Whilst on a family holiday to Wales last month we visited The Cardiff Story. In one room we found a table with a blank model of the city featuring only the River Taff. Beside the table were a pile of different blocks featuring a various assortment of buildings and landscape features. The idea was to build your own version of the city. My five year old son seemed quite happy to stick a school right next to a nuclear power station but I spend a good ten minutes trying to work out the best way of laying out the city. Keeping shops in the city centre far away from industrial factories, maintaining good transport links. Essentially, I was using the skills I had learned many year ago playing Sim City on the Super Nintendo.
Sim City was one of the first games I bought for our SNES (I say ‘our’ because I was forced to share a console with my older sister for the first year or so, she was annoyed when I conned our Dad into buying the Street Fighter 2 pack first). The high percentage the game had been given in Total Nintendo magazine made me curious, I had no experience of the PC version and I wasn’t old enough to consider the idea that this may be a scaled down console version of the game. This somewhat open minded approach probably gave rise to my vast enjoyment of the game. I proceeded to plough many hours into city building over the next few weeks.
Starting with a simple patch of land, often with a few trees and a river if you were lucky, your dreams of a sprawling metropolis begin. The three main zones were split into residential for housing, commercial for shops and industrial for factories but the first concern of your mayorship was how to power all of this which gave you the first big decision. Coal power was cheaper to buy than nuclear but would create a massive smog cloud over the sky, nuclear power was cleaner but more expensive and a disaster if the reactor blew. Once decided it was a case of starting small and laying down the first few zones, linking them with a few streets here and there. Small signs of life would spring up, tiny houses and factories alongside cars driving down roads. It was heartening and refreshing, a game that gave you the tools of creation rather than destruction.
Even at this early stage certain issues were already raised. Crime would still have to dealt with so building a police station was essential. Fire protection would be supplied by building your first fire station. Both of these services would take regular funds from the city coffers which in turn would require you to set the city’s tax rate. Like everything in Sim City, this was a balancing act, too much tax would mean your population would be slow growing as your city would not be an attractive place to work, too little and your funds would be low and investment would be sluggish. Once gaining a small amount of capital you could expand and make your desert outpost into a town adding a rail network for easier transport links, more factories to create jobs, more shops for your citizens to spend their money in and houses for them to live in. Later additions included parks, stadiums and even your own house. The joy of Sim City was looking at your creation from above and watching it grow, seeing everyday life pass by. There became a substantial sense of ownership, you remembered the day when this was all just a desert strip but now it’s a bustling city in which people lived and played. There was a major feeling of pride in what you had achieved.
For those who wanted a bit more of a challenge there was the ability to call on selection of disasters to destroy a part of all of your city. Floods would rage, fires would burn out of control and earthquakes would shatter all the buildings at its epicenter. It was up to you to budget for a recovery and bring the city back to the former glory. Other events were slightly more offbeat such as Bowser emerging from the water and stomping through your streets Godzilla style and aliens invading with a death ray. Getting your city back on its feet was both satisfying to play and boosted your approval ratings no end.
I spent a huge amount of hours playing Sim City and it also featured one of the first examples of unofficial co-op play I ever experienced when two friends and myself each took charge of one zone type in our city and wasted the next five hours arguing over funding and what should be built first. In a strange way it was like a teenage council meeting. I have tried playing the more recent editions of the series but Maxis took the idea of expansion too far and made the game far more complex than it really needed to be. My overbearing memory of Sim City 4 on the PC was building more and more water pumping stations as there never seemed to be enough to keep the taps running. It’s probably something they patched but I never bothered to update. The SNES version was ideally pitched and an unlikely favourite during my 16 bit days and as such remains on my top list to this day.
