
SimCity That I Used to Know - KhalilK
https://medium.com/re-form/simcity-that-i-used-to-know-d5d8c49e3e1d
======
Svip
Can I suggest paying attention to the upcoming _Cities: Skylines_?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxfeBpagvQw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxfeBpagvQw)

[https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-
skylines](https://www.paradoxplaza.com/cities-skylines)

Having spoken to the lead designer, this gave me the impression of the
_SimCity_ I used to know, albeit with some more features like policies and
districts.

~~~
simonsarris
Oh boy, I hadn't seen this before. This is wonderful.

Paradox is known for making very complicated, somewhat buggy, but lofty and
(in my opinion) very fun titles.

I swear their approach to games is "So they say 'a game is a series of
interesting decisions,' lets see how many decisions we can pack into this
one!"

The Hearts of Iron series is basically _SimCity for World War 2._ You pick any
country and a starting year and just _go._ Decide on major events, pick your
cabinet, how you allocate resources (industrial and brainpower), who you spy
on, what you research, elections, and of course the whole war thing. Just
everything. The game is huge fun if you like to sit down and plan things and I
totally recommend it to anyone who loved the sim cities of old.

Hearts of Iron 3 is on Steam here:
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/25890/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/25890/)

~~~
grainassault
This is a Paradox Interactive published game, not a game made by related
Paradox Development Studio which makes HOI, Europa Universalis, etc.

There's no direct relation.

~~~
Svip
While Colossal Order is not a Paradox studio (besides Paradox Development
Studio, they also have Paradox North, Paradox Arctic and Paradox South), it
has very close ties to Paradox Interactive. Colossal Order was present at
Paradox's Fan Gathering at Gamescon in Cologne this August for instance.

------
Blahah
Note that HN user SimHacker did the original port of Sim City to unix, and
maintains the micropolis open source version.

His blog:
[http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/](http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/)

------
vdhus
Real world SimCity:
[https://earthengine.google.org/#intro/LasVegas](https://earthengine.google.org/#intro/LasVegas)

------
Snail_Commando
If you've got about an hour and a half to spend, and you enjoyed this article,
I'd like to recommend a lecture given by Will Wright in 2003.

He covers his background, early computer games, the origins of Sim City, the
Sims, as well as more abstract/high-level discussion of game design and
simulation.

Some high level themes of the talk: using the computer as a modeling tool,
simulation design, Will Wright's game design principles and philosophy,
programming for two dynamic processes "the software" and "the player's model
of the system", and traversal of possibility spaces in game design and
simulation.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdgQyq3hEPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdgQyq3hEPo)

~~~
DonHopkins
Will's talks and interviews are all fascinating and well worth watching,
taking notes, and studying. It's interesting to see how the projects he was
talking about at the time turned out years later. I'll also link to an
excellent interview with Chris Trottier, one of the designers on The Sims, who
is an absolutely brilliant designer who worked Will on The Sims and Spore, who
according to Will can manipulate the very fabric to Time and Space, and is a
pretty good designer, for a girl:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20131117041434/http://pickleodeo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20131117041434/http://pickleodeon.com/testimonials.html)

\----

[http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/9](http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/9)

Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games

A summary of Will Wright's talk to Terry Winnograd's User Interface Class at
Stanford, in 1996. Written by Don Hopkins.

Will Wright, the designer of SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, and other popular
games from Maxis, gave a talk at Terry Winnograd's user interface class at
Stanford, in 1996 (before the release of The Sims in 2000). At the end of the
talk, he demonstrated an early version of The Sims, called Dollhouse at the
time. I attended the talk and took notes, on which this article elaborates. I
was fascinated by Dollhouse, and subsequently went to work with Will Wright at
Maxis for three years. We finally released it as The Sims in 2000, after
several name changes: TDS (Tactical Domestic Simulator), Project-X (everybody
has one of those), Jefferson (after the president, not the sitcom), happy fun
house (or some other forgetable Japanese placism).

At the talk, he reflected on the design of simulators and user interfaces in
SimCity, SimEarth, and SimAnt. He demonstrated several of his games, including
his current project, Dollhouse.

