SimCity was released in 1989, was originally called Micropolis and was designed by the infamous Will Wright. For those that don’t know Will Wright, its suffice to say he’s one of the most popular and influential game designers of our time. SimCity, TheSims, SimAnt, SimFarm and Spore are a few of his hits and TheSims has taken many records since its original release.
Wright had trouble finding a publisher for a game in which you couldn’t really “win or lose.” Turned down by Broderbund, Wright eventually pitched the idea to Jeff Braun of Maxis. Maxis agreed to publish Simcity as one of its first two games.
When near complete, Wright and Braun took the game back to Broderbund to clear the rights for the game. Broderbund executives Gary Carlston and Don Daglow saw how addicting the game could be and signed Maxis to a distribution deal. Four years after initial development, SimCity was released for the Amiga and Macintosh platforms, followed soon after by the IBM PC and Commodore 64. On January 10th 2008, the SimCity source code was released under the GPL license as… Micropolis!
The objective of the game is simple, build and design a city. Though the player could focus on building a highly efficient city with an ever growing populace, it was by no means required. In a sense, open ended, the player was free to design the city as they chose.
Included in the city building experience was the possibility of natural disasters such as flooding, tornadoes and more. Pre-designed scenarios were also included in the game such as the Boston 2010 nuclear meltdown, or mass coastal flooding of Rio de Janeiro of 2047 … even a Godzilla attack of Tokyo in 1961.
In the years to follow, the SimCity franchise would continue to expand with greater detail as SimCity 2000 (1993), SimCity 3000 (1999), SimCity 4 (2003) and a host of other “Sim” games and until the release of “The Sims” in 2000, the SimCity series was the best-selling line of games made by Maxis.
In Fall of 2008, EA will release the next child in the SimCity family, SimCity Creator for the Nintendo Wii and DS systems. And thus, history continues!
In this episode we’ve got a lot of MMO-style content and news. Although we’re not reviewing Wrath of the Lich King yet, we’ve got other subscription based news. This weeks gaming flashback is Defender and this weeks news includes:
@California videogame law ruled unconstitutional
Well, the lawyers need to make a living …
@LulzSec ends its hacking spree:
Yep, I also think that the authorities (with the help of other hackers) got too close to them.
Now, if LulzSec are script kiddies, then that says a lot about the the level of responsibility of the owners of the attacked sites.
@We didn’t have enough time for Fable 3
Loved Paul’s comment.
@Duke Nukem will continue
Interesting point, Jonah. It might bring better games out there rather than a second DNF.
@ Xbox 360 halfway through lifecycle:
Isn’t XBox a DX9 piece a hardware? If so, just an update: Microsoft already released DX11. Heck, even I upgraded my 6-7 years old DX9 video card to a newer one.
@What kind of food and drink to you eat while gaming?
I’m not from US, so this is not for the contest.
I try not to eat while at the computer, but, when I do that I usually go for dark chocolate.
Alternatively, crackers.
I also try not to snack too much because my metabolism has recently started to catch up with me, but I’ve recently found myself indulging in this particular snack and drink combination while gaming: A micro-brew (preferably a porter) and pretzel m&m’s.
Lulzsec – They didn’t personally affect me but I’m glad its done, there is no reason for doing what they did. Pretty much all the info was useless to most. Probably just did it for publicity.
Duke Nukem – I’m glad that they will continue the series, they shouldn’t just leave the game on such a bad note. I haven’t played it yet, but from the enormous amounts of hate that the game got it almost makes me want to buy it. Almost.
Xbox Life – I can see the Xbox360 lasting that long, which is actually surprising. I don’t really know what Microsoft would add if they were to make a new console, I guess just upgrade the machine as a whole, but I’m not too big about graphics so I don’t really care. Going to be interesting to see if it does actually last that long even with the new Wii console. But that will probably only last for a year and then become another piece of hardware that collects dust.
QOTW – I usually just go with anything I can get. Soda is always a nice choice, but I don’t really like to eat while playing. I hate it when my gaming equipment (if you could call it that), gets dirty or sticky.
You know you can play most PC games with a 360 pad or any regular gamepad? just like consoles if you hook it up to your TV via HDMI/VGA (only with way better graphics/performance)