Code Like It's 198x

Simulation Games

Flying, farming, running a club or a city: games that model how something works

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A simulation game models a system, an aircraft, an economy, a football club or a city, and lets the player run it. The idea goes back to The Sumerian Game (1964) and Hamurabi, which spread through David Ahl's BASIC books. subLOGIC's Flight Simulator (1980) and Psion's Flight Simulation (1982) made flying a home-computer genre, and period magazines stretched the word 'simulation' over wargames, sport, business, pirates and gods. SimCity (1989) showed a simulation could be a hit with no way to win; Theme Park, Transport Tycoon and The Sims followed, and Microsoft Flight Simulator was still being made in 2024.

“This is NOT a mere simulation,” Addictive Games told the buyers of Football Manager in 1982. “This is an exciting and highly enjoyable game.” The company felt it had to say so because, by then, “simulation” could mean almost anything. Home-computer magazines of the 1980s used it for flight programs with instrument panels, for wargames, for sport, for running a business and, by the end of the decade, for playing god. What these games shared was a model underneath: a set of rules for how an aircraft flies, how a crop grows or how a city decays, which the player could push and watch push back. This entry follows that idea from mainframe teaching programs to the games that sold in millions.

Fast facts

  • The idea: a model of a real or imagined system that the player runs, instead of a character the player controls.
  • Early examples: The Sumerian Game (IBM, 1964–66) and Hamurabi (from 1968), an ancient kingdom run on grain.
  • Flight: subLOGIC’s Flight Simulator (1980), Psion’s Flight Simulation (1982), Microsoft Flight Simulator (1982 to 2024).
  • Management: Football Manager (1982), Railroad Tycoon (1990), Theme Park (1994), Transport Tycoon (1994), RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999).
  • Cities and lives: SimCity (1989) and The Sims (2000), both designed by Will Wright.

Governing Sumeria

One of the first simulation games was written to teach. The Sumerian Game, developed from 1964 to 1966 by Mabel Addis, a primary-school teacher, and William McKay, an IBM programmer, asked children to run the economy of an ancient city. A shorter game on the same theme was written in FOCAL at Digital Equipment Corporation, credited by later histories to Doug Dyment in 1968, and David Ahl converted it to BASIC. As Hamurabi it went into Ahl’s collections of BASIC games, which carried it onto home computers across the world; by February 1977 the Digital Group was selling it in a volume of games for its computers.

The whole game is a report and three questions. “TRY YOUR HAND AT GOVERNING ANCIENT SUMERIA FOR A TEN-YEAR TERM OF OFFICE,” it begins. Each year a report addressed to the ruler (“HAMURABI: I BEG TO REPORT TO YOU”) says how many people starved, how many came to the city, the harvest per acre and how much grain the rats ate. The player starts with 1,000 acres, 100 people and 3,000 bushels in store. They decide how much land to buy or sell, how much grain to feed the people and how many acres to sow, and the program works out the consequences, including, as the listing puts it, “A 15% CHANCE OF PLAGUE”. Starve too many and the game ends early: “YOU STARVED 37 PEOPLE IN ONE YEAR!!!”

Learning to fly

Flight was the subject that made “simulator” a household word in computing. In January 1980 subLOGIC was advertising its FS1 Flight Simulator in Byte as “a visual flight simulator that gives you realistically stable aircraft control”, with a war game built in: “return to the skies where enemy fighters are waiting to intercept you.” Its advertisements for the Apple II and TRS-80 versions promised “a real-time, 3-D” view “out of the cockpit” at three frames a second, and told readers that “the non-pilot can now learn basic flight control”. Microsoft licensed the program for the IBM PC, and American mail-order lists in 1983 sold Microsoft Flight Simulator “by Sub-Logic”.

In Britain the first well-known flying program came from the software house Psion. Sinclair Research’s own catalogue sold Psion’s Flight Simulation for the 16K ZX81 at £5.95 in 1982, and the Spectrum version was among the first cassettes Sinclair sold for the ZX Spectrum later that year. Computer & Video Games measured it against the “flight simulators which real pilots train on” and found that it did “offer some of the excitement and a very real challenge”.

