SimCity: Will Wright's City in a Box

[jprzybyl]

I absolutely adore this blog. Each entry is incredibly detailed and well written. My favorite is the one on Nintendo's influence on the PC industry:

http://www.filfre.net/2016/04/generation-nintendo/

[gohrt]

That Nintendo walled-garden story reads like Steve Jobs's playbook for Apple Mac and iOS!

[cisstrd]

People who liked the old Sim City games might also like OpenTTD, a gplv2 licensed and heavily improved clone of the old Transport Tycoon Deluxe, it also includes Multiplayer. Under active development and also a nice community.

You are the manager of your own startup transport company and have to build infrastructure, manage finances, routes, build rail system and set up signals to manage your trains, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenTTD

https://www.openttd.org/en/about

[RankingMember]

OpenTTD is awesome, but it's really not the same without the original soundtrack.

I remember my friend getting both Simcity (MS-DOS) and Transport Tycoon for his birthday one year. We were super excited about Simcity, but that quickly waned once we learned to play Transport Tycoon. Such a great game.

[hashkb]

I, for one, thought SimAnt was one of the most fun games of my childhood. And SimTower... I have a coding interview modeled after it.

[thallian]

So many hours that I lost trying to optimize the lifts in SimTower. Loved the game.

[Ntrails]

I would like to try that out - if you're ok sharing?

[wlesieutre]

Some fun history on SimTower:

> After my lecture, a Maxis employee who shall remain nameless buttonholed me. "You guessed right," she said. "Sim Tower was built around a real elevator simulation program we bought from a Japanese guy."

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2150/the_designers_not...

[simcop2387]

I loved simant as a kid but tried to replay it when i was a teenager. I discovered then that the simulation was fairly broken and simplistic which kinda bummed me out, but I learned how to beat the game in <10 minutes. But other people have managed to get that even faster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1B24Vvik2I

[detritus]

SimAnt is the only game I can get to work on my Amiga1200, as it was installed on the HD - all the 3.5" disks I had otherwise have [obviously] rotted over the intervening 20+ years.

A great wee game - I always hoped they'd revisit the idea with an updated version. One day, perhaps!

[braythwayt]

SimTower was so fascinating as a problem.

[vityaz_]

Great read.

Jumping ahead a little: The Sim City 4 community is one of the better ones I've ever seen. 13 years after the release, and people are still releasing high quality mods and custom buildings. The community has kept the game alive for all these years, and made the SC4 experience many times better.

[erikb]

How do you feel about the new games like Cities Skylines? How would you rate it against SC4?

[gohrt]

Article forgot SimLife, the most complex but ultimately boring of all, but made for some fun animations of animals that looked like office furniture: http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/4996/SimLife.html

From the manual: "The family that Transmogrifies together eats flies together!"

[dergachev]

Also see the New Yorker's 2006 profile of Will Wright: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/11/06/game-master

[oneeyedpigeon]

The black-and-white Mac version looks so good - I wish I could play that. I got as far as downloading an old ROM image but can't quite get it in a format that 'Mini vMac' will accept :-(

[erikb]

Somewhere there must be a forum where people can help you with that. Or at least some Wisdom of the Ancients

https://xkcd.com/979/

[wetmore]

Really a very compelling telling of the story behind SimCity and its effect on the world.

[noir_lord]

When I was 10 (so 1990) I broke my foot which required 6 weeks off school (I wanted to go to school but the school wouldn't let me as it was considered unsafe).

I spent the entire 6 weeks playing SimCity on my old CGA XT, it is still one of my fondest memories of childhood and by the end of the 6 weeks I'd pretty much perfected that city.

[Cpoll]

>Wright shows off some of the RX-7’s gadgetry using the same rapid-fire, jargon-laden diction that journalists and tech-conference attendees would later come to know if not always love.

I was confused. Will's not the one talking in that video, I imagine it's the aforementioned Rick Doherty.

[sklogic]

Interesting perspective, I never looked at Trurl as a "god-like" being.

[krige]

This is an absolutely amazing read.

[D_Guidi]

posted here days ago without receive attention. happy to see that someone noticed this amazing article!

[andegre]

Speaking of SC4, has anyone been able to get it working on Windows 10?

What about OpenTTD on Windows 10?