Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 71: SimCity

Episode Date: August 1, 2016

In an era of high scores and game overs, Bay Area developer Will Wright's fascination with urban planning led to an experience completely unique to our medium: a video game with no win state. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Mikel Reparaz, and Kat Bailey as the crew traces the history of SimCity from its brilliant roots to its unfortunate decline, and ponder just how much product Will Wright's cartoon avatar needs to keep his green afro so bouncy and manageable. Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week on Retronauts, we reticulate every spline. Hello, everybody. Hello, everybody. Welcome to a brand new episode of Retronauts. I'm your sometimes host, Bob Mackie. Who else is here today? Hi, I'm Kat Bailey, and I am not reticulating splines at this moment. I don't even know what that means. I still don't, but we won't find out in this episode.

Yes. Who else is here? I'm Jeremy Parrish, the other sometimes host, and I've found that reticulans have no spines. I don't know what that means, but we'll move on. Who else is here today? I'm Michael Rappares, and I will stop at nothing to learn the origin of Porn Tips Gazzardo. Okay, you must explain that, Michael. That is a cheat code that gets you like all the money in SimCity 2000.

Oh, yes, that old code. And I have never been able to figure out where does that come from. Was there a guy named Gazardo who is giving them tips on porn tips? I have no idea. I know one of the cheat codes in Duke Nukem 3D had the word cornholio in it. I can't imagine where that was from. It gives you a peek into the window of the mentality of 3D ROMs at the time. But we're not here to talk about cornholio today.

That's on my spinoff podcast. We're here to talk about SimCity. The Sim City series, which kind of fell off a cliff a few years ago with a really unfortunate installment that has its bright moments, but still not the best way to carry forth the game's legacy. But we're going to talk about the good times for the most part in this episode. But first, I did want to talk about the creator of SimCity, a little guy named Will Wright. Actually, I'm not sure he's a little, very little, six inches tall. Yes, he's actually the world's smallest man. I haven't been in my pocket right now, honestly.

Oh, man, no wonder he wouldn't email me back. Actually, I never emailed him. So, Willow Ray, born in 1960, he kind of like just immediately became like a super designer after his first title, which was the Broderbun title, Raid on Bungling Bay. I don't know how to say that. Bunggling. I always said it bungling. Me too. I thought it was Bungling Bay.

Yeah, I think the, uh, the joke is a bungling. The Japanese, uh, katakana on the Famicom box, I know this, says bunga ring. Bungaling, okay. Bungaling. It's funny because I found this out through research, the bungling empire was a, the bad thing. guys in Broder Bun games. Like they were the constant villains. And this is essentially an overhead shooter that tasks the player with blowing up six factories on this big map with their helicopter while fending off counterattacks. But what's important about this game is that it contains the roots

of SimCity's premise because over time the factories would naturally grow. They would develop roads. They would develop better technologies. And if you didn't take them out in time, they would develop countermeasures against you that could blow you out of the sky. Has anyone ever played this game? It seems extremely primitive. It's a 1984 Commodore 64 game, I believe. No, nobody. No, but I'll get to it on good intentions before too long. Oh, that's right. There's a Nintendo port of this game. Yeah, I forgot about that. Yeah, I mean... And it was released, I think, at the same time as Load Runner, which I believe they also said, yes, the bad guys in Load Runner, they're bungling. They're bungling. Even though that wasn't in the Japanese version. Oh, so they're also bunglings as well. Yeah, you're like the monks and the PC version became the bungling empire in the NES version.

They've come a long way. So, yeah, basically. Basically, after doing this, like, Willow right has, well, I need to explain who Wilwright is. Based on, I've done a ton of research about him, he seems like a guy, and he'll admit this, he's a guy who gets really, really interested in topics, learns everything there is to know about that topic and then moves on to the next thing. He's, like, obsessed with learning, obsessed with knowledge. And basically, he started playing around with this tool for Radon Mungling Bay, an editor.

He started developing it as a toy you can tinker with. Like, how can I make this into a simulated city, if you will? Like, he was really interested in urban planning at the time. He was really interested in learning how different social systems work together in, like, a giant, like, I guess, machine of people. And this eventually turned into SimCity. It's a little more complicated than that, though, because he tried to sell this idea to people. But the idea of a game you couldn't win was just too crazy for any publisher. Like, you just play in this world and that's it.

Like, there's no end state. There's no score. I mean, this was the mid-80s. How will people know when to trade their copies in? Exactly, yeah. So, I mean, that should be considered a benefit to a game you can't win. But still, it was a very tough sell. But he meant a Bay Area entrepreneur named Jeff Braun in the mid-80s.

And Braun encouraged him to go ahead with the game and the two-formed Maxis in 87 to develop and publish Sim City. It was such a strange and weird idea that no one would publish Sim city. And it basically created the Maxis Empire who would go on to create the Sims. I think arguably the more popular Will-Wright franchise, I think, had more longevity. there's still the Sims. There's no more SimCity anymore. But again, SimCity does reflect as a person. It does reflect his politics. He's very pro-mass transit being a Bay Area guy. And he's also anti-Nuke being a Bay Area guy. So those messages come through loud and clear in SimCity for sure. Foundational game designer, maybe one of the five most significant,

maybe 10 most significant? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it is very rare for someone to create two genres, you know, in and of themselves. Arguably, you could say the Sims had precedence and they kind of did, but what what Wright did with it was much, much more different than little computer people. Was Will Wright in that, can video games make you cry at for EA? I don't think so. It's been a while since I've seen that. But, yeah.

Well, I know that he was heavily influenced by several of the people who were in there, including Danielle Bunton and people like that. Yeah, yeah, I have to go back. And maybe I'll check that up before I post this episode. But, yeah, like, I believe the scenarios were added to the game to make it more marketable where it's like you are dropped into this setting. There's a problem. You need to address it. And then if you address it before the time limits up, you win.

So there are some, like, I guess, levels of SimCity. But really, it is essentially about creating a city being the mayor for life and, you know, just messing with this world and hopefully, you know, making a productive city. Not just the mayor for life. The mayor for all eternity. Exactly. You're a time lord. You're beyond time and space. That's true.

with your, yeah, it's weird that you cannot be deposed in any way in SimCity. Maybe you can. You're a benevolent dictator. I hope so. I hope so. So, kind of runs against his progressive views, doesn't it? I don't know if he's progressive. I mean, there was a scandal because he donated to McCain's

campaign, but in terms of politics, it's really hard to nail down Will Wright's politics because things that he creates seem to not be an expression of conservative values. Like, I feel like the Sims, it is like a very capitalistic message, but it feels satirical in that, like, everything you're doing is like, what is the most

money-making choice? Everything must be the most money-making choice. I think Will Wright is too smart to participate in the current, you know, like political structure. He's above it. He's outside of it, I think, and maybe he is a progressive in that way, like, where he's not, like, I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican, but I've never really been able to pin him down. You think he's feeling the burn? I think he might be feeling the burn. My favorite thing about Will Wright was that at every talk he would give a Russian space minute where he would tell you about an ill-fated Russian space mission. He was just that kind of guy. Will Wright is that kind of guy.

