From SimCity to, well, SimCity: The history of city-building games

Cities are everywhere. Billions of us live in them, and many of us think we could do a better job than the planners. But for the past 26 years dating back to the original SimCity, we've mostly been proving that idea false.

We've traveled through time and space to build on alien worlds, in ancient civilizations, and in parallel universes—laying down roads, zoning land, playing god, and cheating our way to success in a vain attempt to construct a virtual utopia. And now, here, I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour through the history of the city-building genre—from its antecedents to the hot new thing.

The early years and an empty plot

While extremely limited in its simulation, Doug Dyment's The Sumer Game was the first computer game to concern itself with matters of city building and management. He coded The Sumer Game in 1968 on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 minicomputer, using the FOCAL programming language. David H. Ahl ported it to BASIC a few years later retitled as Hamurabi (with the second 'm' dropped in order to fit an eight-character naming limit).

The Sumer Game, or Hamurabi, put you in charge of the ancient city-state of Sumer. You couldn't build anything, but you could buy and sell land, plant seeds, and feed (or starve) your people. The goal was to grow your economy so that your city could expand and support a larger population, but rats and the plague stood in your way. And if you were truly a terrible leader your people would rebel, casting you off from the throne.

The game captured many a player's imagination, and several more expanded versions soon emerged, with different localities but the same core systems. Of these, George Blank's 1978 Apple II game Santa Paravia and Fiumaccio was perhaps the most notable, as it introduced several types of buildings (or "public works") that you could buy/construct.

With Santa Paravia, most of the elements of a city-building game were in place. You had taxes, buildings, disasters, population growth and decay, approval ratings—even a map of your kingdom that displayed at the end of each turn. But the most crucial ingredient of the genre was missing (and no, it wasn't that the game was still turn-based). Santa Paravia felt as though you were playing a computerized board game, not experimenting with wooden blocks and model train sets.

That final ingredient took several more years to gestate. In the meantime, game development legend Don Daglow's 1982 two-player Intellivision game Utopia further polished the existing formula by putting it in real time and making it entirely graphical rather than partly or wholly text-based. More than ever before, in Utopia you had to think quickly about where to spend your money and how to balance population growth against factors like income, infrastructure, natural disasters, and the threat of attack. And as the name suggested, Utopia was all about proving Sir Thomas More wrong and developing the perfect, harmonious society (an impossible goal, true to More's writing).

However, the city-building genre as we know it today came about by accident. While developing his first commercial game, Raid on Bungeling Bay, a shoot 'em up released for the Commodore 64 in 1984, Will Wright noticed that designing city maps for the player to fly over in a helicopter was more fun than actually controlling the helicopter and blowing stuff up (i.e., playing the game). He began expanding his world-building tools as an experiment. He applied various urban planning and computer modeling theories, implementing whatever ideas he'd been reading but especially drawing from MIT professor Jay Forrester's work on system dynamics.

After a year, Wright had a new game, though no publisher was willing to put out SimCity (or Micropolis, as he called it at that point). Wright later formed Maxis with businessman Jeff Braun and self-published SimCity in 1989. It was released initially for Mac and Amiga and then soon after for all the other personal computing platforms, followed by a Super Nintendo port in 1991.

SimCity was the virtual city-building dream fully realized, and it laid the blueprint for all that came later. Part mayor, part urban planner, and part omniscient god, you were given a large empty city plot with procedurally generated terrain features arranged on a grid and a palette of MacPaint-inspired building tools with which to fill it. Beginning in the year 1900, you had to build some kind of power plant and connect it to three types of zoning blocks—residential (for housing, religious centers), commercial (for local business), and industrial (for export manufacturing). You could also set taxes for each zone and build police and fire stations, parks, stadiums, roads, railways, and, at certain population thresholds, also seaports and airports.

You had to balance the budget (unless you cheated) and the effects all of these buildings had on each other as well as the larger system of population growth or decay and citizen happiness. And if it all got to be too much for you, you could always unleash wave after wave of disaster upon your town like a child at the end of his playtime joyfully tearing down his tower of blocks. Floods, earthquakes, plane crashes, fires, tornadoes, and amphibious monsters wreaked havoc on cities in what would become a hallmark of the series.

