Retrospective: SimCity 2000 (or why the world’s energy problems will be solved by 2050)

When you are a child, the world is full of endless possibilities (it’s also full of asshole bullies and unfair rules, but never mind that.) And no game better embodied that world of possibilities than did SimCity 2000. Released in 1993, SimCity 2000 was the isometric 3D sequel to the original top-down SimCity and was the company’s biggest hit until The Sims came along in 1999. The idea was basic – you were the major of a blank patch of land (and water, if you so wished) and your job was to build a city, complete with power, water, services and entertainment for your new residents, who would flock to your city as soon as you zoned land for residential, commercial or industrial use.

SimCity 2000 seemed to predict a sunny future where we’d all eventually benefit from advances in technology, where political and police corruption were nonexistent and where a low student/teacher ratio meant a school automatically turned out A students who went on to fulfilling courses of study and careers.

Of course, there were still disasters.

For example

Disasters that you could start yourself from the disaster menu, and also from the magical debug menu that allowed you to generate mega-disasters like volcanoes and nuclear meltdowns as well as enough free cheat code money to rebuild right away.

If you wanted to take your game seriously, however, you were in for some planning. SimCity 2000 isn’t the most complicated game in the world, but it’s up there on the list, and to make your citizens happy you’ll have to track and alleviate high crime and heavy traffic, build enough fire departments and hospitals to keep people safe and walking around, provide schools, universities and libraries to educate your citizens and keep them from not getting stupid. Critical decisions such as whether to allow the construction of a military base mean balancing between the value of the military’s help in fighting disasters against higher crime and pollution where the base was built. City ordinances can also affect your city, with their own benefits and drawbacks.

Fortunately, you have a panel of advisers ready and willing to help you with your decisions. Unfortunately, they aren’t much help. Most of them just want full funding in their particular areas and will complain if you drop it.

Pretty sure this one isn’t real

One of the most interesting aspects of SimCity 2000 was its predictions of future technology. You had the option of starting your game in 1900, 1950, 2000 and 2050, but 1900 was the default (and the “real way” to play, as far as I’m concerned) perhaps in part because you got to see and take advantage of new technologies as they developed historically. Upon the building of the first airplanes, you get to build an airport. Your first nuclear plant is available in the 50s. But, of course, SimCity 2000 was only developed in 1993, so there are some technologies that are mere predictions – the most exciting of which is the fusion power plant, made available in 2050. SimCity‘s fusion plant can power about half of the entire map, is completely safe and, despite being the most expensive plant in the game, is also the most cost-effective. We should all hope Will Wright’s prediction is correct.

If you’ve played SimCity 2000, you’ll know just how much waste this screenshot depicts

SimCity 2000 also saw the advent of the arcology, a bizarre self-contained city of the future. The idea for the arcology didn’t come from SimCity, in fact – early design ideas were proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright and other architects, and real-life arcology-esque projects are planned for construction in the United Arab Emirates and Japan. Arcologies in SimCity 2000 are expensive and massively boost crime and potentially pollution, depending on the type you build, but they also give a major boost to your population – and to your tax base.

Despite these predicted advances in technology, though, your city’s local newspaper will always be completely stupid and nonsensical. It uses article templates with randomly generated words in certain spots, kind of like Mad Libs. Even so, SimCity‘s newspaper is still less of a joke than the Washington Times.

Yes, every story in the paper looks like this.

So, yeah. SimCity 2000 is a real classic. All my love for this game might stem from the fact that I played the hell out of it as a kid, but even without the nostalgia goggles on, it’s a legitimately great game. Not that I really need to convince everyone of that, since it sold about ten billion copies anyway and everyone seems to love it or at least pay it respect.

Sadly, though, the SimCity story doesn’t have a happy ending. SimCity 2000 was followed by SimCity 3000 in 1999 (sort of a graphical update of 2000 with not much else going for it, though it’s still good) and SimCity 4 in 2003, which was also good and legitimately felt pretty different from its 1993 ancestor. The series’ latest entry, however, was a disgrace. 2013’s SimCity looked amazing, but it was released full of bugs. Many fans were shocked at the fact that they were required to be connected to the internet to play the game in singleplayer mode. To add insult to injury, the SimCity servers fucked themselves upon launch and for a while nobody was able to play the game they’d just bought for 50 or 60 dollars. To add even more insult to injury, Maxis and EA apologized for all this by announcing the coming release of The Sims 4, which they promised wouldn’t be all glitchy and force to you be online constantly. A shitty SimCity game for a good Sims game. What a trade, huh? Some people might like it, but really, this drives me crazy. Not like I have much time left to play open-ended sandbox games anyway.

Perhaps not coincidentally, EA won The Consumerist‘s Worst Company in America award that same year. EA basically responded by saying “We have enough money to buy and sell you ten times over, so fuck yourself.” Which I suppose is fair.

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