And I do want to go over his life after some city just to tell you what he's up to now. So, of course, after The Sims, he went on to make Spore, which unfortunately did not create a third genre of games, a third like new brand. It kind of failed miserably after a lot of hype, a lot of, you know, a lot of bad ideas maybe. Yeah, I was at the GDC presentation where that was introduced. Like, I went not assuming anything interesting was going to be shown, and it was just, like, exploding my mind. Then the game itself turned out to be kind of, but the idea there was so good. Yeah, I totally agree, and I feel that it's unfair to chastise will write for not creating the third most brilliant idea in the universe. Because, like, who in this world has created both Sim City and the Sims?

Two ideas that important. I mean, like, I feel like... Shiger Miamoto. I mean, he is up. there with Shigura Miyamoto in terms of just creating forms of expression for video games. Will Wright was smart enough that he would do, he would make games that people can even really conceive of. I mean, the idea of the Sims, and maybe this is jumping ahead, but the idea of the Sims was like, you're living your life? Why would you do this in a game? I don't understand.

And it was, I guess, kind of a tough sell, but for a long time it was the highest selling game ever. Yeah, and I mean, with all of the different iterations, if you add them all up, I'm sure it probably I was going to say, I think, you know, Spore is probably his highest profile failure, but, I mean, he did a lot of games that kind of went nowhere. Exactly, yeah. I mean, you know, did Sim Ant ever get a sequel? No. I don't think so, no. So you had Sim Ant, Sim Earth, Sim Life was one that I played a lot as a kid.

Oh, wow. Protospor. Okay. Where you are creating various life forms and tampering with their DNA. Sim Earth was kind of in that way, too, right? That was more about the Gaia theory, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. And I believe, I mean, I did play Sim Earth, and it just baffled me.

It was not as straightforward as SimCity. It did not have the touchstones of, like, I've lived in a city. I know what roads are. I know what zones are. I know, like, people have to go to work and things like that. But Sim Earth, it was just like a lot to take in at once, I think. I played that just a little bit on a friend's computer. And I don't remember the game.

I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. But at the time, it was like 1991, 92. And he had this, like, crazy high-end. Macintosh. And I was just like, what a cool computer. Everything's so beautiful. That's all I remember. Okay. Well, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of some games that aren't memorable, like Michael said. But the thing is about Maxis, and we'll go into more about Maxis soon, but I feel like they were always trying to get away from SimCity, but nothing else they made ever caught on. So they would be forced to make a new sequel to get more money to fund things that

would never take off. Like, again, Sim Earth, Sim Life, Sim Health, Sim Farm, Sima Ants. Sim Tower. Sim Tower. That's actually a Ute's Cytto game. Yeah, Ute's Tower. But they were licensing thing and sticking Sim onto them too just to be like we need to make more things.

But again, I feel like he was always tethered to Sim City until the Sims came out and that was a new thing to work on for him. So anyways, after Spore, that was a bit of a digression, but after Spore he went on to form the stupid fun club in Berkeley where it was basically just a bunch of millionaires

building battlebots, which sounds like the ultimate way to retire. Just like, I'm going to build fun robots that kill each other in like a warehouse in Berkeley. Like, that seems amazing. Periodically pops up at, like, conventions and conferences and that kind of thing just to talk. Yeah, and he's still a brilliant guy.

I mean, he's not as invested in making video games. In fact, the last thing he made, and I was like, what is Will Wright up to now? So I did some Googling. And the last news stories were circulating maybe around a year ago, May of 2015, where it's like, he's producing this new social media app called Thread. And it's this platform that lets you stitch together pictures and put word bubbles on them to make, like, comic books. But I did a search for it on iOS, and it doesn't exist any. anymore. So I have a feeling it didn't take off. Did it ever exist? Had it actually launched?

I think it did launch. I mean, I was reading about people using it and stuff like that, not just in like a beta or whatever you would call that on iOS. But, uh, yeah. I last saw him in 2013 at the Gamespeak conference, which is a conference put on by Venture Beat. And he was actually interviewing the founder of wargaming.net because he was a big world of tanks fan, which he described as a first person shooter for old guys. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, he always wanted to do, uh, play. Plain games and things like that. Well, right. He was still a gamer, you know, even now. It's just like he's, he's an inveterate nerd, and I respect that. Yeah, for sure.

And so eventually the Stupid Fun Club folded because I guess you eventually get bored of building killer robots as a billionaire. And then he went on to this new venture. What's that? Oh, that folded. It's no longer around anymore. And I feel bad because it's like literally a 10-minute walk from my apartment. And so I could just be like, hey, billionaires.

Can I have a cool robot to play with? What's he doing now? I don't know. Like, 2015 was our last well-write update. So, yeah. And usually with these series overviews, I'd like to go into the influences of the creator. But with Will Wright, these ideas sort of like just sprung out of his brain. Like there was nothing like SimCity before SimCity.

Again, it's very rare to see these presidents set without there being influences. I mean, he was so early on in the game, right? It was the early 80s. I mean, everything was so new. Yeah, it was still possible to create new genres and things like that. Exactly. And so it was very much that proto soup where games were coming out. and he happened to be right in the middle of that. And I do recommend a lot of my research came from an article on GameSpot from, I believe, 1999.

It's called Simply Divine, the story of Max's software written by Jeff Keely. Unfortunately, you cannot actually find it via GameSpot. You have to search for the Wayback Machine. If you just search for the article title, it might pop up. But it is an invaluable resource in learning about the history of Maxis, their ups and their downs. And it was written right before the Sims came out or right before the Sims was entering production. And it's like, the epilogue is like, there's this weird idea called Doll House. Will it ever work?

And Doll House eventually became The Sims. I guess that was the working title. So yes, yes, it did work. It worked very well for All right. There was one influence. I already mentioned Danielle Button. Oh, yeah, for sure. There was also pinball construction set by Bill Budge, which Will Wright specifically cited as an influence at a GDC talk last year or maybe the year before.

I mean, pinball construction set, you're building stuff. Yeah. And he was fascinated with games where you built. And I assume Mule was an influence just because it simulated economies and things like that, correct? Okay, yeah. So before we jump into the games, I'm just curious, like, what is your relationship with SimCity? I'll go last, Kat, like, how did you find out about it? What did it activate in your brain? Like, how do you feel about the series?

Just let me know. Well, SimCity was always just kind of around, right? Because it was on Super Nintendo. It was kind of like Carmen San Diego. But I did not play it on console. Instead, a friend gave me a pirated copy, as tends to happen in the early 90s with PC games. And it actually was the last, this was SimCity 2000. And this was the last game, actually, that my dad played seriously.

Because my dad was actually a gamer when I was growing up. He had an Atari and everything, that's how I got into games. And he discovered SimCity 2001 weekend and basically did not leave the computer for the entire weekend. It will do that to you. Yeah, so I would like keep popping in to like come play a game and there'd be my dad like in a rope being just sitting there staring at the computer playing SimCity 2000. And then it was after that he basically swore off games. He said, nope, too addictive. Don't have enough time for this anymore.

I'm done. He wanted a productive life. But man, did he love SimCity 2000? I love SimCity 2002. I played it a lot. So after that I played SimCity 3,000. Like Emily, my like partner and I in Japan, we built a city. in SimCity 3000.

