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!
From Nintendo:
@EA selling virtual car for $100:
I was initially shocked, but then I remembered previous examples: Battlefield Heroes rents virtual weapons for real money, WoW has players selling in-game gold for real world currency. Heck, TF2 has a whole economy based on virtual goods.
All these examples point out that there is a lot of spare cash, and enough people having it are willing to spend it on whatever they feel it is valuable.
Hey, Jordan, I proposed a similar measure (tax sales from virtual goods) in episode 240 😛
@Modern Warfare 3 beats Avatar:
Well, I wouldn’t say that the gaming industry beats the movie industry, just based on one game. I think we (or at least I) will need to check more numbers.
One thing to be noted though: Activision made that money, not the original dev team (they left Activision after MW2). So, I’m sorry to say that, but the devs just found out how easy they can be replaced, without major losses from the company …
@Move to next-gen is “terrifying“:
… really? PCs already are next-gen, they always were. And the XBox is always very close to the PC, because of the hardware and software similarities. Terrifying? Yeah, but only for Sony and Nintendo, because they failed to understand the importance of a good platform/framework/API.
@Man sues Sony for ToS update forbidding suing:
Ha ha ha! 😀
Well, you can always choose to not use the console … As for Microsoft doing the same thing (forbidding class action suits), shame on them.
As for the size of DynamicJul’s country, yeah, there are a lot of small countries: Monaco, Lichtenstein, Faroe Islands, San Marino …
@QOTW: a game in the STALKER universe.
:)) so apparently there will be no show until mid January … anyway, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
My country is the actually the small island of Malta.
@Naughty Dog: Move to next-gen is “terrifying“: I think that if the PS4 is released in the near future, it will have a launch just as hard as the PS3. Just like Naughty Dog, I think that developers have only just started using the PS3 to its extent and anything new will definitely be a challenge.
@Nintendo only showing E3 Wii U demos at CES 2012: I don’t think this really means anything. I think that they’re just holding everything for E3. First of all, I think that E3 is the most known and the hype that would come from releasing all the information in a few hours would be much greater rather than if they released it over a couple of months.
@QOTW: As far as games that have already been announced, it’s Mass Effect 3. I have already pre-ordered it and hope that it will get me through my GCSEs without me playing any other games.
@Next-gen Hardware:
Maybe they’re skipping a few numbers and working on the PS9 from the PS2 days (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRJXLu3YVpM).
@Paul: Congrats on the move and reuniting with your partner. It’s great to hear queer perspectives on gaming, and I think a lot more people should be coming out as gaymers. 😛
@ ea selling virtual car for $100
I’m not surprised coz most companies do this ,i mean they won’t lost anything physically and its just virtual
@ modern warfare 3 beats avatar
This doesn’t prove that gaming industry is better than the movie industry ,its just one game
@ qotw
I’m most interested in the upcoming transformers game
I wish my classmates know what’s the difference between a flashgame and a title coz they keep teasing that I don’t know games but they’re wrong ,wth they think godswar is a cool game and they compare it to world of warcraft wtf ,btw godswar is a Facebook game mmorpg
@ ea selling virtual car for $100
Yeah virtual items purchases can get real crazy, specially in Online worlds with micro transactions.
About the Entropia Universe space resort the article refers to, it matters to say that those real estates are sources of income. Other players pay a % of their revenue generated on the asteroid. The estate owner could also sell shops and apartments to other players. “Neverdie” announced a few years back that just 6 months after the purchase of the asteroid, he and his investors were already on profit. Personally I felt worse when I saw people spending 30k $ in a handgun.
@ Next-gen and Naughty Dog its not the first time a developer comes out and expresses concerns about how fast we’re moving to a possible next generation of consoles. I think it was last year that Ubisoft said that every time a new generation of consoles comes out, games get more expensive to develop.
Game developers and publishers would like a few more years in this generation before bumping up the investment.
@Star Wars Old Republic
Nice to see its going well for them, but this game was a huge disappointment for me. I was kinda hoping for a massive sandbox mmo like SWG but ah well, just another game that doesn’t really bring anything new other than the conversations with multiplayer.
@Question of the week
Since Skyrim is already here, I’ll go and say Darkfall 2.0 if it ever gets released. Darkfall is a mmorpg sandbox-ish game, with full open pvp and full loot. It is a brutal game where you never feel safe, where you loose whatever you were carrying if someone kills and loots you. One of those games that tried to follow the steps of Ultima Online.