodore Amiga, then to MS-DOS, the platform where it really started to drum up the sales figures. After that came just about every other viable or semi-viable computing platform in the Western world, including even such aged refugees of an earlier computing epoch as the Commodore 64 (the machine on which Wright had coded his first prototype of the game), the Sinclair Spectrum, and the BBC Micro. But the next really key port after the MS-DOS one was to the new Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the much-anticipated successor to the best-selling single games console to date. When the SNES came to North America in August of 1991, SimCity was one of its launch titles, serving as an early demonstration that this console was capable of far more than the likes of Super Mario Bros.
It’s therefore ironic to note that SimCity’s biggest champion inside Nintendo was none other than the creator of Super Mario Bros., the legendary Shigeru Miyamoto. Wright had first bonded with him over the course of a week-long, exploratory visit to Japan in October of 1989. Nintendo then agreed to undertake the port themselves under Miyamoto’s guidance, “Nintendoizing” the game without losing its essence. Miyamoto inserted his American friend into the proceedings as “Dr. Wright,” who popped up from time to time to offer comments and advice, doing much to personalize a game that was, like all of Maxis’s software toys, utterly bereft of identifiable characters in its original form. Having SimCity on the SNES, which quickly became a bigger self-contained market for games than all of the existing computer platforms combined, was another huge boon for Maxis, even if the more cartoony look wasn’t going to do them any favors with the furled-brow Time magazine crowd.
At the same time that they were expanding onto a living-room console, Maxis was becoming a publisher of out-of-house games. These weren’t generally given the Sim branding but did tend to be aligned with it in spirit. Maxis provided an entrée to the American market for any number of international studios whose abstruse concepts had been given short shrift by other publishers. Their games ranged from A-Train, a Japanese-developed, finance-heavy Railroad Tycoon competitor that gave the lie to the idea that all Japanese games were simple and cutesy like Super Mario Bros., to a passive Russian “aquarium simulator” called El-Fish that was as proudly goalless — some might opt for the term “pointless” — as anything that ever sprang from the mind of Will Wright.
Many of these were worthy, even noble efforts in their way, even if they don’t float your humble author’s particular boat. But that fact kind of points out the problem with them: they were ultra-nichey titles that demanded players who were seriously interested in their unusual subject matter, at a time when the distribution systems of commercial computer gaming were not well-suited to such products. Maxis struggled even to get them into the stores where they might be bought. Few retail orderers were excited about wasting precious shelf space on El-Fish when that same shelf could be filled with yet more copies of DOOM and Myst — and yes, of SimCity as well.
In the summer of 1992, Jeff Braun traded 30 percent of Maxis’s equity and a seat on the company’s board for a cash injection of $10 million from Warburg Pincus Ventures. The deal was predicated on the understanding that some of the money would be used for a new SimCity that was more in tune with the expectations of the 1990s, one that could be sold to all of the people who had bought the first one all over again, at the same time that it hopefully reached large numbers of new people.
At the time, Will Wright had been tinkering for months with something that even the dreamy minds around him didn’t quite understand, a virtual dollhouse that he was building up from some of the core algorithms of SimAnt. By Wright’s own admission, Braun had to “drag” him away from it to do SimCity 2000. He wound up devoting more than a year of his life to the project, but he did so more begrudgingly than passionately, because his trusted business partner was telling him that Maxis needed this game in order to survive and make possible all of the other ones. “I was in management mode,” he says. “I had a pretty clear idea of what the design would be, since we were basically just doing a sequel, which is always easier. It was more just making sure the engineering was good and the performance was decent.”
Co-designed by Fred Haslam, who had previously worked with Wright and James Lovelock on SimEarth, SimCity 2000 was a new software-development experience for Maxis all the way around. Prior to this point, Maxis had been as much a creative playground as a serious company, happily thumbing its nose at all of the established industry logic about what you needed to do to actually sell games. And, sure enough, they hadn’t sold all that terribly many games beyond the sui generis SimCity. Now, Braun told everyone, they needed to make their sequel to that game match a set of bullet points that were demanded by the marketplace, needed not to challenge anyone’s expectations unduly while they were doing so, and, most importantly of all, needed to have the finished product ready to go for the Christmas buying season of 1993. They managed all of these feats, but not without some friction and hard feelings. Some employees, finding the dictates to be a betrayal of everything they had thought Maxis stood for, quit rather than abide by them. Those who stayed became familiar before all was said and done with the nature of crunch, another new experience for Maxis people.
In the end, though, SimCity 2000 did exactly what was required of it, both as a computer program and as a commercial product. The most obvious improvement over its predecessor of four and a half years previous was in the visuals. An isometric view replaced the old top-down one, the onscreen color count increased from 16 to 256, and professional artists were… well, suffice to say that they were present this time. The difference really was night and day.
To the improved visuals were added an improved interface and a host of fairly commonsense gameplay extensions: hospitals and schools, new types of heavy industry and power plants, a plumbing system, subways and trains and other new transportation options. (One can detect some influence from Railroad Tycoon in these, feeding back into the game that had done so much to inspire it; game design has always been a dialog.) You could choose an historical starting date for your game and take advantage of new technologies as they became available: subways in 1910, buses in 1920, highways in 1930, etc., all the way up to microwave and fusion power in 2050. (If only…) As your city’s mayor, you could issue ordinances and read about your accomplishments and your follies in an in-game newspaper. It was all done well, but at the same time not overdone, being still eminently recognizable as the same SimCity that the old fans knew and loved. In the eyes of a business professional like Jeff Braun, it was the perfect sequel.
He was amply rewarded for his foresight in getting it out before the first SimCity cash cow had dried up completely. SimCity 2000 rocketed up the bestseller charts that Christmas of 1993 in just the way that all of those other recent Maxis games hadn’t. Then it kept right on selling for months and then years, another rare perennial in an intensely seasonal industry, a game so popular that it spawned three separate trade-paperback strategy guides from big outside book publishers. Although Maxis had as yet found only one way to actually make consistent money, they were fortunate in that it made them a lot of money. Having given SimCity another lease on life, they could go back to being weird… okay, no, let’s call it esoteric.
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Sources: The books Games That Sell! by Mark H. Walker, Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold, SimEarth: The Official Strategy Guide by Rusel DeMaria, SimCity 2000: Power, Politics, and Plumbing (revised ed.) by Nick Dargahi and Michael Bremer, SimCity 2000 Strategies and Secrets (2nd ed.) by Daniel A. Tauber and Brenda Kienan, The Official SimCity 2000 Planning Commission Handbook by Peter Spear and Johnny L. Wilson, Game Design Theory & Practice (2nd ed.) by Richard Rouse III, and Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology by Steven Levy. Macworld of April 1990; Computer Gaming World of September 1990, January 1991, March 1992, September 1992, April 1993, July 1993, and November 1993; Retro Gamer 115 and 210.
Online sources include the collection of Maxis articles by Phil Salvador at The Obscuratory, Matt Barton’s video interview with Jeff Tunnell, and Tristan Donovan’s interview with Will Wright for the old Gamasutra site.
Where to Get Them: Of the Maxis games described in this article, only SimCity 2000 is currently available as a digital purchase.