Like, we were just kind of like working together, putting everything together. That was fun. And then I never played four, but I did, I don't think I reviewed the new one, but that was the last SimCity game I played, and it was unfortunate. Cool. So how about you, Michael? How do you feel about SimCity? Where did you find it?

You know, I first saw, you know, PC-owning friends playing it when I was relatively little, like in junior high, and thought it was kind of boring. and then SimCity 2000 came along with the isometric view and I cheated like crazy through that just to like give myself all the money and then like build all the weird things that you only unlock after hours of play like I don't think Will Wright would be against that though

like he wants you to play in this sandbox like I think the gaminess of the game is something he just is it's just like it's forced upon him you know he just wants you to have fun in this world of systems I'm sorry go ahead yeah but my connection to it is kind of weird in high school and early college, I was trying to create a fake religion that I called Brink Femborgism. Wow.

And it was, I had this whole fiction about like, yes, this Viking child in the Middle Ages was abducted by some sort of intergalactic ogre and taken to another dimension called Nith. And so I started to just to build up Nith in Sim City 2000. What's this religion called? Brink Femborgism. I'm a Femborgite. You have your first disciple. My first actual convert after. This is not on the internet anywhere, is it?

It was on GeoCities for a while. I hope it's gone. I feel that way about my GeoCities page. Jeremy, I feel like you told me earlier you're afraid of holding public office, and that's why I didn't play SimCity. Yeah, that's right. No, I mean, I've farted around a little bit with some city games, but I've never really gotten into any kind of simulation like this.

And I'm asking myself why, because I like that. the concept of these games, but I guess when it comes to playing video games, stuff like SimCity, Minecraft, that sort of thing, just it doesn't appeal to me very much, you know, as something I want to invest time in because if I play a game, someone else's creation, I want something kind of structured with, you know, real goals and maybe a story or something. And if I'm going to create something, I'd rather actually create something, you know, and spend that energy and effort into making. making something like artwork or writing or something like that.

That sounds kind of pretentious, I think, but I'm really just kind of asking myself, like, yeah, what is it about these games that fails to grab me? And I really think that's it. I just, I can't invest myself in creating something virtual like that. I need something more tangible. Yeah, you want your effort to reflect something. Yeah. So, like, I, you know, don't think less of people who enjoy SimCity. Like, it's cool.

I think it's a really interesting and unique and potentially addictive concept, but like that civilization, populace, I just doesn't, like, when I sit down to it, I'm just like, no. I see. Well, as for me, like, I feel, I'm sure a lot of our other listeners found it this way, but I first played the Super Nintendo version. And I think this is, I mean, of course, I wanted to play. Super Mario World and stuff like that.

But the Super Nintendo's launch lineup and the games after that were so different than everything else I was seeing. The idea of SimCity, just the idea alone sold me on it, just seeing it in Nintendo Power. Like, I've never played anything like this before and I have to play it. So I got that version. I was just obsessed with it.

I played it every day. And then my friend had a computer and just playing SimCity 2000 on his computer made me think, like, we need a computer in our house. Like, I need to play this game every day. And from then on, I played every installment, even the later one. And, like, I've always loved this series, and that's why I'm doing this episode, basically, like, just to talk about the ups and the downs and what games I think stand out the most. Wasn't the Super EniS version adapted by Nintendo EAD internally?

Yes, I think so, yeah. And we'll talk a bit about that one. That's pretty unusual. Like, they don't do that. Yeah. Are there any other Western games they've done that with? No, I mean, you know, they collaborated with Argonaut for Starvox. That's true, yeah.

I can't think of a Western developed and created game that Nintendo said, oh, yes, we're going to do our version of. of this. We're going to, you know, build it for our system. Did they have anything to do with the Super Nintendo version of Populus? No, that was done by, I can't remember. Yeah, they didn't work on that. Yeah, I mean, I can see this idea like, I'm sure it was not just the popularity of some city that made Nintendo want. And I'm sure, like, Miyamoto, Tesika, people like that, they saw the ideas in this

game as something completely brilliant and new and something that they needed to put on their system to show, like, our ideas are great, Willow rights ideas are great. we want to make this SNES, a 16-pit world, just like full of these great new ideas you've never seen before. And I think that's why it fits so perfectly with that at a launch lineup. Yeah, and SimCity was, what, 1989? So the game was pretty new and, like, kind of cutting edge for PCs. So having that on their console gave them, you know, like an edge. It was like, hey, this console is some serious business.

Look at that. We're doing, like, top-end PC games. Yeah, you can have that PC experience without buying a $2,000 computer, you know, for your home because computers were still very expensive. So let's move on and talk about all of the games. So the first game, obviously, is SimCity. It was released February of 89 in its original form. It went on everything.

If there was a platform, SimCity hit it. But again, I think a lot of our listeners are going to be familiar with the August 1991 U.S. NSNES release of the game, which I think is, if you're a console game or one of the more memorable iterations of SimCity. Am I wrong? You're not wrong. Okay, thank you. I need to be reassured. I've been playing them to kind of catch up. And that one did something really cool that I didn't notice the PC one.

Oh, what's that? Changing seasons. Oh, that's right. Yeah, there's a lot of graphical flourishes in the S&S one. I mean, it looks the best. It sounds the best. I did an entire micro episode about the soundtrack. Please listen to that.

I mean, it is just like it is taking the very kind of ugly and basic computer graphics and just dressing them up in Super Nintendo Flair, I think. So this establishes the essentials of SimCity. It's still fairly simple at this point. So we have the RCI system, residential, commercial, industrial. and the push and pull between different demands of these zones. So, like, you have to build residential zones to start off with, but then those people want jobs, so you have to build the industrial zones.

But then they want a place to shop, so you build the commercial zone. So it's a cycle that goes back and forth, and it's always, like, finding the right balance of what to build next, not running out of money, knowing who to tax and things like that. It's the first thing that a lot of people playing SimCity grapple with because they're like, they go in usually and they start placing things, and the first thing they ask themselves is, why is it anything appearing? Right.

And then they figure out they have to put in roads and power. It's like, okay, things are appearing. But wait, why are they all abandoning their buildings? I don't understand. And then they realize, oh, actually, my commercial demand is way up and my residential demand is way down. They realize what that little bar means. Yeah, I mean, that's always been some city. It's even in the latest one.

And we also have how you power your city is a choice. And there's only two choices in the first game. There's coal and nuclear. And nuclear brings the most possibility for devastation. Coal brings the most possibility for pollution. There's a possibility of meltdowns if you build a nuclear reactor to power your city. And we have only two forms of transit in this version of SimCity. We have roads and rails, although the smart and expensive way to build your first SimCity is just using rails.

