Nuclear power is your friend...unless it explodes on you.

Portable Cities

SimCity was a pretty demanding game on hardware back in the day. But now, it's hard to believe that the total program weighs in at a miniscule 996 kilobytes. By comparison, SimCity 4, the latest game in the franchise, ships on two CD-ROMs. You could fit more than 1,200 copies of the original SimCity on those two discs!

The original SimCity is now so portable that it's been ported over to the Palm OS, though you have to purchase the program. And if you don't have a PDA, you can still play SimCity Classic at the official SimCity Web site, since Maxis has translated the game into a Java application. All you need is a Java-enabled browser (Netscape is not supported). You also need to register, but it's free.

Don't be put off by the primitive graphics. To a number of SimCity fans, the original game remains the most beloved. Yes, later SimCity games added better graphics and greater functionality, but at the cost of increased complexity and hardware requirements. But SimCity Classic retains the streamlined gameplay and elegant gameplay mechanics that made SimCity one of the greatest games of all time.

In SimCity, the sims just don't believe in mass transit.

Before SimCity arrived in 1989, computer games had to be about beating something. Save the world, defeat the evil foozle, shoot down a MiG fighter, or score the winning touchdown; there had to be some kind of conflict to be resolved. In an era before Jerry Seinfeld proved that you could make a hit "about nothing," no one could fathom that someone would want to make a game that had no goal, let alone anyone wanting to play it.

And then Will Wright came along. He was developing a 1984 action game called Raid on Bungeling Bay when he noticed something. In the game, you fly an attack helicopter over an enemy city. But Wright realized that he was more interested in exploring the layout of the city than in destroying the enemy. Inspired, Wright studied urban planning and incorporated what he had learned into a game. But when he shopped it to prospective publishers, no one would bite. They liked his ideas but told him to turn it into an actual game that you could win. Unable to find a publisher, Wright and business partner Jeff Braun set up their own company, Maxis, to publish SimCity. And the rest, as they say, is history. SimCity would become the first huge computer game hit, selling millions of copies, garnering tons of mainstream media attention, and spawning no fewer than three sequels and an army of clones and imitations. Sid Meier cited SimCity as the inspiration to make Civilization, and SimCity made Wright wealthy enough to pursue another idea called The Sims, the most popular and successful computer game ever.

Of course, none of this would have come about if SimCity had not been outrageously addictive and well designed. The gameplay is deceptively simple at first: Build a road, zone some neighborhoods for homes and businesses, then sit back and watch as the sims move in. It's the next best thing to being god. But just when you're beginning to think there's nothing to it, your sims start demanding things like housing, less traffic, jobs, low taxes, police and fire coverage, stadiums, and parks. At this point, you've already spent your initial capital, so you're dependent on tax revenue to keep everything going. But to keep tax revenue flowing, you've got to keep the sims happy. But to keep the sims happy, you've got to spend money. SimCity captures the vicious cycle of urban planning in a remarkably fun and challenging way. Unlike in real life, you don't have to deal with lawsuits, angry citizens' groups, or armies of lawyers. And if things do get frustrating, you can always vent your anger by unleashing an earthquake or tornado on your city's denizens. Or if you're really hacked off, you can even send in a Godzilla-like monster to flatten the place. Urban planning has never been quite so much fun.

SimCity was a hit with parents and educators as well. Of course, it helped that SimCity dealt with such familiar subject matter. Your parents might not know the difference between an orc and a troll, but they do know about good schools, congested traffic, and neighborhood crime rates. SimCity was a game whose subject matter literally struck close to home. Educators loved SimCity because it taught kids about urban planning and the give-and-take compromises that make up society.

But most of all, SimCity is a game that serves as a framework for your imagination. Will Wright once told us that he's amazed at how much emotional value people place in their cities. To him, the game is basically a bunch of mathematical models. But to the people who play the game, it's the utopian city of their dreams, the place where they wish they could live and raise a family. SimCity is the quintessential software toy and one of the most influential and important computer games ever made.

It's hard to describe just how groundbreaking the original SimCity was for its time. I was still in high school when I got my copy of SimCity, and I was so stunned by how amazing it was that I told some of my classmates. They were so intrigued, that a bunch of them, including jocks I never, ever hung out with, came over to my house after school and watched as I built my city. They were enraptured. It was like nothing they had ever seen. They literally just sat there for hours in a quiet sort of awe. To this day, I've never seen any other game have anywhere close to that effect.