We’ve reached No. 50!
At varying points throughout this countdown of Retro Gaming Essentials, I’ve had several “come to Jesus” moments where I’ve had to re-evaluate my ranking.
Often, these internal conversations have occurred at noteworthy markers, such as when we hit the Top 20 with “Super Mario Kart” or the Top 30 with “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.”
The conversations, such that they are, generally go something like this:
“Would I feel like a dumbass if this game wasn’t (or was) included in my Top (whatever)?”
That acts as a tie-breaker and helps me crystalize my recommendations. And when you boil it down, that’s really what this list is – a list of games I think should be experienced. Not just my personal favorites, and not just the games that seem important: Concessions on both points will be had, in the interest of providing a resource that is a little more worthwhile as a whole.
And that resource is this: What games, at the end of the day, do I recommend people play (and why)?
Building off of that, if we’re saying to folks, “Hey, play these 50 games,” I don’t see how that list of 50 can be at all close to complete if we don’t talk about “SimCity” (and by extension “The Sims”).
Any reasonable approximation of the history of video gaming requires that conversation.
So, as we put a bow on 50 reviews of some of the best games in existence (with the intention of someday reaching a tidy 100), I say this with full confidence:
Any gamer looking to play some of the all time greats should 100% include SimCity (or one of its sequels) on their to-do list.
SimCity at a glance:
Genre: Building simulation
Released: 1989
Platform: PC
“Game of the Year” from Computer Gaming Monthly
The story behind the origins of SimCity is rather quaint and probably serves as a point of inspiration for modern indie developers, as it’s essentially the tale of a developer, Will Wright, coming up with an interesting idea for a game, and then finding an investor, Jeff Braun, eager to break into the gaming industry.
Their connection spawned the company “Maxis,” which published Wright’s game in 1989.
Wright had centered on the concept that building an environment to play in was itself an enjoyable experience while working on a previous title, “Raid on Bungeling Bay,” earlier that decade. He had discovered that he enjoyed creating the settings for the game more than he enjoyed the game itself.
This basic idea is at the center of SimCity, where the gamer gets to create a city from scratch and see it thrive, struggle, or be relentlessly mediocre like Cleveland.
The player is given full access to an array of tools to see this through. Services like power, roads, water access, and railway are central to the experience, but the gamer has the freedom to build out commercial, industrial, and residential elements in whatever alignment they see fit.
Natural disasters and other hindrances pop up occasionally to hinder one’s efforts and keep things interesting, and available funds can be limiting as well, so that one’s city doesn’t come together in five minutes or anything. It takes a period of time of fiddling and tweaking to get it to any sort of satisfactory point.
And of course, ideas come along later on that necessitate tough decisions. “Should I bulldoze this entire neighborhood, start my game over with a new city, or just deal with the imperfections present and continue to be dissatisfied with my city in all the important ways (like in Cleveland)?”
It’s fairly realistic in that way.
Thinking back to my first exposure to the game, I remember not being particularly enthralled with the spartan graphics, yet also not being put off by them either. The game had a sort of timeless quality to it, wherein I couldn’t quite place its origins. It looks rudimentary as hell today, but circa 1990 or so, the game looked about the way it needed to, even if there were prettier games to look at already available for consumption.
The primary hook of the game seemed timeless as well. This just felt like the sort of game that needed to exist. “Yeah, of course there’s a building sim. Wait, this is new? How?”
SimCity was a massive, massive hit, inspiring all of the ports and sequels, including a version that was a launch title for the Super NES, a fairly by-the-book sequel in “SimCity 2000” that moved the perspective from top-down to isometric to makes thing more aesthetically pleasing, and some pretty weird off-shoots that included the likes of “SimAnt” and “SimCopter.”
The sequels, though profitable, by and large bored Wright, who continually wanted to try new things.
His experimentation eventually led to the creation of “The Sims,” which instead of a city builder was more of a life simulator. The gamer was given full control of an individual (or individuals) and got to play God over their existence.
“It’s another big day of watching TV and eating burritos!”
“I’m going to make 10 people live in a room with no toilet!”
“I’m going to give this avatar my own neurosis so that I have company in my own misery!”
“Cleveland.”
I mean, this stuff could get pretty sick pretty quickly.