I mean, it's possible in the first game to only have rails and no roads at all, which they would change in every other version after that, which is pretty weird. I feel that's like Will Wright's ideal city, though, you know. Railroad town? Yeah, just like no one has a car. everyone just has mass transit and it's great. And another SimCity element that we'll see in future games is the disasters that can happen and can be summoned at will. So if you're bored and you want to see your city destroyed, you can summon a tornado, fires, riots, things

like that. And we have, again, the tax rate. There is just one future SimCity games would, you know, increase the complexity of taxing. But again, you're taxing your citizens. You have to set the tax rate. That brings your income in. And really the game is about addressing the... the concerns of your citizens, along with worrying about the tax rate, they have concerns

like the crime rates, the land value, unemployment, traffic, pollution, and just overall happiness. That's essentially just making people happy is what gives you more money in this game, just like finding the perfect balance, knowing where to put things, knowing how your people are getting to where they're going, just like making life easier and better for people is the best way to play this game. Could you take out loans? You can take out loans, too, yeah. And I'm not sure if that's only in the SNES version, but I know you can do it in that version as well. And then you would go bankrupt from the interest. Yes, so it teaches you as a young child.

Don't take out loans. I did not learn that when I went to college. That sure happened to me a lot. It's like I would take out these big loans. I'd be like, I'd have all these money. And I would go out and build all of this stuff. And then I would suddenly be in the red. And I'd be like, what's going on?

I don't understand. I didn't really understand this whole concept of having to pay back the loans. Payments plus interests. Yes, exactly. If I get a credit card, I could get a PlayStation and an N-64 and pay them a little bit every month. Or just not do it. Terrible idea. Yes, it's a bad idea.

So I'm wondering, like, I know Jeremy's a bit older than me and Kat. Keep saying that. Well, it is important because I was like 10 when I played some city, and it actually taught me, like, how cities work. Like, oh, there are different zones. There's a reason why there's not a factory next to my house. There's a reason why cities are laid out the way they are. I'm wondering, did this game teach you guys just about how cities were built?

Because I think that was something where I wanted to impart in the players of this game. I'm just like, this is how cities work. And this is, if your city sucks, you can find out why by playing SimCity. I mean, I certainly learned about zoning, the concepts of zoning from SimCity. I mean, at the end of the day, SimCity is not what you would call a super accurate reflection of city planning. Not really. It's pretty simple, all things considered. But of course, it's a primitive game, so whatever.

But, yeah, in that respect, like, learning, oh, don't put industrial and, you know, residential together. people don't like to be around a power plant that's polluting everywhere. Stuff like that did, in fact, teach me what kind of urban, the very basics of urban planning. How about you, Michael? Did this game, like, teach you anything, like, just in general? I don't know if you started with the first game, but I'm just curious, some city in general. Did it like, did you learn anything, do you think? Just do you take anything away from it?

Well, the zoning thing, definitely. Also, balancing budgets is really hard. And you want to be, like, you know, super. liberal Democrat, at least I do a lot of the time, like, yes, yes, I want to provide all these services in my city and then realizing like, oh, I'm like $6,000 over budget every month. And now I'm, since I had it at maximum speed, it's now like minus 72,000 something. Yeah. And like I said, I didn't actually understand the concept of like, you know, taking out loans with interest when I was like 11, 10 or 11. So that kind of taught me a little bit about that, you know,

because you don't think about those things when you're a kid, right? Yeah, it was edutainment in its own way. I don't know, Jeremy. I didn't really play the game, so I still don't understand how cities work. I keep asking him to put a big munitions factory right behind my house, and they won't do it for some. See, Jeremy, that's why playing SimCity is important. One thing that, one additional thing about the SimCity for the Super Nintendo, is that it was influential enough that it actually made an appearance in Smash Brothers. Oh, you're right?

There's a Dr. Wright statue, right? He's a support character. cis statue. So when you use it, he will appear and a building will pop up and grow and can hurt people. Oh, yeah, you're right. I have seen that before. That's cool. So it just goes, that's actually pretty remarkable that a third-party game was enough of part of the Super Nintendo Ziteguise that it would make its way into Smash Brothers.

So do you think we'll ever see a Dr. Wright amoebo? No. Oh, man, I want one now. I didn't even know who Dr. Wright was until I realized, oh, this was like a Super Nintendo, And, like, I knew it was for the Super Nintendo. I didn't realize that Dr. Wright was, like, part of the Super Nintendo thing. Will Wright does not look like Dr. Wright in any way. No, Dr. Wright had, like, a purple suit with green hair and stuff like that.

And he shows up in Link's Awakening, writing a love letters to a hippo. What? Yeah. Oh, weird. Is that him? That's him, yeah. It even plays his song that you hear in Sim City when you go into his little cottage. Yeah.

T-I-L. To be fair, he was being catfish in that game. That's the first instance of cat-fishing. Because he doesn't know she's a hippo. Yeah. Wow. There's love is pure in all its forms, okay? Between Dr. Wright and a hippo?

Who are we to judge? That's what I say. There's another cool thing. Is she a hippo that loses her bikini? What's that? Does that happen? In like the German version or something? Oh.

Anyway. This episode is going places. Yeah, I'm learning new things. I noticed something about the original one, and I can't remember if this is carried over into the Super Nintendo, that you could change the look of the game. They had different graphics sets. That's right. I think you could buy like a SimCity expansion or I don't know if you could download things at that point or anything like that. I only know about it because I played the original on the Internet Archive and that version for whatever reason is set by default to the medieval skin.

Okay, yeah. And I notice it's not just changing the tiles, but they actually change some of the flavor text. So if you go into the scenarios, there's like Tokyo 1965, I think, that's like a Godzilla attack. and when you go to it in the medieval stuff it says like Tolkien 1548 Oh wow, okay, yeah Instead of the big salamander monster that usually appears It's like this giant cyclops wearing a toga

Yeah, I mean there were some real I can't go over every release of this game Because God, it was released so much But there were multiple releases of this game With different content Originally the Boxer Sim City for the PC Had Godzilla on the cover like stomping through a city And then Toho was like, wait a minute

We own that character, you can't do that So now that was replaced with a tornado. So at some point, there was a Godzilla cover of SimCity. But again, I think the version that you listeners might know the most about is the S&S version. It's not the most playable because, again, you're playing it with a D-pad instead of a mouse. But I think it is the best in terms of presentation, as Michael pointed out earlier for sure. And like Kat said, we have Dr. Wright, a parody of Will Wright. Looks nothing like him.

But he's there as sort of like a preview of the advisors you talk to in future games. He pops up to tell you about problems, congratulate you. and just give you updates on your city. There's not really a lot that he does, but he's a fun little character that runs around. And, like, when a riot is happening, he's, like, running across the screen and there's a guy, like, firing a gun at him or something

with, like, a mask on his face and sunglasses. It's very cute. And, again, great soundtrack. Please listen to that Retronauts Micro. You will love the soundtrack so much. And there's some Mushroom Kingdom editions, like the Bowser replacing Godzilla or their non-Union Mexican equivalent,

whatever they called it in SimCity PC. And there is a Mario statue as the ultimate reward. So if you get the Megalopolis level of population, you get a Mario statue in your city. It's weird to think that this game was originally designed for the Famicom, originally intended for the Famicom, because I feel like the S&S does not really have the horsepower for SimCity, even at this level. Because when you, do you guys have a lot of experience with the S&S version, Cat, or Michael, any experience? Oh, SimCity? Yeah.