Here are some important points Will Wright made, at this and other talks. I've
elaborated on some of his ideas with my own comments, based on my experiences
playing lots of SimCity, talking with Will, studying the source code and
porting it to Unix, reworking the user interface, and adding multi player
support.

\----

[http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/35](http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/35)

The Future of Content - Will Wright's Spore Demo at GDC 3/11/2005

What I learned about content from the Sims. ...and why it's driven me to
procedural methods. ...And what I now plan to do with them. Will Wright Game
Developers Conference 3/11/2005

Notes taken by Don Hopkins at the talk, and from other discussions with Will
Wright.

\----

[http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/31](http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/31)

Sims Designer Chris Trottier on Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion

The Armchair Empire interviewed Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The
Sims and The Sims Online. She touches on some important ideas, including
"Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion".

Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together until
the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret to the
success of games like The Sims and SimCity.

The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The
approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned
Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't
missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's
OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!

In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that
SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not
comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play
book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to
cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.

If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an
hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally
assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet
forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach
critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned
Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then,
they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped,
like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and
technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet
game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!

[http://www.armchairempire.com/Interviews/chris-trottier-
the-...](http://www.armchairempire.com/Interviews/chris-trottier-the-sims.htm)

\----

------
frik
_SimCity 2000 for Win95_ is my personal favorite SimCity game (sadly a 16 bit
EXE). It's a sandbox style game, with no real end goal. SimCity 1 started as a
map editor for a helicopter game, that was more fun than the actual game. It
would be great to see a new triple A reboots of SimCity (and real time
strategy) games, but without any casual or free2play or DLC flavours - just
straight old school games game mechanics with modern 2D/3D graphics.

~~~
wlesieutre
If you want to get it running again without too much of a headache, Good Old
Games has it for $6.

[http://www.gog.com/game/simcity_2000_special_edition](http://www.gog.com/game/simcity_2000_special_edition)

~~~
frik
Thanks, but there a comment mentions it's the inferior DOS version.

I occasionally play the Win95 version of SimCity and Doom 2 in a WinXP VM.
Another Win95 launch title, Pitfall works fine on 64-bit Windows.

~~~
wlesieutre
What's the difference between the DOS and Win95 versions? I only played it on
Mac, but the DOS version seems basically like what I remember.

------
aw3c2
That's some weird native advertising(?):
[http://i.imgur.com/qapXCSe.png](http://i.imgur.com/qapXCSe.png)

Did BMW pay the "devotee" to do this interview?

~~~
zuppy
The entire re-form is sponsored by BMW, I honestly don't get your point. It's
a really interesting section of Medium, try looking for the other articles.

~~~
aw3c2
Thanks, I had no idea about that. I would never actively browse Medium as it
has burned a "many big words with shallow baity content" warning in my brain
in the past.

------
hello_there
I always wished that someone made a fusion between Sim City and Red Alert
where you also had to defend your city.

~~~
KhalilK
Well there was Streets of Sim City[0] where you could take any of your Sim
City 2000 cities, and turn it into a vehicular racing and combat playground.
Way fun at the time!

0.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_SimCity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streets_of_SimCity)

~~~
Redoubts
SimCopter was pretty fun too, but game was more about Commercial missions and
civil protection

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter)

~~~
HCIdivision17
I loved the in-game radio and the enormous number of goofy/awful commercials.
It was a huge amount of fun to build a city in SC2K or SCURK, fly through it
running missions, and then burn it to the ground with an Apache "fighting
crime" (aka clearing traffic jams the easy way).

