SimCity is the Granddaddy and Grand Poohbah of city sims, and all sims for that matter. Designed by Sim-Lord Will Wright, who has over two dozen titles under his belt with the word "sim" in the name, SimCity is where it all started.

Actually, that's not entirely true. There was a component of Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984 that had a feature similar to SimCity, and Wright realized soon that the city construction was more interesting than the game he had created. And thus SimCity was born a few years later.

It is worth noting that when the Amiga version of the game was purchased in 1989 two disks came in the box. While most gaming sites report SimCity was a one-disk game, that is true. But the box contained two disks: a 512KB disk - which had 16 colors, and a 1MB disk - which had 64 colors.

Players build cities from scratch or hop into the middle of "scenario cities" which come fully loaded. Naturally, Tokyo with a red version of Godzilla is hard to resist a look! (see screenshots below)

Constant attention to the city is necessary to prevent total chaos from ensuing, and the AI for such a simple game, in code, is impressive to say the least. There's a reason why an entire franchise spanning three decades spawned from this game. It's good. Really good.

Back of the Box:

Design and Build the City of Your Dreams
Fight crime, unemployment and pollution. Control budget, transit and population. Create industry, shopping centers, parks, stadium, seaports and airports.

Pre-built cities include:
• Tokyo • San Francisco • Bern • Hamburg • Rio De Janeiro • Detroit • Boston

Control disasters - floods, earthquakes, fires, tornados, meltdowns and monsters.

Real-time graphics and demographic mapping keep you constantly informed.

SimCity includes maps of famous cities on disk, open to your design.

It's up to you to save the population, or engineer it's destruction.

SimCity is Alive!
SimCity is a model that works, but no toy train set ever looked this good! Lay roads and traffic moves. Supply electricity and smokestacks churn.

A SYSTEM SIMULATION FROM MAXIS

Screenshots