SimCity was the virtual city-building dream fully realized, and it laid the blueprint for all that came later. Advertisementįurther Reading From SimCity to Real Girlfriend: 20 years of sim games He applied various urban planning and computer modeling theories, implementing whatever ideas he'd been reading but especially drawing from MIT professor Jay Forrester's work on system dynamics. He began expanding his world-building tools as an experiment. While developing his first commercial game, Raid on Bungeling Bay, a shoot 'em up released for the Commodore 64 in 1984, Will Wright noticed that designing city maps for the player to fly over in a helicopter was more fun than actually controlling the helicopter and blowing stuff up (i.e., playing the game).
However, the city-building genre as we know it today came about by accident. And as the name suggested, Utopia was all about proving Sir Thomas More wrong and developing the perfect, harmonious society (an impossible goal, true to More's writing).
Simcity builds how to#
More than ever before, in Utopia you had to think quickly about where to spend your money and how to balance population growth against factors like income, infrastructure, natural disasters, and the threat of attack. In the meantime, game development legend Don Daglow's 1982 two-player Intellivision game Utopia further polished the existing formula by putting it in real time and making it entirely graphical rather than partly or wholly text-based. That final ingredient took several more years to gestate.
Santa Paravia felt as though you were playing a computerized board game, not experimenting with wooden blocks and model train sets.
But the most crucial ingredient of the genre was missing (and no, it wasn't that the game was still turn-based). You had taxes, buildings, disasters, population growth and decay, approval ratings-even a map of your kingdom that displayed at the end of each turn. With Santa Paravia, most of the elements of a city-building game were in place. Of these, George Blank's 1978 Apple II game Santa Paravia and Fiumaccio was perhaps the most notable, as it introduced several types of buildings (or "public works") that you could buy/construct. The game captured many a player's imagination, and several more expanded versions soon emerged, with different localities but the same core systems. And if you were truly a terrible leader your people would rebel, casting you off from the throne. The goal was to grow your economy so that your city could expand and support a larger population, but rats and the plague stood in your way. You couldn't build anything, but you could buy and sell land, plant seeds, and feed (or starve) your people. The Sumer Game, or Hamurabi, put you in charge of the ancient city-state of Sumer. Ahl ported it to BASIC a few years later retitled as Hamurabi (with the second 'm' dropped in order to fit an eight-character naming limit). He coded The Sumer Game in 1968 on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 minicomputer, using the FOCAL programming language. While extremely limited in its simulation, Doug Dyment's The Sumer Game was the first computer game to concern itself with matters of city building and management. Behold, the original SimCity Commodore 64-the game that changed everything.
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