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!
@To the Moon
Paul, you’re right about the story vs. gameplay. But a game with all gameplay and no story becomes slightly boring. People are goal driven, and the storyline provide these goals.
And yes, “Go bring me 50 rat tails” is a goal, but it is far less interesting than the ones provided by a good story.
@People don’t want PS Vita
He’s true, I don’t want the PS Vita 😀
Jordan, thing is, people do like to carry only one item in their pockets. True, a good game library goes a long way (see XBox) but there is a line where the extra games will indeed trump the discomfort of carrying an extra item.
Thing is, I don’t think Vita will go beyond that line.
@video games for London riots:
Lol! I play STALKER and a bunch of other violent games, but you don’t see me looting. Keep ignoring the 600 lb gorilla in the living room and blame it all on the games …
A friend of mine from UK kept telling me for years that the hands of the police kept being tied behind their backs with laws considering the human rights of delinquents. He for once was not surprised of what happened: when you know you won’t get punished, guess what happens.
@Epic may ban people who spoil Gears of War 3 online:
Actually, this serves Epic well. (1) They’re basically punish people for advertising the game, and this is dumb, and (2), Epic, choose your testers better. If you have a crappy PR, you get crappy people working for you. Do your homework. Have them sign NDAs.
@Intel hiring sci-fi writers to drive technology:
Jonah, you’re making a mistake. It’s not about where to go with the tech, but rather to discover what desires the people of the future will have.
In order to have a product that sells, you need to find out what will the next generations want in terms of using technology. For that you don’t need tech people, you need sociologists.
@QOTW: one problem here is that I rarely dream. The other one is that I don’t bother remembering my dreams, unless they are truly remarkable.
Paul: You asked for it, here it is; hate mail.
You mispronounced my name. My name is not Mark. How dare you sir. I hate you.
Jordan: The story you are thinking of regarding the “accidental” flushing of a GBA was actually from the cover story on the handheld by Electronic Gaming Monthly. They purposefully flushed the unit and it started working again three days later.
QOTW: I’ll be trite here and mention Guitar Hero. It’s true though, I did dream of the colors flying down the fretboard at me during the night.
My QotW answer is not a great deal away from Matt’s. It is THE classic game.
Tetris.
I invested so many hours in that game trying to get the stupid large rocket animation that all I could see when I closed my eyelids was tetrinos falling. Now I know where they got the idea for The Matrix code animations.