No. Okay. Michael did you? Very little. Okay. The weird thing is the S&ES was a powerful machine in 91, but when you have a lot of experience. But when you loaded a larger city, it took, like, a few minutes for the city to actually come to life. Like, nothing would have power.

Everything would be flashing. So it took a while for all the calculations to fall into place to actually simulate the city. Yeah, the console had, like, a 3 megahertz chip, which was really slow at the time. I don't know how that compared to the PC it was meant to run on, but I imagine. I think PCs at that point were like 20 megahertz. Okay, yeah. Last processing was real. I guess so.

And, yeah, it's weird to think that this was originally going to be an NES game, and I'm glad. it wasn't. And an interview with the composer Soyo Oka, she said that, yes, I originally wrote the music for the Famicom version. So the Famicom, her music is actually just a kind of an upgrade to the music she originally wrote. So, yeah, like, I don't feel like

this is the ideal version of SimCity. I have a lot of fondness for the S&ES version just because I grew up with it, but I feel like the later games feel like more of a logical conclusion to the ideas presented here. Like, I like, I like this game, but I like it with more ideas floating around. How do you guys feel about, like, the

first sim city. You know, it's not, it's kind of a non-entity to me because I never played it. I've only played SimCity 2000 and beyond. It just strikes me as the more primitive version. And I always found the top-down view to be kind of off-putting compared to the isometric view that followed. So it never really, like, I never really felt any like interest or desire to go play the original SimCity. But of course, I mean, it's where it all began. And most of the concepts were introduced there. Do you have any fondness for the first SimCity, Michael? Not really. I mean, it has a certain charm going back to it now, but I kind of started

with SimCity 2000 and like Kat pointed out. It's very difficult to go back to that overhead view and sort of more simplistic arrangement of everything. Everything is a square. You know, you don't get to just lay things out exactly the way you want to. So it's a little, it feels limiting. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. And we're back to talk about SimCity

And we're back to talk about SimCity 2000. Back when 2000 signified the future, can you imagine simpler time like that? This was released in 1993, February, in fact. And it was kind of a result of the other SIM titles not catching on, as we talked about. We had SimEarth, SimA, SimA, Sim Life, Sim Health. Maxis needed a hit, and thankfully, this was a big hit for them. And if I can do a weird analogy, I feel like this is the link to the past to SimCities Legend of Zelda, where it kind of built off of the foundation in a way that became kind of the definitive experience that other games built on.

Am I crazy? I need to ask you that question. No, I don't think so at all. Did it restrict the non-linearity of SimCity? No. It's not a perfect analogy. It's not perfect, but what is? No, it's not a perfect analogy, but I think it's sound in that SimCity 2000 introduced so many of the more advanced concepts and just built on it so much.

I mean, just the fact that, for example, you could have way more power plants, for example, way more public transportation, and the board of advisors thing. and just like off the top of my head, like that kind of stuff is kind of what came to define SimCity as long with Archaeologies, which was a thing. It is really weird being older now, the idea of like using title is seven years from now to indicate future. Yeah, it would be like SimCity 2023 for us. Yeah, that is weird. I mean, 2000 was just like it was the ultimate suffix on like a, if you want to make an invention and make it sound fantastic, like the Toaster 2000 or whatever. Like, it was just like... It did sound more futuristic. It did. I mean...

Oh, Simpsonity 2000. That's the more advanced first. There was a UFO on the cover, like flying over the city. Oh, was that a UFO? I always thought it was kind of a robot thing. Oh, I think it might have been... I'm not sure. There was that huge one-eyed spider bot thing.

Yeah, that guy was on... Yeah, he was on the title screen, I believe, just like taunting you. So, yeah, this has a lot of changes. I don't want this to turn to a list, me listing things. So please stop me to comment on these things. So the most important thing, we have the diametric perspective, not isometric. I'm making that distinction so no one jumps up my butt. But it is a diametric perspective, which makes this world seem less flat.

We were not ready for a 3D SimCity until 2013, but this made the world kind of pop out of your computer. You know, you were not just looking at a flat representation like Google Maps. You were seeing things like that come out of the ground. It was really interesting. Different levels of like geometry. You can like build hills and things like that. Like that was very important to make the city seem not just like a flat tract of land. There's a host of new power options.

We have hydroelectric gas, microwave, et cetera. Like, just more of a variety of choices to make and how to power your city, each with their own upsides and downsides. Usually, if it's a cleaner kind of power, it costs more and it gives you less energy in general, which is kind of true of, you know, how it reflects real life. And you would also start in like 1900, and you would only have access to some kinds of electricity. I think that was true in the Sim City. Yeah, I think you're right about that, I forgot about that.

And as time went on, you would get access to, like, oil. and then later nuclear and then finally Fusion, which obviously was the best but also most expensive. The real trick was to start with a map with lots of waterfall tiles because you can build like hydroelectric plants

and they don't pollute. You need a ton of them to power a city but again, if you can have all those waterfall tiles you can build a really clean city that runs well. If you have the money for it, I think you could also just raise your own hills and then cover them in waterfalls. Yeah, you could do that too.

Like terraforming was part of the game as well. And it was a lot of fun. because you could build like your own mountains. You could put little signs on them being like... I like that too, yeah. They're putting little signs on things. So we have the Board of Advisors, which would stick around. The transportation guy seems very mad all the time.

That's another thing I learned. You don't ever cut transit budgets. Or that guy will kill you in your sleep. So I got to say this is my one claim to Internet fame. And all the years I've been writing things for the Internet. I feel like this is the only thing that will outlive me. The meme about the... The meme about the Transportation guy.

If you see that on the internet, I feel like I'm responsible because I wrote a something awful article that got me to number two on dig for like a couple of days back when that was a claim to fame. So I think it's called the SimCity Board of Advisors. Look it up. It's from 2007. I still think it's a funny article. And I remember that. If you play SimCity, you might get a chuckle out of it. There's also a Twitter account that does pretty much the same thing.

Oh, okay. Damn it. I need to get residuals on that. You do. I still see images stolen from that article and posted on Twitter and stuff. So I'm like, that warms my heart, you thieves. You choke thieves. Yes. So what else do we have? Really important is the query tool, which I think brought some city to a whole new level. You can click on any tile that has a building on it. And it'll tell you what the business is and more information about it. So it was really fun just like, I mean, there was a lot of humor packed into this game, like about these silly businesses and these silly places you could like it. Not explore, but kind of learn a little bit more about them. Like kind of was kind of like flavor text for your city. I think it would also tell you if the city, sorry, if that building had power and water and everything like that. So that was really interesting.

too. And they would do really interesting things of the query tool in later, in later installments. Did they have light, medium, and heavy commercial density? They only had light and heavy in this one. In the original, there was just plain zone. So yes, we have light and dense zones for every kind of zone. And we also have, which I think lost a lot of people pipes. Like actually having to put, get water to your citizens by building pipes underground from like water. pumps in, like, I don't think the water towers were in this version yet, but I feel like a lot of people drew the line at having to make pipes. It was like one step of micromancha too far. Did you, did you agree, Kat? You seemed to be nodding your head about building pipes. I mean, it was really confusing. And that was actually one of the Achilles heels of SimCity 2000 was

a lot of the more advanced concepts, like building a subway was extremely like, how do I even do this? This doesn't make any sense. Yeah. My main goal for years and years was to figure out how to build a military base. Oh, you can do that, yeah. Yeah, I would clear everything out to make it happen. Also, an airport. And, like, the stuff that would just kind of appear would be super haphazard and not very, like, like, not very cool.

