SimCity | Code Like It's 198x

SimCity began with a helicopter game. In the mid-1980s Will Wright was making Raid on Bungeling Bay, in which the player bombs factories on a chain of islands, and he built himself a tool to lay out those islands. “He could just plop down factories and roads,” Maxis’s president Jeff Braun told ACE in 1990. “While he was designing Raid on Bungeling Bay he decided it was more fun building the islands and cities than it was destroying them.” The game that came out of that discovery made the player the mayor of a city and gave them no enemy and no way to win. Computer Gaming World told its readers to “Buy this game”, and a few years later magazines were arguing over whether it, not Populous, had been the first god game.

For a closer look at zoning, delayed feedback, budgets and the worlds we imagine inside a simulation, read the SimCity study.

Fast facts

Designer: Will Wright.
Developer and publisher: Maxis, distributed in North America by Brøderbund and in Britain by Infogrames.
Released: early 1989, for the Macintosh and Amiga, followed by the Commodore 64, IBM PC and many others.
Prices in the US: $49.95 on the Mac, $44.95 on the Amiga, $29.95 on the C64.
Working titles: “Metropolis” on the C64, according to Maxis, and “Micropolis” in a 1988 preview.
Sales: one million copies by early 1992, counting 500,000 Super Famicom cartridges in Japan.
Source code: released in 2008 under the GNU General Public License as Micropolis.

From Bungeling Bay to Maxis

Computer Gaming World traced the idea further back, to a story by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem. In “The Seventh Sally” an exiled tyrant is given a whole city in a box to rule, and oppresses its tiny citizens just as he had his real ones. Wright was fascinated by it. He also read up on urban planning, and Computer Gaming World reported in 2002 that his research led him to John Conway’s cellular automata and to the system dynamics of the computer scientist Jay Forrester.

He wrote the first version on the Commodore 64. The accounts of when he finished it differ by a year: Computer Gaming World said in 1989 that the programming “was completed in its basic form in 1986”, while Braun told ACE it was finished in 1985 and “was originally called Metropolis on the C64”. Either way, nobody would publish it. “Will couldn’t find a publisher,” Braun said, “so we set up Maxis.” The two had met at a party, and Maxis started in 1987 as their partnership. They rewrote the game for the Macintosh and took it to Brøderbund, which had published Raid on Bungeling Bay, for distribution. According to Computer Gaming World, Brøderbund “challenged the design team to add city management scenarios in order to make it more of a game”. As late as the end of 1988, the magazine Info previewed the Amiga version as Micropolis.

Playing the mayor

Each game starts with an empty stretch of land: forest, rivers and coast. Down the side of the screen sit the tools, which ACE likened to the brushes of an art program: roads, rail lines, power lines, parks, residential, commercial and industrial zones, police and fire stations, power plants, stadiums, airports and seaports, and a bulldozer for mistakes. The player does not build houses or shops. They mark out zones, connect them to power and roads, and wait for the simulated citizens, the “Sims”, to move in, open businesses and build factories. Everything costs money, and the only income is tax. ACE reported that the easy game started the player with $20,000, medium with $10,000 and hard with $5,000.

Both magazines explained that SimCity was really two programs running at once. One was the editor the player used. The other, which ACE called “the ‘brain’ of the simulation”, ran in the background, working out crime, pollution, traffic and land values, and sent its findings back. Buildings went up and traffic started moving while the player was still laying roads. Every year the citizens answered an opinion poll about their biggest problems and whether the mayor was doing a good job.

The simulation pushed back. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer, Johnny L. Wilson, found that population growth fed the tax base but crowded neighbourhoods brought crime, traffic and pollution, and that a smart suburb could turn into high-rise flats: “Cries of anguish have rung through the CGW office suite on more than one occasion as one of us has cried out, ‘Oh, no! My prime residential area just went condo!’” Rail lines cut pollution, but only if the roads under them were bulldozed. Buildings decayed over time, so a successful city eventually needed rebuilding.

Then there were the disasters. A nuclear power station risked a meltdown, an airport too close to the city centre risked plane crashes, and fires, floods, tornadoes and earthquakes could strike anywhere. The player could also set them off from a menu. The worst was a giant reptile that ACE called “Godzilla-like”. Computer Gaming World noticed that the monster avoided parks and made straight for heavy industry.

The scenarios Brøderbund had asked for set the player a job to do in a real city: traffic in Bern, a flood in Rio de Janeiro, a monster in Tokyo, the earthquake in San Francisco, rebuilding Hamburg after the bombing, crime and unemployment in Detroit, and a meltdown in Boston. Wilson thought them “not anywhere near as compelling as designing your own”.

Reviews

Computer Gaming World reviewed the game in May 1989 and found it “an extremely addictive product”. Everyone on the staff had a city of their own, and they kept printed maps to argue over whose was best to live in. The review ended: “Buy this game. We want them to make lots of money so they’ll develop SimCounty, SimState, SimNation, SimPlanet, SimUniverse… billions and billions of games!” It added that a paper on using SimCity as a model for urban planning was to be given at a conference of city planners that August.

