Trendsetters: The 10 Most Significant Games
8/26/2008 6:16 PM | 9 Comments | Page 8 of 10
Steve Kent
Status: Thank you Mario, but the status message is in another castle!
SimCity(Maxis, originally for Macintosh and Amiga computers and later everywhere, 1989)
While making the game,
Raid on Bungeling Bay, designer Will Wright threw in a map editor that let players create islands. In later interviews, he told reporters that he enjoyed making islands more than running missions. This led him to rethink gaming. What he came up with was
Micropolis, a game in which players built cities. By the time
Micropolis was released in stores it had a new name, however:
SimCity.
"
SimCity is significant not only for spawning a new genre, but for reversing the way we expected videogames to be," says Sid Meier, who, as the creator of
Civilization and
Railroad Tycoon, is arguably one of the most significant game designers in history. "Up to the release of
SimCity, we were blowing things up, destroying things, shooting things. Conflict and destruction were fundamental to computer games and here was a game where you built things and it was satisfying... and it wasn't a competitive game."
In
SimCity, players designed a city and attempted to manage its growth. Every move in
SimCity brought about consequences. Adding a pro sports team would bring new citizens, but it might also result in a rise in crime causing some citizens to leave. And then there were catastrophes such as earthquakes and attacks from giant monsters.
SimCity was a major best-seller that opened the way for successors (
SimEarth,
SimFarm, and eventually
The Sims) and competitors such as
Railroad Tycoon and
Populous.
"
SimCity inspired
Civilization and many other games that took that building approach," says Meier. "It expanded our horizons about what games could be and expanded our horizons. It certainly began the whole God-game genre and encouraged a lot of designers to think, 'Hey, maybe my idea could work.'"