Combat came next. MicroProse started in 1982 by advertising Hellcat Ace, “a real time, three dimensional WWII flying simulation with a unique pilot’s eye view”, and went on to make its name with F-15 Strike Eagle and Gunship; the MicroProse entry tells that story. In Britain Digital Integration sold D.K. Marshall’s Fighter Pilot for the Spectrum as “a spectacular flight simulation of the world’s most exciting jet fighter”, with take-off and landing on four runways, crosswinds, fog and an instrument landing system, and quoted CRASH’s verdict: “Definitely the best simulation for the Spectrum.” The flight simulation entry covers these games in more detail.

What the magazines called a simulation

Advertisers and reviewers put the word on almost everything. SSI, whose name stood for Strategic Simulations Inc., sold wargames. Big K called Imagine’s Stonkers “one of the very best general’s-eye-view battle simulations around”. MicroProse advertised Pirates! in 1987 as “the worlds first swashbuckling simulation”. The Games Machine headed its preview of Populous “God simulator from Electronic Arts”, and the god games entry follows that label. Readers voted on it too: Big K‘s readers’ poll for 1984 had a category for “Simulation of the Year”.

German magazines had their own word, Wirtschaftssimulation, economic simulation, for games about running a business. Amiga Joker used it in 1991 for Starbyte’s winegrowing game Winzer, “eine Wirtschaftssimulation mit Jahrgang” (an economic simulation with a vintage), and described Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon as a mixture of SimCity, model railway, trading game and Wirtschaftssimulation. The German press was still using the label for RollerCoaster Tycoon in 1999.

Management games

Football Manager showed how little a simulation needed on screen. Kevin Toms wrote it for the ZX81, and its first advertisement in February 1982 listed four divisions, the FA Cup, a transfer market and injuries, “all this and much much more packed tightly into 16K RAM”. The player picked a team and read the results. The Football Manager entry tells its story.

Peter Molyneux tried the same kind of game the next year and failed. “One of the first games I ever wrote was a business simulator,” he told Edge in 1994. “Back in 1983, all a programmer had to do was write a simple shoot ’em up and they’d be a millionaire. But with my business acumen I decided to write a business simulator.” It had two orders. Eleven years later Bullfrog made the idea into Theme Park, which Edge called “a straightforward business simulation”.

Railways were a favourite subject. Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon (1990) had the player build a railway company, and in 1994 MicroProse published Chris Sawyer’s Transport Tycoon, which added roads, air and sea. Edge called it a “strategy sim” that used “the huge RAM and high clock speeds of today’s powerful PCs” to grow “to truly immense proportions”. Sawyer’s RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999) let players design their own coasters. PC Zone noted that it bore “a striking resemblance to Bullfrog’s classic Theme Park”, and gave it 87%. The tycoon games entry follows that line.

SimCity and The Sims

SimCity (Maxis, 1989) put a city in a box. Will Wright had started it on the Commodore 64 after finding that building the islands for his helicopter game Raid on Bungeling Bay was more fun than bombing them. The player zoned land, laid roads and power lines and set taxes, and a simulation running underneath decided where the citizens moved, where crime and pollution rose, and when a fashionable suburb turned into high-rise flats. “Oh, no! My prime residential area just went condo!” cried someone in Computer Gaming World’s office. There was no way to win. The magazine told its readers to “Buy this game”, and by January 1992 Maxis had sold a million copies, half of them Super Famicom cartridges in Japan.

Wright’s The Sims (2000) shrank the model to a household. Computer Gaming World put it on its cover in May 2000 as “a gaming phenomenon so profound and transcendent” that it had no choice. Its editorial described sitting down to “check in” on a household one night and finding the sun up seven hours later, after a barbecue fire, a haunting and a lost job. “Gamers haven’t seen an open-ended, emotionally-laden game like The Sims in a great while,” it said.

