Yet what we most readily forget about this ancient, Spartan game is just how hard it could be. It was a masterpiece of design – visual, simulatory, managerial.
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You could see neighbourhoods prosper, see roads congest and collapse, watch buildings fade into cracked dereliction, or be rejuvenated by fresh investment. This was a game so clean and crisp, so immediate and detailed, even way back in the prehistory of 1994, that we knew things without having to ask. Even more crucially: it could all be understood at a glance. Games are more than the sum of their rules, and it's never truer than in the case of SimCity 2000. You might know what the game was about, or even grasp the mechanical programming that powered it, but you couldn't not understand how it worked without spending those hours at your desktop. This means that no one can understand quite how it works without experiencing building a city for themselves. Like so many great games, SimCity is what clever men call “computationally irreducible”. A butterfly beat its wings over there, and a deficit the size of the moon swelled up over here. It started out with a simple set of things we could do – build roads, zone land for commerce or residence – and yet the possibilities that emerged from even the smallest decisions were vast. SimCity was a fine example of the 'emergent' game scenario. It was that sudden, wondrous game, and the thing which threatened to consume hours, days, months, relationships, careers, lives. Once unearthed and installed, a city must be founded, expanded and maintained.Ģ000 managed to be as easy to use as a set of child's crayons, and yet abyssally deep – and the perfect scaffold for tactical imagining, like Chess, or Elite. Back in 1994 we couldn't help but worry about how close the industrial zones were to our suburban housing, or about how much we were spending on road maintenance, or subways, or airports. The isometric depth of this sequel dragged us outwards and upwards from the original SimCity, inspiring us to such an extent that that original compulsion to build and zone and budget seemed flat and parochial by comparison.Ģ000's rich spine of management systems and statistical paraphernalia induces the weird urge in all gamers to become tight-fisted local governors. This is the Sim game upon which all others rest, like resource-pecking vultures on the bones of some perfect Darwinian entity. No subsequent Sim-sequel has been able to capture SimCity 2000's primal management essence. If nothing else I think that 2000 captures the quintessential essence of a City game.
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This look back at SimCity 2000 invites the anger of fans of the subsequent SimCity games by claiming it was the best the series had to offer.
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In keeping with our Sim theme, I thought I'd publish this piece which was originally written in summer 2007 for PC Gamer UK's Long Play series.
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