One of my best gaming memories was going to Super Software and indulging myself by buying not one but two games. It felt positively decadent. This was in 1989 so the Internet effectively didn’t exist yet and magazines were still my main source of gaming news and previews. Super Software was a large software-only store in Richmond that carried games for nearly every major system. At the time that meant everything from the Apple II and Commodore 64 to the Atari ST and Amiga. I had my trusty Amiga 500 and there was a good selection of games for it.
As I strode in on that day in 1989 I found two games that were both part of what would become called ‘god games’ or sandbox titles: SimCity and Populous. Each went on to be massive hits, spawned numerous sequels and I sank many an hour into constructing urban paradises or smiting my computer opponents.
In the long term SimCity got its hooks into me more deeply. I’ve always enjoyed making things–not necessarily in the woodshop sort of way. In fact, I hated woodshops as a kid. Saws and other sharp tools held little appeal except as tickets to the hospital for a klutz like myself. A virtual way to build and create, though, that I could get into.
The original SimCity was fairly simple and only nodded in the direction of realism. You could construct a city with a rail-only transit system (no roads at all) and it would work. It may be that the pseudo-realism was part of what made the game click. When the sequel, SimCity 2000 came out, it introduced numerous improvements, an increased level of sophistication and an entirely new (and glitchy) water/pipe system that was almost universally disliked. Sure, having to make sure the water flowed added realism but the process of laying pipe and making it work felt more like an uninteresting chore. By the time the eminently charming SimCity 3000 appeared, the pipe-laying was gone.
SimCity 4 was the most ambitious of the titles yet, with full regions that could interconnect and layers upon layers of charts and simulation. I confess I never played it much because the drive to be more realistic–while perfectly logical–just didn’t have the same appeal to me as the slightly goofy earlier titles.
And so we come to the newest version, just released today. It’s not called SimCity 5, just SimCity, as if being framed as a reboot. And in a way that seems about right. The cities you can build are smaller but the simulation is even more detailed and realistic than ever. The game requires an always-online connection and while it doesn’t force you to build alongside other players, it does take away the option to save your city at certain points, instead relying on EA’s cloud storage to do the work (and in the first 24 hours it is working with predictably spotty success). While I marvel at the look of the game and genuinely applaud the game moving even more toward being a true simulation, I can’t help but feel that this is the next step in me being pushed away from the series permanently.
Maybe I can’t reconcile my creative drive with a proper simulation. If I want to build something silly, I don’t want to be (unduly) punished for it but the new SimCity torpedoes that philosophy.
I guess there’s always Minecraft and its (literal) castles in the air.