I think that’s where I tapped out on things, because to me, it was a little bit like having an ant farm and shaking the thing up like in Raul’s Wild Kingdom in “UHF.”
Yeah, this stuff wasn’t real. But I also didn’t enjoy having that kind of power over other people’s lives. I wanted them to live and thrive on their own! And I especially didn’t like the idea of being weird/creepy/cruel with them.
I preferred the original concept of having control over things, not people. It was like playing with blocks or Legos, but without the annoyance of spreading bricks all over your dang house.
You could build whatever you wanted. Your imagination was the only limitation. If you wanted to make a 24-lane super highway after bulldozing a park, you could do that. If you wanted to ensure your city had green spaces on every block and relied on clean, public transportation, you could do that. But it was more about systems and inanimate objects. The Sims was more like putting rats in a cage and shocking them if they tried to eat the cheese.
And yet, The Sims still appeals to a lot of people, and I can acknowledge that and be cool with it.
Different strokes for different folks!
Where I fall on that is to say, yes, The Sims is a really big and popular series, but here is where that series got its start, with the original gangsta SimCity.
I advocate playing SimCity instead (or at least first).
So what makes it worth playing today?
I’ve made my pitch, and yet, here is where I give y’all permission to play a different game in the series other than this one, since you’d have to either head over to Archive.org OR get super creative to play this one nowadays.
The original version of SimCity is basically defunct, though if you’d like to go down the rabbit hole of trying to make it happen, you can find instructions in various online forums. Still, I don’t think the experience there is super great with glitches and whatnot, basically rendering the extra effort a bit of a waste of time.
So knowing this, we can allow for folks dipping their toes in instead with other games from further down the lineage. SimCity 2000 and the other games that came along later on in the series are available at the EA app (SimCity 2000 is largely considered one of, if not the very best games in the entire series), and hunting down a SNES copy of SimCity ain’t the worst idea in the world either if you have a yellow SNES hanging out in your collection somewhere.
Or, like I said, head over to Archive.org.
But the main point I wanted to make with this article, moreso than the pitch that people give this game a try, is that the game mattered a whole heck of a lot.
PC gaming is fairly close to my heart, as my father was a proponent of personal computers, and as a general rule, I simply had easier access to PC games for a longer period of time there in my adolescence and young adulthood.
This was in the days when processing power and graphics cards and so forth were often afterthoughts to more practical concerns like whether a PC could do word processing. As a result, some of those games were better than others. But many of them shared in the need to make concessions within their core design to leverage themselves to as wide an audience as possible. (Lots of people had systems that were weaker — or stronger — than whatever the current standard was.)
That didn’t make all PC games bad. It just meant that limitations spurred innovation.
As I think back to it, the most important PC titles at the time weren’t aping one another. They were doing wild new things, often out of necessity.
Case in point: I’ve previously recommended three other PC games in this list. And those games – namely, “Doom,” “Tetris,” and “Oregon Trail” – are all certified A-plus experiences, and they are all significantly different from one another.
I feel a person probably needs to play those three games in particular if they want a decent understanding of where modern video games come from.
SimCity falls a little lower on the list (those three all entered the discussion among the Top 20), and I feel that is justified for several reasons, not the least of which is that this game isn’t as hugely entertaining in quite the same way. I tend to tap out with SimCity more quickly, despite the appeal of its premise. And as commercial as all of those other series have become, the “Sims” brand is probably even more blatant about trying to nickel and dime you to death with its modern approach of microtransactions (thanks in part to the sale of the brand to EA some decades back). That dings it as well.
But on the “unique” scale (let alone the “this is important historically” scale), SimCity certainly passes the sniff test in the same way those other three do.
Wanna build a city without creating a Lego firewalk of death in your living room?
Wanna create your own test case for better public transportation to email to your representatives in Washington?
Wanna see if you can make something that’s better than Cleveland?
SimCity is your huckleberry.
Dave’s Score: 9/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Original hardware which is basically defunct (PC, Amiga, Macintosh, Commodore 64)
- Various ports (Most noteworthy one being for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System)
- Compilations that are now likewise basically defunct (SimCity Classic, SimClassics Volume 1)
- Archive.org (to the rescue once again!)