------
RankingMember
Great game, this brought up lots of fond memories. I don't really understand
why a modified Gotye song reference was used for the article title as it
doesn't really make sense in this context. Has the SimCity concept changed
such that we don't recognize it anymore? The article itself doesn't seem to be
saying anything to that effect.

~~~
kemayo
Well, there was a lot of criticism about the recent SimCity, around how the
underlying simulation was broken. That's probably enough to get a breakup-song
reference going.

e.g. the 100% residential city:
[http://www.pcgamesn.com/simcity/simcity-100-residential-
city...](http://www.pcgamesn.com/simcity/simcity-100-residential-city-
reaches-132-million-population-without-exploding)

------
graememcc
For anyone feeling nostalgic, I ported the open-source version of the original
game to the web:
[http://micropolisjs.graememcc.co.uk](http://micropolisjs.graememcc.co.uk)

------
lorenzfx
The community around SimCity 4 has really transformed the game with Mods and
Addons. If you want to have a go at SimCity, I cannot recommand SimCity 4 with
some Addons highly enough. I'd suggest you start with the _Network Addon Mod_
[0] (not sure if this is the official site), which _is a mod improving and
expanding upon the functionality of the game 's transit networks_ (I'm not
affiliated with that project in any way, just had a lot of fun with it).

[0]
[http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Network_Addo...](http://www.wiki.sc4devotion.com/index.php?title=Network_Addon_Mod)

Example of what is possible with this and probably some other addons:
[http://www.moddb.com/mods/network-addon-
mod/images/possibili...](http://www.moddb.com/mods/network-addon-
mod/images/possibilities-of-nam2)

------
lazylizard
i recently played
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banished_%28video_game%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banished_%28video_game%29)
and its quite nice..

~~~
frik
It's nice, but too hard ...or too unforgiving. A little mistake early on means
all your citizens but handful will die 60min later.

City building games like the Settler 2, Anno 1602 or Caesar III are more fun.

------
marak830
“I think everybody just puts too much trust in Wikipedia,” he said.

He says this because the original release date is off, well. . . . . Edit the
damn page then instead of worrying about it being off?

~~~
DLWormwood
It’s one thing to edit Wikipedia; it’s another thing altogether to make that
edit stick. Now that Will Wright has been cited in an article published by a
third party, an editor has already started the process of changing it via the
article’s talk page. Creatives have had a very big problem self-correcting the
site, since the official editors have a distrust of uncited sources.

~~~
FiatLuxDave
Is there a startup opportunity in providing a way for creatives to quickly
create a cite of themselves or otherwise fix this problem? After all, if you
are the actual authority on the release date, some journalist getting it wrong
in an article shouldn't trump what you say.

I think this would be a good example of something that a team of smart devs
could whip up in a short period of time.

~~~
bronson
Sometimes HN is priceless. I can't tell if this brilliant satire or not.

------
DiabloD3
I've been playing SimCity in some variation for 25 years, according to this.
That... humbles me for some reason. And makes me want to play it.

Edit: Since we're all vying for the games we wish we had: I want a game that
is half Simcity, half OpenTTD. Some players manage cities, some players manage
companies, and you all have the goal to grow cities. And not all companies
would have to be transport companies, it'd be neat to play as the OpenTTD
industries too.

------
tlo
For the Debian and Ubuntu crowd: apt-get install micropolis

~~~
nnnnni
For Arch users, micropolis is in the AUR.

------
dec0dedab0de
I used to spend hours and hours playing Utopia, which is incredibly similar to
Sim City, but came out in 1981 for the intellivision. I don't know if it's
just nostalgia, but I still enjoy playing it sometimes. I suggest checking it
out if you can.

~~~
unoti
I played countless hours of that with my little brother, who was about 9 at
the time. Decades later he still claims that he figured out the system for
fairly accurately predicting where rebels would be placed. He did seem to hit
my hospitals with alarming accuracy, so I'm inclined to believe him, although
I could never figure it out myself and he never would tell.

------
visakanv
This was an exciting, nostalgic read. Simcity was such a huge part of my
childhood.

~~~
joezydeco
Here's a chance to relive it!

[https://code.google.com/p/micropolis/](https://code.google.com/p/micropolis/)

EA open-sourced the SimCity code (under the original name _Micropolis_ ), it's
since been ported to Java and some other environments.

------
Zardoz84
IMO Sim City 3000 and 2000 was the best Sim Cities .

------
zindlerb
Will Wright gives such great interviews. One of my favorites is
[http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/pearce/](http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/pearce/)

------
coldcode
I bought a copy of the original from Will when he was still in his apartment.
What an amazing thing to see in those days.