In Britain, where Infogrames released it at £29.99, ACE gave the Amiga version an ACE rating of 945 in September 1989. Its reviewer, Eugene Lacey, thought it had “much more depth” than Populous and “a degree of usefulness as a simulation” that the Electronic Arts game lacked. He called it “a seminal simulation”, with “the potential to elevate the whole genre out of its current militaristic ghetto”, and noted talk of its being used in universities for seminars on town planning. What kept it a game, he wrote, was that just when a player felt ready to run for mayor, “up pops Godzilla and rips down a few houses”.

British magazines later filed it under the heading they had coined for Populous. In 1994 The One called it “the Grandaddy of all God games”, adding that its PC version had come out before Populous. The god games entry follows that argument.

Conversions and sales

By the end of 1990, Braun told ACE, SimCity was available on the Spectrum, C64, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari ST, PC and Macintosh, and in Japan on the FM Towns, Sharp X68000 and NEC PC-9801. Maxis sold add-on graphics sets, including Ancient Cities and Future Cities, and a separate terrain editor.

The biggest conversion was Nintendo’s. Braun told ACE that the Super Famicom version was being made by the team behind Super Mario Bros. 3, and that it would be “the best version of SimCity with more ‘gamey’ features”. It came out in 1991, published by Nintendo. Nintendo Power showed its adviser, Dr. Wright, who arrived with gifts for the city, and a Mario statue awarded when the population reached half a million.

The sales figures grew quickly. ST Format reported in March 1991 that more than 400,000 copies had been sold worldwide. In January 1992 Info reported that Maxis had sold its one millionth copy, and gave the breakdown as 400,000 in the United States and Canada, 200,000 in Europe, Japan and Brazil, and 500,000 Super Famicom cartridges in Japan. By 2000, Edge wrote, the SimCity series had sold more than six million copies. Wright had not expected any of it. “Back then, computer games were much more action-oriented,” he told Computer Gaming World in 2002. “I never expected SimCity to sell like it did.”

The series

In 1990 Braun described a sequel with hills and valleys, water supply, sewers and schools, several kinds of rail and a larger area. It became SimCity 2000 (1993). SimCity 3000 followed in 1999 and SimCity 4 in 2003. By then Electronic Arts owned Maxis, having bought it in 1997.

SimCity Societies (2007) was made by another developer, Tilted Mill. A new SimCity in 2013 required a constant internet connection, and many players could not get into their cities at launch; two years later EA closed Maxis’s studio in Emeryville, California. The series carried on with SimCity BuildIt (2014) for phones and tablets.

Micropolis

In January 2008 Electronic Arts released the source code of the original SimCity under version 3 of the GNU General Public License. The occasion was the One Laptop per Child project, which was collecting software for its low-cost XO laptop for schoolchildren. Wright worked with Don Hopkins, a programmer who had earlier made an unreleased Unix version of the game, to adapt it for the laptop. The version on the XO kept the name SimCity, which EA owns as a trademark. The public release took the name Micropolis, the game’s working title from the 1980s, and its code is still published and developed.

Sources

Computer Gaming World, issue 54, December 1988: Maxis Software, Lafayette, California.
Info, issue 23, November/December 1988: preview of the Amiga version as Micropolis (Maxis).
Computer Gaming World, issue 58, April 1989: Sim City (Maxis) in the readers’ game ratings ballot.
Computer Gaming World, issue 59, May 1989, pp. 16–17: review by Johnny L. Wilson (“The Seventh Sally”; completed in 1986; Maxis, the Macintosh and Brøderbund; the scenarios; prices; the editor and the simulator; taxes, rail, disasters and the monster; “Buy this game”).
ACE, issue 24, September 1989, pp. 65–67: review by Eugene Lacey, ACE rating 945.
The One, issue 14, November 1989: Infogrames’ release at £29.99 on the Amiga and PC, with the ST in March 1990.
ACE, issue 39, December 1990, pp. 55–56: Rik Haynes, interview with Jeff Braun (Maxis’s founding; Raid on Bungeling Bay; “Metropolis” on the C64; the list of versions; the Super Famicom version; the add-on sets; plans for SimCity 2).
ST Format, issue 20, March 1991: “Over 400,000 copies of Sim City were sold worldwide”.
Nintendo Power, issue 28, September 1991: the Super NES version, Dr. Wright and the Mario statue.
Info, issue 46, January 1992, p. 18: the one millionth copy, and a licence for a Unix/X Windows version.
The One, issue 67, April 1994: “the Grandaddy of all God games”.
Edge, issue 80, January 2000: the series’ sales of more than six million.
Computer Gaming World, issue 214, May 2002, p. 65: George Jones, “Inside the Mind of Will Wright” (the level editor of Raid on Bungeling Bay; Conway and Forrester; “I never expected SimCity to sell like it did”).
Edge, issue 47, July 1997, “EA acquires Sim kings”: EA’s purchase of Maxis.
“SimCity (1989 video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the Super NES release in 1991; the sequels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_(1989_video_game)
“SimCity”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): SimCity Societies (Tilted Mill, 2007), SimCity (2013) and its launch, SimCity BuildIt (2014), the closure of Maxis Emeryville in 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity
Nathan Willis, “The original SimCity is now the open source Micropolis”, Linux.com, 31 January 2008 (web, secondary). https://www.linux.com/news/original-simcity-now-open-source-micropolis/
Don Hopkins, Micropolis source code repository (web, secondary). https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis