Along with its subsequent titles - SimCopter, SimTower, SimAnt, Sim et cetera ad nauseam - SimCity kicked off a series of digital sandboxes that put complex systems within the grasp of anyone with a computer mouse.Įvery decision has a consequence in the balance of dozens of variables. SimCity gives the player macro- and micro-managerial control of a voxelated urban terrarium. I think the two are both kind of educational technologies, and that’s the part that interests me basically, how we take these things - whether it’s storytelling, or play, or games - and use those to increase our understanding and our engagement with the real world, not pull us away from it.”
“I think that play, in a more general sense, is fundamentally one of the ways that we understand the world, the real world,” says Wright, “as is storytelling. The Sim series also represents a philosophy about design, and the role of play in our learning process.Ī screenshot from the original SimCity game for the Macintosh. Popularizing a genre of “software toys” that presented players with an interactive, complex world writ little, gamers growing up in the ‘90s may remember a time when any new PC title from Maxis (the company Wright founded with partner Jeff Braun) bearing the prominent ‘SIM’ prefix promised endless hours of play time that wasn’t about winning or losing, but experimentation and discovery. Regardless of its precise birthday, SimCity was a hugely influential game. “I think everybody just puts too much trust in Wikipedia,” he said. I found this out from Will Wright, the game design guru behind SimCity and the genre of games it spawned, whose mental history of the legendary game is presumably more accurate than the Internet’s.
Well, actually that’s a common misconception - the IBM version of SimCity was released in October of ‘89, but the original (for Mac and Amiga), came out in February. SimCity, the classic PC game that makes mayors out of middle schoolers, turned 25 last week.
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