Fake Cities, Real Lessons
How applicable those lessons are... different question.
I have always had a soft spot for the video game genre called city builders, which consist of exactly what it says on the tin: You build cities.
Although it is more accurate to say that I have always had a soft spot for the SimCity games than for city builders in general. Unfortunately, like everything Electronic Arts (EA) touches, the SimCity series is pretty much dead now, and it has been more than a decade since its latest full release (not an app).
It was replaced in the city builder hierarchy by Cities: Skylines, a game from Paradox Interactive. While Paradox (last I checked) retains much more respect in the gaming community than EA, how much of the difference it deserves is an open question.
What makes the old SimCity games—namely SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 4, all of which I have hundreds of hours with, possibly more in the case of 3000—so much better than Cities: Skylines, a game I have never played for more than 30 or 40 minutes at a time? And what is really different about Paradox compared to EA? Is corporate decay inevitable?
The King
My first SimCity experience came in the mid-90s at my grandmother’s house, where I think SimCity 2000 was bundled with Windows 95.
Something was immediately intriguing about the concept, but I was hopeless at the game. I’d start with however much money, build the power plant, the water system, the police station, the fire station…
If you’ve played these games before for any length of time, you already see the problem. See, pre-adolescent me naturally understood that things like hospitals and schools are a regular part of life. That kid did not necessarily understand budgetary outlays.
And so I’d build all that stuff, run out of money, and not have nearly enough of a tax base to get more money to build more stuff. My cities all died.
It’s not surprising that I wasn’t quite as obsessed as some people:
That said, I eventually figured things out. SimCity 2000 really is a beautiful game for its era.
My difficulties with 2000 notwithstanding, the game hooked me. I remember going to another kid’s house one time to play the Apple version of the game, and I remember nothing else about that kid except vaguely what he looked like. And, even when on my grandmother’s computer, there were always pre-built cities to destroy, at least.
When it came time for SimCity 3000, things weren’t so dire, because the new game had a mechanic that let you get away with providing services early on. Once your financial situation was catastrophic enough in 3000, you could build certain buildings that earned you money.
It wasn’t until I bought a strategy guide, the only such book I’ve ever purchased, that it really clicked that your city can’t sustain a school system in its first month. But at least in 3000 you could do that and wait for the dirty buildings to save you with cash.
Although EA is now a death sentence for any game (ahem Madden ahem), in the late 1990s, it was the competent company, while Maxis was a crumbling studio. EA not only didn’t ruin SimCity 3000, there is no SimCity 3000 without EA. Maxis was the one who sucked.
Now, of course, both Maxis and EA are either dead (Maxis appears to be a brand name at this point, not a separate institution) or a shell of themselves, but that seems to happen to most companies.
Although I was playing 2000 and 3000 when they were still recent iterations, I did not play SimCity 4 until much later. The 2003 game was an absolute resource hog and unplayable on the machines I had until much later (though that didn’t stop me from closely following online forums about its release). It’s also the most complicated of the games by far.1
But even SimCity 4 was nowhere near as resource-heavy or complicated as Cities: Skylines.
Forced Relocation
Despite the success of both SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4, EA did eventually kill the series after the disasters that were SimCity: Societies in 2007 and SimCity in 2013.
I played neither, and nor did a lot of people. They were bad enough games—see this, for example, but please never mind the author—that a new franchise entered the space.
Like SimCity 4, I had to wait for my computers to catch up to Cities: Skylines, which finally happened in 2020.
My SimCity days preceded EA’s fascination with microtransactions, but Paradox’s emphasis on downloadable content was completely mainstream by 2020. I still only have the vanilla version.
That vanilla version of the original 2015 Cities: Skylines game still runs $30, which is fine even for a decade-old game (although there is a sequel now). But if you want all of the 58 downloadable expansions? Try $350. It’s basically just a different flavor of microtransaction. But Paradox (again, last I checked) gets away with a lot of this stuff where EA does not.2
Skylines is the only game of theirs I’ve played—except a brief, free try at Stellaris—and neither particularly convinced me to widen the scope of my Paradox experience. Apologies to any fans.