Later history

The oldest line in the genre is still running. Microsoft kept publishing Flight Simulator through the 1990s and 2000s; Flight Simulator X (2006) was the last made by its in-house Aces Game Studio, which Microsoft closed in 2009. The series came back in 2020 as Microsoft Flight Simulator, made by Asobo Studio and built from satellite data of the whole Earth, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 followed in November 2024. The SimCity series went on to SimCity 2000, 3000 and 4 and a new SimCity in 2013, and in 2008 the code of the original game was released as free software under the name Micropolis; the SimCity entry has the details.

Sources

  • “Hamurabi (video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): The Sumerian Game, Mabel Addis and William McKay; Doug Dyment’s FOCAL version of 1968; Ahl’s BASIC version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi_(video_game)
  • David H. Ahl, BASIC Computer Games, microcomputer edition (Creative Computing, 1978): Hamurabi, its origin in FOCAL at DEC, the listing and sample run.
  • Byte vol. 2 no. 2, February 1977, p. 23: Digital Group advertisement listing Hamurabi.
  • Byte vol. 5 no. 1, January 1980, p. 96: subLOGIC FS1 Flight Simulator advertisement.
  • 80 Micro issue 11, November 1980, p. 54: subLOGIC T80-FS1 advertisement (“real-time, 3-D”; “the non-pilot can now learn basic flight control”).
  • Byte vol. 8 no. 8, August 1983, p. 198: mail-order advertisement for “MICROSOFT Flight Simulator (by Sub-Logic)”.
  • Sinclair User issue 4, July 1982, pp. 54–55: Sinclair Research software catalogue, Flight Simulation (Psion), ZX81 16K, £5.95.
  • Computer & Video Games issue 10, August 1982, p. 15: Flight Simulation for Sinclair. Issue 14, December 1982, p. 95: Sinclair advertisement for the first Spectrum cassettes, including Flight Simulation.
  • Byte vol. 6 no. 1, January 1981, p. 263: Strategic Simulations Inc. advertisement for its wargames and Computer Quarterback.
  • Antic vol. 1 no. 4, October 1982, p. 70: MicroProse advertisement, Hellcat Ace.
  • Personal Computer Games issue 5, 1984, p. 134: Digital Integration advertisement for Fighter Pilot, quoting CRASH.
  • Big K issue 1, April 1984, p. 32: Stonkers. Issue 9, December 1984, p. 128: readers’ awards, “Simulation of the Year”.
  • Computer & Video Games issue 70, August 1987, p. 32: MicroProse advertisement for Pirates! (“The worlds first swashbuckling simulation”).
  • The Games Machine issue 16, March 1989: “God simulator from Electronic Arts”.
  • Sinclair User issue 3, June 1982, p. 60, and Your Computer, September 1982, p. 112: Addictive Games’ advertisement for Football Manager (“This is NOT a mere simulation”). Your Computer, February 1982, p. 53: the first advertisement (“packed tightly into 16K RAM”).
  • Amiga Joker (Germany), April 1991, p. 62: Railroad Tycoon review. August 1991, p. 110: Winzer previewed as “eine Wirtschaftssimulation mit Jahrgang”.
  • PC Player (Germany), April 1999, p. 52: RollerCoaster Tycoon as a Wirtschaftssimulation.
  • Edge issue 9, June 1994: Theme Park preview (Molyneux’s 1983 business simulator).
  • Edge issue 17, February 1995, p. 63: Transport Tycoon review.
  • PC Zone issue 72, January 1999, p. 23: RollerCoaster Tycoon preview and Theme Park. Issue 76, May 1999, p. 167: RollerCoaster Tycoon’s review score, 87% (PC Zone issue 75).
  • Computer Gaming World issue 59, May 1989, pp. 16–17: SimCity review (“went condo”; “Buy this game”).
  • Info issue 46, January 1992, p. 18: SimCity’s one millionth copy.
  • Computer Gaming World issue 190, May 2000: The Sims cover story and editorial.
  • “Microsoft Flight Simulator”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Flight Simulator X, the closure of Aces Game Studio, Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator

See also

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