Yeah, I think in this game, you would zone for airports and seaports. Instead of just plopping down an airport, you would just build a zone and, like, like, little hangers would pop up in runways and things like that. It was super haphazard, and it never really filled out the space, and it really drove me crazy, to be perfectly honest. But, no, water was a biggie, because, If you didn't, obviously, if you didn't put in the water pumps and everything, the people would start moving out and people would complain about the lack of water. And it always seemed like you didn't have enough water.

Yeah, that's a problem too. Huge portions of your city would suddenly just start flashing. Like, you'd be like, what's going on? Well, not enough water. Okay. This was also, like, back when PC games came with, like, these book-sized manuals that you were expected to read. And so for those of us, like you and I who pirated it, we didn't have the benefit of that. So they're like, okay, what am I doing?

I guess I'll put down some pipes. I can do that, right? But it's never, like, it never tells you why you should do something or why you even would do something. Yeah, a friend of mine, he had the manual in the box. He lent the game to me and I installed it on my PC. But he also had this, like, phone book-sized strategy guide. And I was like, I want to read this cover-to-cover. And, like, in the beginning, there's this, like, 20-page essay about the nature of cities.

and I was like a 12-year-old kid. I was like, I guess I have to read this. And then when I got there, I'm like, I feel smarter now. Like, I had no idea what I read. I don't think Neil Gaiman write it. Oh, I remember that. No. I did read that for some reason.

I don't know if Neil Gaiman wrote that essay, but if you click on, I think, the library, you can read a Neil Gaiman essay within SimCity 2000 that he wrote. Yeah, so there's a lot of weird stuff in this game. Hmm, that's really interesting. Yeah. Also, strange for those of us who pirated it. I know in the Mac version, at least, like, it retake. Like, it retained the original owner's mayor name that they put in.

So for the longest time, I thought the legit mayor of SimCity 2000 was named, Mayor, I Will Slap You. That's an odd choice. I believe. I did a fresh install, and I was able to put in my name and everything. It just, it was on a disc, but whatever. I believe this would be the beginning of Max's fascination with llamas. Like, you'd see a lot of references to llamas. And there'd be a newspaper that would pull.

pop up occasionally that would have funny headlines and stuff just to kind of tell you what was going on in your city. There's like a lot of like kind of silly humor packed into these games just to make you smile, you know, if you're doing poorly. And some more features, we have ordinances so you can like, I want to make gambling legal and increase my crime rate, but get more money. I want to tax industry a little more. There's all these little things you can check off that can have big impacts on your

city or make things better, but, you know, kind of drain your money a little bit. So there's that too. We were talking earlier about whether it taught me like, how cities worked. I had no idea what the heck an ordinance was. Yeah, me too. I didn't really know what budgeting, like, was all about or, like, what I was, that I was supposed to, like, raise a lower particular department's budget.

So this was all very new to me at the age of, like, 11 or 12. Yeah, I mean, like, I still don't really know what an ordinance is, but I assume you have to vote on it. I'd assume America should be like, yeah, gambling's legal now. Take, have fun, kids. Yeah, right? Yeah, you are the God for life. Well, there's no city console is the thing in this game.

And so it's like, the mayor, like, in addition to being all, all eternal and, like, all powerful, like, it's not, like, can institute whatever they want. Yeah, I mean, you are, like, a totalitarian immortal dictator, and you can do whatever you want. Yeah, I think the Tropico series just kind of ran with it. Yeah, it's like, let's just make you a crazy god. And then we have archologies, which I think we brought up. These are these crazy future buildings. And this is actually one of the possible, only one of the possible endstates for a SimCity game. of 300 of these on your map.

After 2051, you can actually reach an end state in which your citizens leave the planet to colonize the moon or whatever. So building 300 archeologies is a big deal. It's really hard to do, I think. Yeah, but I didn't really want to because it just looked ugly on the map. They are pretty ugly. I mean, the archaeologies themselves looked super cool. They were really big.

They towered over your city. And I only wanted a couple on them on there because they were impressive. But at the same time, you know, just having like 300 of them. or whatever on your map. Like, it's just a row of the samey. Yeah, it's not fun to look at. I think it's really just an Easter egg for people to, you know, dig into. The ones that do take off the launch archologies actually look kind of neat because

they have that big dome on top with, like, the park underneath. And I really love the darkologies for some reason, probably because I was a teenager in a metal. What goes on in the darkology? Only the future will know. You don't want to know. Like 45,000 people can live there. But that ties in to Michael's gag earlier.

earlier on, which is, yeah, people would enter the infinity money cheat and just build tons and tons and tons of archeologies, so. Yeah, so it was really easy to get to that end state if you were cheating, just very time-consuming to put all those down. Yeah, again, I don't think it was for anyone to find. I think it just might have leaked out or something. I don't know who would have done this on their own, you know, without being influenced by like a tip or something.

But it goes without saying this is an extremely popular game, or it was at least, and it inspired the SimCity urban renewal kits, or Skirk, if you want to call it that, I wouldn't. And it's a very will-write idea, and that it's just a toolbox for SimCity in which you can basically, I want to pre-build a city. I want to put whatever I want down, wherever I want it to be without worrying about money or any kind of limitations. And I can do that. But the coolest thing about that is you can actually edit tile sets for the game. So my idea was, I want to make this as lousy as my hometown. Like, everything's got to suck because I grew up in a awful town. Please, don't ever go there.

But I eventually lost interest because that's a lot of work, editing hundreds of tile sets. But the fact that you could do it was amazing to me. Like, I feel like this is such a will, right idea, just giving you a graphics editor for SimCity because it was so popular, there was a demand for that. There was a really cool future tile set. Yeah, I've seen that before. Yeah, I liked that one. But the Skirk was also really useful because, like, terraforming your city, like, cost money.

And you didn't have a lot of money in the early going. And so if you're on like mountainous terrain, that could be really tough to get an established city right off the bat. So Skirk was great because then you could just edit the tile set at the beginning. Of course, most of the time people would be like, I just want a 100% flat tile set, whatever. Yeah, that's boring. But, I mean, it could make it more manageable, what's the main thing? A future some city games would give you a god mode where you could terraform the land for free before you actually started. I don't think some city 2000s did that, though.

I think it was just randomly generated. That's what that reticulating splines thing comes from. The female voice would say that when you would start a new city, it would just randomly generate a new tract of land. And if you didn't like it, you could regenerate it. Don't kill me, but I don't think there is that godboat in this. But, yeah, like, the cool thing about Skirk is you can also build levels for SimCopter and Streets of SimCity. If that's something you want to do, I kind of like SimCopter. I might do a micro about it in the future just because it's a very weird game with weird history behind it.

My overriding memory of SimCity 2000 is the Great Fire of 2003, in which I actually. accidentally saved after a fire had started in my city. Okay. And the worst thing about that was that it wasn't always entirely clear how you were supposed to put out a fire. Yeah, you just kind of like have to dispatch the people and hope they get there. Yeah, it would be like dispatch. And you would put like a little sign or something next to it.