Maybe I just lacked the context of childlike wonder I enjoyed with SimCity, but Skylines does not hold my attention. I’m sure there are plenty of kids out there who love Skylines but wouldn’t be able to get past SimCity 2000’s 1994 graphics. Oh boy, what they are missing.
Skylines is also different enough mechanically that I (subconsciously—until now) never found it worth the effort to catch up to all the differences. Still, I’d rather blame nostalgia… and Paradox.
Do They Even Work?
Since I grew up with it, SimCity was always just a game to me. But to others, it’s serious business, known to inspire people to become city planners. That doesn’t mean it’s beyond criticism.
Games need to present a simplified version of reality, of course, to even function. A game that didn’t do this would be reality itself, and even the most ambitious game designers like Will Wright could never try that.3
Several writers have latched onto SimCity’s shortcomings as a simulation. For example (from this article):
Wright’s vision imposed an old-school approach to city-building, influenced by Robert Moses and the Chicago school. For those early urban planners, and in “SimCity,” there were binary solutions to problems. To lower crime rates, build police stations. If people complain about traffic, build more roads. If you need space to build a freeway or a stadium, raze working-class neighborhoods.
For the record, I never liked razing built up areas.4
A blogger I’ve only come across in Google searches over the years related to this very topic, Jarrett Walker, had at least three posts critical of varying editions of SimCity: here, here, and here, although who cares about last one really as it’s just the 2013 version of the game.
Walker’s two main criticisms of the games are a lack of mixed use zoning and an unrealistic design of transportation systems. Rather tamer than you might expect when the title asks if the game makes people stupid. Yet, valid if the game intended to be a perfect simulation. Which it’s not.
And speaking of games not intended to be a perfect simulation…
The Sims
We’re moving a bit beyond the scope of this article, but I do want to take this detour and I’ll make it brief before we wrap up. The Sims is a far more popular game series than SimCity, which always bugged me more than it should. While I played the original Sims, I always considered it a bit of a bastard cousin to SimCity.
Which, if you listen to Will Wright, it kind of was. From the linked article: “‘I've always wanted to do a game involving architecture,’ he admits. ‘It has a lot of design symmetry to the ideas of SimCity - you must look at traffic patterns in a house, land use, and pollution.’
“‘It's what I like to call the Calvin syndrome,’ he says, referring to the mischievous, self-indulgent boy from the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. “So the answer is yes - you can have a voodoo family and starve the characters or have them fight,’ admits Wright.”5
When you put it that way, it makes sense that The Sims outperformed SimCity by every metric except how much nerdy weirdos like me enjoyed it. Still though.
Conclusion
Well, by now you can probably guess which game series I’d play given the choice between SimCity, Cities: Skylines, and The Sims.6
But what about you? Do you have any experiences and/or preferences with these games (or companies)?
Final note: So, this was another post that was largely constructed before this Substack ran out of its initial gas, forcing me to try and snatch from the ether the last gasp of thoughts I was putting together a year ago. I’m not sure I made it coherent enough in the end, but hopefully it read as more than just the in(s)ane ramblings of one individual experience.
And despite that, it had the most obvious problem in any of the games (as far as I know): traffic did not scale. EA eventually put out an entire expansion to solve this, but even then the mod community did—and is doing, actually—a lot of its own work to turn the traffic simulation competent.
Although if the feedback to Cities: Skylines 2—which finally came out in 2023 (apologies to anyone who bought all $350 worth of the original expansions)—is anything to go by, this discrepancy seems to be diminishing.
He would, however, come up with the only marginally less grandiose idea of a simulation of everything, but I never played Spore.
At least for the purposes in the article (highways and stadiums). I would follow the strategy guide and destroy lower densities for higher densities. Let’s just assume people moved back in after that.
If you want me to quote you, a Calvin and Hobbes citation helps.
With apologies again to any Spore fans, a game which I’ve now spent two footnotes acknowledging for shade purposes and nothing more.