SimCity also demonstrated a new way to conceive of video games. Along with its increasingly pretty and complex sequels (the 1994 SimCity 2000 is the one chosen for “Applied Design,” and a new version of the game has just been released), it sold over eighteen million copies, and was, as John Seabrook wrote in his 2006 New Yorker Profile of Wright, “arguably the single most influential work of urban-design theory ever created.”
It has no “end,” no plot, no set goal: you play until you are bored, or until your city seems to you to be perfect or maimed beyond repair.
#Simcity series#
You choose tax rates and ordinances from a series of menus, and try to balance traffic and property values and pollution and dozens of other factors on the way to creating a successful city-with the definition of “successful” rather up in the air. They can’t be sampled you must surrender to them.ĭesigned by Will Wright, who had made only a single previous game, and first released in 1989, SimCity casts the player as a slightly supernatural city planner, laying out roads and power plants and building zones in a simple, brightly colored interface with a distinct resemblance to MS Paint. This is about as satisfying as looking at pictures of food, but it is also in a perverse sort of way a real tribute: these games are still too big, too stubbornly new and strange and mysterious, to fit into a museum just yet. These games-most notably the immensely popular SimCity, as well as its lunatic homemade successor Dwarf Fortress-were deemed “too complex or too time consuming,” and are represented only by noninteractive video displays.
And some games weren’t allowed in at all.
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