And so I was like, okay. So I would, I had tons of fire departments and I was trying to surround it, but it just kept spreading and spreading and spreading. And I think I spent maybe like 50 years in game. like fighting this eternal fire. And it's like the tire fire in Springfield. Yes. It ended up burning down literally half my city because I got a big city at that point.

And it was like years later, I was still clinging out ash and like rubble and everything from that. I want to see the man on the street interview from that town. Like what is your biggest concern about the city? Oh, the constant fire that's been burning since before I was born. Way to go, cat. Good thing you're a dictator for life. I don't know why my kids decided or my parents decided to have a kid. in this.

Yeah, like, why didn't they move? Property values are great, though. So, yeah, I mean, there are so many ports of this game. I can't go over them all. One of the cooler ones is the 64-D-Port for the... That's the Nintendo 64 add-on disk drive, which we didn't get here. The coolest part about it, though, there is a pedestrian mode that lets you stroll through your city as a pedestrian at ground level.

Of course, it looks hideous. It looks awful, but it's still an interesting idea that you would see explored in games like SimCopter and Streets of SimCity, where it's like I want to actually beyond be in this city and see what it's like outside of these isometric or diametric graphics. Well, that's what you are always thinking, right? Like you would look down and you would see all the little people walking around and you go, what are they thinking? Yeah. What are they doing? What's it like down there on that street in my crazy, hideously planned and poorly constructed city? Yeah, I mean, even though SimCopler was a bad game that I had fun with, it was still fun to be like, I want to

visit my city and fly around it and like look at all the things I built in a 3D, a bad 3D world, but it was still 3D, and that was important. You know, just had to have that experience, I think. But, yeah, SimCity 2000, amazing game. A little bit difficult to grapple with some of the more elaborate stuff. Like, highways were always a struggle for me because you had to build the actual on-ramp, and it was always a little weird.

So I would always inevitably have just regular streets, but the irregular streets, definitely not enough once you had a large number of people. So I always had constant congestion. It was basically like L.A. writ large. And the public, so it would encourage you to build the bus stops and everything and the trains eventually. I could never figure out subways. So it was actually pretty, it was actually pretty advanced, but I don't feel like a lot of people got to those advanced concepts. No.

They were like kind of focusing on the base level of, it was a sandbox, right? It was almost Minecraft before Minecraft in that you would just build up your city, essentially building up a sand castle. and then when you're bored of it, knock it all down by summing an alien and watching them blow the stuff up. Yeah, especially with things like mass transit, it's so expensive to build subways.

Like, you literally have to build one stop at a time. Be like, okay, they have to get from here to industrial zone where they work. Let's just build this and see how many people actually use it. Hopefully all this underground tube I've built that was so expensive will actually pay off at some point. And of course, when I was 11, I wasn't thinking about the most efficient way to get people

from point A to point B. I was like, does this look cool? Yes or no. Yeah. And to wrap up, some city 2,000. I think even though it's from 1993, it feels like a very complete interpretation of the idea. Like, it feels like, where do you go from here? And that is a problem that they would have with future installments. It holds up really well. It really does, I think so. And I'm sure

there's a way to buy it. I think you can buy it on Gog, but it's totally around. Yeah, it's like $5 on it. Five or six. And it holds up extremely well. It's very fun to play. I'm going to be the I'm going to be. I'm going to I'm going to I'm I'm

M.O.O.O.O.O.O.O.O.O.O.S. Hello, everybody. I hope you're enjoying this episode of Retronauts. This is Bob Mackey once again, coming to you with a few quick announcements. And just in case you're wondering, I'm doing this so we won't have to bug you about buying mattresses or boxes full of things that games journalists throw away. This is a quick and easy way for us to let you know how to support the show and to let you know what's going on in the world of Retronauts. So in case you didn't know, Retronauts is fully funded by all of our patrons at patreon.com. We literally could not make the show happen if you didn't support us. And in case you didn't know, putting together a podcast like Retronauts

is an extremely expensive endeavor, especially if you want to keep it at the level of quality I think we've maintained for these past three years. So if you'd like to help the show, please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. For just $2 a month, you can get every episode up to a week in advance, and there are some great physical rewards if you want to give us more than that. So please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts to see how you can help the show. And if you can't spare buck or two, that's totally cool. Something else you can do that help the show is write a review on the iTunes Music Store. Just go over there, write us a review.

It helps our show get more eyes on it. It helps more people see it in general. And it's a great way to help the show without, you know, opening your wallet. And we also would appreciate it, hey, why don't you share our episode on Twitter, on Facebook? Let people know. If you've got a friend who likes Earthbound, share our Earthbound episode. If you got a friend who likes, hey, Sim City, we're talking about Sim City for 90 minutes. Who else is doing that in this crazy era we live in today?

Well, we are, and we'd appreciate it if you let your friends know about our fun little show. So just two quick announcements before I let you get back. to the SimCity discussion. One is that we are definitely going to be at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo this October. We're doing a panel. It's going to be a celebration of the 10th anniversary of Retronauts.

I'm letting you know way in advance, so please book your tickets now to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. It's going to be great. It's my favorite Gaming Expo in terms of classic games, and I absolutely love going to Portland every year, meaning all kinds of great

retronauts fans. So please come on out in October. I can't wait to say hi to all of you great Retronauts people out there. And one final bit of self-indulgent announcement. I normally don't like to celebrate meaningless milestones, actually I do. But I do want to note that a few days after this episode hits the main feed, I will have

celebrated my fifth anniversary of being on Retronauts officially. I believe my first episode was August 4th or 5th of 2011. And I have to say, thank you so much for welcoming me into your hearts and ears. It's been a great, great time with Retronauts. It was the highlight of my job at One Up. It's the highlight of what I do now. And I love making the show and I love entertaining. you and my goal in life is to entertain bored people because that's what podcasts do with

my life and I hope to do the same with yours. So thank you so much for tolerating me at first as I was learning the ropes of podcasting and sticking with me as we, you know, soldier on into our 10th year of Retronaut which is coming up soon. It's been an amazing ride and I honestly can't wait to tackle so many new subjects in the future. That's it for me this time, guys. Please enjoy the SimCity episode. I think it's a good one. Thank you. So we're not going to have a whole lot to say about these other games because they are just sort of like embellishments on SimCity 2000 and what that did for the series. And SimCity 3,000, again, concocted to save Maxis because they went public, I think, in 95.

and that nearly killed them because the evil suits at the top were like, we need you to make games. So they were releasing all these games that weren't finished. It was destroying the Maxis brand. And eventually EA acquired them. And that was a good thing for Maxis. I mean, we think of EA absorbing company being like a sign of doom and gloom now. But at that point, it was like they saved Maxis.

And it was eventually. Yes, eventually it was. But so what happened was they wanted SimCity, the next SimCity, to be in 3D. But obviously, in 1996, 1997, you know what 3D graphics looked like. Can you imagine a city rendered at that level of graphics to be as complex as SimCity should be? And rightly, it was regarded as an embarrassment. I think it was revealed at E397, and they were like, we really need to rethink this. I can't imagine what it looked like, but I bet with 1997 3D graphics, it was every bit as ugly as you think.