SimCity had no explicit goals. It gave you some interesting systems and tools to play with and let you go to town. Playing SimCity helped develop our understanding—or mental model, as Will Wright calls it—of the urban environment that so much of the world's population lives in, and it took some of the mystery out of why urban planners make the seemingly bizarre decisions that they do.

If you thought you could improve traffic flows by making the roads five times wider and staggering residential blocks with commercial and industrial ones, you could try it and see (spoiler: it doesn't work—traffic always expands to fill road capacity, and such a zoning policy would lower land values and increase pollution). If you believed a nearby rail line was increasing crime in your area, you could model your city in the game and experiment with changes.

SimCity was a revelation in the games market. It was arguably the first non-twitchy game to enter the public consciousness, and it earned plaudits from such bastions of old culture as The New York Times and Time, as well as specialist games and technology press. It transcended games of the time to become a part of popular culture, of all levels of education, and of the very field it simulated—many urban planners used it to test existing ideas and to inspire new ones.

To the moon and to the past

Maxis soon released graphics sets that converted the appearance of SimCity into historical, fantasy, or future cities, but the game itself was unaffected by these. Those who were itching for city builders that really embraced the past and future didn't have to wait long, however.

Wesson International took input from NASA contractors in designing 1990 lunar colony simulator Moonbase. Faced with a barren lunar surface, unblemished but for the occasional crater, you had to consider such issues as oxygen and water supplies and heating/cooling while assembling a network of sleeping quarters, research labs, power generators, and other buildings. If SimCity was an ode to contemporary American sprawl, Moonbase was an epigram of future restraint—of a time when we will build and spend only what is necessary because life is fragile and prosperity can turn to struggle at any moment. (It was also fun to watch spacesuit-clad people drive moon buggies around on the roads).

Celestial Software's Utopia: The Creation of a Nation (1991) made a less concerted effort to adhere to realism. Its simulation concerned itself with building a colony on a new planet without getting destroyed by aliens who seemed kinda pissed that you'd invaded their world. You advanced from stage to stage, spreading your tendrils around the planet and building mini-cities (or trying—the interface was horrible) while finding a way to produce oxygen and energy and maintaining a large enough army to fend off alien attacks.

Impressions Software was first to apply the core SimCity formula to history, and it chose the most obvious subject matter. Caesar (1992) made you a provincial governor in the time of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. Challenged to uphold the Roman tradition of top-notch city planning and needing to curry favor from Augustus, you amassed a network of straight roads and reservoirs threaded through and around houses, workshops, marketplaces, schools, theaters, and a staggering number of bath houses.

Caesar was far more than a reskinned, muddier-looking SimCity. But it incorporated a key trapping of ancient Rome: war. You had to conscript plebeians for duty to help defend against barbarian attacks, and you had to pay them fairly or they'd revolt against you. Your people would also turn against you if you failed to build everything they wanted within walkable distance from their homes, and you'd be "promoted" to a more challenging map once your city reached a certain standard. This meant you had much less room to experiment than in SimCity, though the extra layer of "game" served as a strong motivator and provided a clear metric against which to measure your skill.

The Settlers (1993 on Amiga, 94 on PC), or Serf City: Life is Feudal, as it was called in its initial US release, carried this tiered progression system further with a set of 50 missions, each more challenging than the last. The Settlers was a very different kind of city builder, mind you.

In The Settlers, city planning took on a greater sense of purpose. Buildings weren't related to each other through abstract zones of influence but rather through the resources that they processed. You needed a farm to grow and harvest wheat that could be sent to a windmill to turn it into flour so that the baker could make bread to feed to the iron, coal, gold, and granite miners (they could also eat fish or pork). Even construction relied upon a forester to plant trees that a woodcutter would chop down so that a sawmill could make boards. Oh, and you needed a toolmaker to produce appropriate tools for everyone.

All city-building games are fun to just watch and observe, but The Settlers was especially delightful for these charming little dudes who cheerily skipped along their slice of the road network carrying resources one unit at a time as though they had all the time in the world.

It was especially heartwarming to admire them in conflict. If your expansions brought you in contact with the border of a rival, you could fight for more territory. This involved a group of your soldiers waltzing out of a tower/castle/hut and knocking politely on the door of a rival military building. The soldiers queued up in an orderly fashion and one after another engaged in a round of combat until only one side was left standing. Defeated soldiers wouldn't die, either—they'd just sulk away with a few dents in their armor.