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!
3D on the PC requires a 120ghz monitor so the game can split 60ghz to each eye.
Oh, and Derrick, it sounds like the Blu-ray diode in your PS3 is about to fail. All of the diodes have a set lifespan and WILL fail at some point.
The booth babes were on their lunch break from some game developer who had nothing to do with Harmonix. They were doing Dance Central because it looked fun.
@Starcraft 2 3D? I think the sales of Sc2 will be ground breaking for pc games but the 3D option wont sway buyers
@ps3 FINALLY making money Took them long enough they should have already intigraded the Plus feture took them to long.
@ Activison and Xbox live It’s True and if lets say they pull a consolt out of thier asses I bet it’d sale just it would have to already have games being made on it, and of course make CoD a exclusive even then it still wouldn’t sale AS much as xbox, maybe ps3…
@Murloc Cup? I already have all 3 preorded. LOL because i’m a collector of things. can’t wait to sit it on my shelf as it gathers dust. Btw I’m a die hard WoW fan since you started talking about it and I love it
My comment: The Update thing on battle.net IT’S BULLSH*T because when i log on when servers come online Turns out onlything that was changed was battle.net and still it was annoying there was no patchs or anything with WoW w.e it’s my bitch of the week and you should try to add a Bitch of the week into your podcast!
Btw typed that on my iphone big fingers small keys..
Forgot to mention in the podcast, we won’t have an episode next week as we’ll be in transit to our vacation spot up north. We will pop one out the week after (just before we head off for another week to a cocktail conference)
Vulnerable I’ve been reading about of blogs about the Real ID. There are many rants that there no privacy & that it will make your account Vulnerable to hackers. I disagree. I believe Real ID allows you to control your privacy its not compulsory. Also Hackers will need more than a account name & real name to obtain an account. I think the issue is that Many accounts are controlled via email. Emails need to be more secure to make them more suitable to be the control to many online accounts. Well anyone have any additional take on Real ID’s ?
If we are having no podcast next week, will Don be doing a mashup? They are great. Although with recent weeks he’d be struggling to find anything not porn related!
3D – To play 3D you a screen that has a refresh rate of 120Hz or more and some glasses that split the two images to each of the eyes.
Basically, you’re getting two sets of 60Hz playback and the glasses split the two sets of playback to go to each eye.
Currently, the largest screens you can get using this method of 3D (which is the only method that gaming supports as of yet) are around 23″.
Question of the Week:
A genre that I think would really benefit from the extra dimension would be flight sims, and it may even re-spark some interest in the (unfortunately rare) space-sim type games.
I quite like the idea of a subtle 3D touching done so that it really feels like you’re flying a jet at twice the speed of sound…
A specific game that I’d like to see in 3D would be Mirrors Edge, however. Although that would quite possibly kill the people that already had problems with motion sickness that that game caused.
It’s been a while since I listened to one of your podcasts, unfortunately. And I’m glad to see you’re still as entertaining as ever.
Cheers, and peace.
eni
I’ll try to keep this short:
Way to go, Sony! Tell people that the production costs lowered but the price won’t. That should get you lots of new fans.
I do like to have the physical media. As far as I am concerned, after I got the CD/DVD, the company that sold it can go bankrupt. I got what I wanted.
So, in some way, as Derrick pointed out, it is an issue about feeling safe.
Question of the week: 3D goes with any game that has a camera position that will offer depth of field. FPS, flight sims (as Eni mentions), third person shooters, MMOs like Warcraft.
I’m not sure about using it on an RTS like Starcraft though. In those games, your units are placed on a fairly plane terrain. There is just not enough depth.
I do know that in Warcraft III you can tilt the camera to an almost third person perspective, but still, I am not fully convinced that 3D will suit such a game.
@Herr_Alien:
You’re right about the RTS point… But as you mentioned, newer RTS’s give you control over the camera position to a huge degree now.
It started off with games like Warcraft III (in fact I think it was Warcraft III that first offered this ability). But now it’s so common-place that if it were left out, people would probably consider that a reason not to buy the game.
Games like the ‘Total War’ series (which are a mix of Real Time battles and Turn Based campaign strategy) give you control over the camera on both the battle map and the turn-based campaign map. I think that 3D in these circumstances might work quite well, and would certainly give a new angle on playing the game (no pun intended).
However, as with the new Starcraft, I think that this would be nothing more than a gimmick and something that you may or may not try at some point but would never change your opinion on the game in it’s entirety.
Firstly, hope you all had a nice vacation.
In regards to the Qotw:
Rail Shooters – The ease of scripted events in rail shooters could really bring out some great 3D moments.
And in case this was missed in the news section, Valve is releasing another free game on Steam.
Alien Swarm – a 4player co-op top down tactical shooter. (will be available by the time this podcast is out)
This is a Source remake of a popular UT2004 mod. The original modders were hired by valve a couple of years ago and have been working on it in their spare time while apart of the Left4Dead and Portal 2 teams.
And while I’m sure its some savvy business plan by Valve to get more people signed up to Steam, you can’t complain with free and it looks fantastic.