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!
Sorry I’ve not posted up in a couple of months, so I’d like to say well done for reaching, and now surpassing, 200 shows.
The quiz episode was well contested, though Jonah giving us the answers to questions that would follow afterwards must have meant the scoring was a little difficult. Well done Jennifer for controlling the boys! Farewell to Don, but I am sure we will hear regular contributions and possibly guest anchorage in the event of illness.
As we approach 2011, I wanted to give my predicitions, and ask what you think will happen.
1. Diablo 3 to launch…. November.
2. Kinect to be the must have item, only to fail due to lack of decent support and top title conversions.
3. Back to the Future episodic content to be excellent.
4. Nitendo to switch all focus and support to the 3DS and pretty much drop the Wii. Wii 2 to be announced in development.
5. PSP 2 and PSP Phone to have poor market penetration due to users not forgiving Sony for PSP 1 backing.
6. World of Warcraft to start losing subscriptions, due to players beginning to realise that although the world has been remade, the game is still the same, and plays the same.
My question of the week from 201 – The game that really surprised me from 2010 – I have 2 games in this category. The first is Duke Nukem Forever. The reason? More hype and resurrection of a game which should have died 10 years ago.
The second is Gran Turismo 5. The reason? It FINALLY came out. Sure there may be lots of complaints about only 20% of the cars being premium polished ones, but the game is still ahead of its time. This really is one of the reasons why 3D gaming works. It feels like the game was designed with 3D in mind, rather than tacked on afterwards.
Sorry I’ve not posted up in a couple of months, so I’d like to say well done for reaching, and now surpassing, 200 shows.
The quiz episode was well contested, though Jonah giving us the answers to questions that would follow afterwards must have meant the scoring was a little difficult. Well done Jennifer for controlling the boys! Farewell to Don, but I am sure we will hear regular contributions and possibly guest anchorage in the event of illness.
As we approach 2011, I wanted to give my predicitions, and ask what you think will happen.
1. Diablo 3 to launch…. November.
2. Kinect to be the must have item, only to fail due to lack of decent support and top title conversions.
3. Back to the Future episodic content to be excellent.
4. Nitendo to switch all focus and support to the 3DS and pretty much drop the Wii. Wii 2 to be announced in development.
5. PSP 2 and PSP Phone to have poor market penetration due to users not forgiving Sony for PSP 1 backing.
6. World of Warcraft to start losing subscriptions, due to players beginning to realise that although the world has been remade, the game is still the same, and plays the same.
My question of the week from 201 – The game that really surprised me from 2010 – I have 2 games in this category. The first is Duke Nukem Forever. The reason? More hype and resurrection of a game which should have died 10 years ago.
The second is Gran Turismo 5. The reason? It FINALLY came out. Sure there may be lots of complaints about only 20% of the cars being premium polished ones, but the game is still ahead of its time. This really is one of the reasons why 3D gaming works. It feels like the game was designed with 3D in mind, rather than tacked on afterwards.