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!
Quake Live
Almost missed this episode.
@Microsoft’s decision to reverse its online policies
Dunno about it. I think it’s a bit too late. Just like a commented to a youtuber, similar hardware, smaller price – I think PS4 is better placed.
And due to using similar hardware, I expect the game libraries to be similar.
If you ask me, it’ll be the price and the exclusives that will make the difference.
@EA’s Soderlund states next-gen consoles should have come a year earlier
… idiot.
Hardware takes time and resources to develop. It’s not like you can set up a day one patch for a piece of hardware. Oops, the CPU bus should have been 256 bits wide, well, no worries, we’ll ship a day one motherboard replacement …
@Fish claims Fez 2 won’t come to Xbox One due to anti-indie policy
mmm not sure about it being a fit. I think that Team Meat was also a bit angry at the new consoles. So …
Thing is, while something to be praised, making such a stand can cause them some financial grief. I mean the devs built some communities on the platforms they released their games. Switching the platform could mean a smaller community, possibly a smaller market.
@Better late than never
It’s never late to have a new generation of consoles. If it came a year earlier, it would most likely be more expensive. Or less refined. Still, I can barely wait for the PS4. The Microsoft swing did nothing to change my mind.
I still will be getting a PS4. Probably will import it because of the atrocious Europe and UK price markups. I know there are taxes involved but we have to pay almost as much in pounds as you pay in dollars.
@Premium games
At the beginning of the previous generation here in UK games cost almost £60. But it quickly fell to £40 which was the price of premium games last generation. No one in UK is going to pay more than £40 for a game. Especially now that the consoles are region free.
@Betrayal
I agree with Alien. I know that Microsoft won’t turn back on their new promises as it would be financial suicide. But I hear a lot of people saying that they don’t trust Xbox anymore and won’t buy the Xbone. I think Microsoft shot itself in the foot pretty bad. That and the price. Here in UK the price differential is pretty bad(£429 vs £349) It will make a lot of difference here in UK.
@Star Wars Battlefield
Battlefront was a blatant rip off of Battlefield and now seeing DICE have the development is quite strange. I am just glad the game is being developed by someone. I loved the first 2 games and the Lord of the Rings: Conquest atrocity which came out some years ago was a poor representation of the series.
@There is something Fishy about the Microsoft East Indie Trading Company
I quite enjoy indie games on Xbox 360. Recently played White Noise (multiplayer rip off of Slender) which cost as much as a can of coke and gave me more fun than most premium games. I would love to see greater support for Indie games in the next generation. A note on Fish rant, if Microsoft policies are so anti-Indie than how did those thousands of games made it to the Indie channel?
@being impressed
None really. I mean, the games are good but none of them struck me as particularly amazing. Probably because I don’t tend to watch much trailers and just wait for the games. If I was to choose one then I enjoyed the Battlefield 4 gameplay. Looking forward to bringing down skyscrapers and reducing maps to rubble. And 64 player console battles. The game itself looked just like Battlefield 3 thou.
@loosing a game disk on a territory of your own bedroom
I think the problem here is not that Alpha Protocol disk was easy to loose because its tangible but because you are a scatterbrain. A digital copy won’t fix that.