Look at SimCopter, and that's probably what it looked like. So they basically had to rethink this. And Lucy Bradshaw, who would be a big Baxis Big Wake for a long time until the studio closed. Oh, yeah. She spearheaded a new 2D SimCity 3000, and it really feels like a quote-unquote HD remake of 2000. Like, it is prettier with a few minor tweaks and new features. Unfortunately, there is no way to play this unless you have the disc anymore. Oh, really?

That really sucks. Yeah, I feel like 3000 is a very good interpretation of the game. A lot of people didn't like it when it came out. because it was really buggy. And it didn't have performance issues, if I recall correctly. I didn't get it until maybe six months later, so it's possibly, it's possible I patched it or something. It had an expansion pack, I think. I forget what it is.

It's called Unlimited. I wasn't sure what was in that, though. But by the time I got around to playing it in, like, 2006 or something, it was fine. Yeah. I really liked it. There's only a few new features. I feel like this is the easiest version of the game because you actually have relationships with other cities. So, like, what I would do in SimCity 3,000 is, like, I would have, like, garbage.

Island, and I would buy garbage from other cities, and I would also put my prison there, too. So it's just like the prisoners live on Garbage Island, and I get all this income because I can buy garbage, and they won't bother the citizens, because... So that's what Garbage Island is. Yes, exactly. That's where Homer was going

in that episode, to my garbage island. And I think I put a little sign in it that said Garbage Island. So that just, I feel like this is a very easy version of the game. It's one of the versions I can actually make money and consistently without cheating. It's also the first game with garbage.

It was, yeah. I was one more system to grapple with. That was kind of like, oh, this is annoying and difficult. So, again, we have new things added to the game. Not as many as SimCity 2000. We have three kinds of zoning densities. Wow. We also have the relationship with neighboring cities.

You can build farms now. You can zone for agriculture. I never did. I didn't know what you got out of that. And real world landmarks. This is the first SimCity to have music throughout. Like in SimCity 2000, these little 20-second ditties would just pop up every now and then. But in 3,000, it was kind of.

constant music, and the soundtrack is very, very good. It's kind of like Gershwin. Didn't they also start focusing more on the actual Sims? Like, I think, because this was post-Sims. This was pre-Sims. This was 99. Sims came out in 97, didn't it? 2000.

Yeah. Oh, well, I'm totally wrong then. Okay, well, they started focusing more on the Sims. I remember that you could like click on them maybe. That's in four, and we'll get to that in just a minute, because there's not a whole lot to talk about in four. My apologies. No, it's cool.

They do run together a bit, Cat, especially... So many fact errors from Kat today. Oh, my God. You're going to get roasted in the comments, but I will say, I understand why you're mixing these things up, because three and four are just sort of like, what can we do, what can we add? And they're not as revolutionary as 2000. But I feel like 3,000 is pretty playable, and it's unfortunate that you can't buy it today. Did you guys have any experience with this one before we move on to four? Yeah, I played it when I was living in Japan. And what was your experience like? I really enjoyed it. It took everything.

that from SimCity 3,000 and expanded upon it, and it looked a lot prettier, obviously. And so by that time, like, my girlfriend and I would play games together, and playing the game together consisted of us, like, staying up until 2 in the morning, arguing over what we should be doing next in planning the city. I think staying up until an unreasonable hour is part of the SimCity experience, really. Just, like, where did the time go?

One of the things that you kind of learn eventually is, like, mid-maxing the, like, the actual size of the zones that you should be doing, something that I didn't really understand in SimCity 2000, but eventually picked up in 3,000. And obviously, I was a bit older, so I understood, like, most of the fundamentals of the game a lot better at that time. And I had fun doing things like, I had a big river through my city, and I was building all of these elaborate bridges across it. And I was, like, okay, here's where the downtown area is going to be. And here's the stadium district. And so there was just a lot more, like, buildings and tiles.

sets. And so, I mean, once again, it was just an advanced version of 2000. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah. And I think it needed to have a graphical upgrade for like this generation of graphics. Absolutely. I mean, 2000 still looks really good. Yeah, it's very good. All things considered, but 3000 looked even better. So. We're going to be able to be. I'm going to be. So our last game we're talking about today is SimCity 4. and I can't believe it was released 13 years ago.

It was released on January 14th, 2003. And really, this is the most micromanagey SimCity for people who love the series. I feel like this is the most intimidating SimCity if you are new to the game because everything is about micromanagement, like adjusting the coverage for every school, every police station, every fire station, everything needs to be micromanaged, everything needs to be clicked on. It is a very, I feel like this is the most bonsai experience because you have to build incrementally and keep an eye on every social service.

every scrap of road just to make sure everything is running efficiently as possible. Have you guys played SimCity 4 at all? I was playing it earlier today, actually, and it is the only SimCity I'm aware of that actually has tutorials that tell you what to do and how to micromanage all that stuff, because I skipped them the first time. It's like, I know how to play SimCity. What is this? And then, yeah, there's all this stuff that I did not understand at all that makes it so

much easier to balance your budget. Oh, for sure, yeah. It was much more about building a region more than a city. city? Yeah, this had region play. You were supposed to, you were supposed to play multiple cities and have them interact with each other. Like, I want to have this be my industry town and have the people commute to it and things like that. But yeah, a lot of it was micromanagement in that each kind of service has like three different levels so I can build like a little police booth and plop it down in the middle of my residential area. And as

the population grows, I have to click on the police station and make the area around it expand and add money to that budget to make it cover more territory. Like it is about getting down on that granular level, and I can see how that can be very intimidating for people who have never played SimCity. I feel like this is not made for a SimCity newbie in any way. Absolutely not, but at that time, a Sim, like the simulation genre was extremely

well established. I think we were on SimCity 3 at that point or not SimCity 3, Civilization 3 at that point. Sims 2 would be out in a year, so Sims 1 Mania was still going crazy with this. In the 90s, we had games like Masters of Orion and the 4X genre are like really exploding.

And so I feel like SimCity 4 felt the pressure to really layer on the systems and keep up with these like really huge and intricate games. And maybe it was to its detriment. But I've heard that for outside of performance issues, which was also a thing with SimCity 3000. Which is not a thing anymore because we are 13 years later. Right. But SimCity 4 was generally well regarded.

Yeah. I mean, I think people who like the series viewed as like the culmination, the masterpiece of SimCity. where it's like if this is the most dense and most rich experience you can have with this series. And as much as I enjoy it is like a little too overwhelming even for me. Like I don't know if I have the time to sit down and do this anymore with my life. I think there are still people playing it. I mean, maybe they might have moved on to city skylines, which is kind of the spiritual successor to some city. I have to get that now.

Yeah, I have it and I'm going to play it when I go home because I feel inspired to build a city in my little sandbox. Did you guys spend any time with the rush hour? missions. Oh, I was going to mention that, Michael. Can you talk about what those are? So rush hour was an expansion that let you drive around in your city, a bit like streets of Sim City, except it was just a very close-up overhead view. Yeah. And so it would give you these missions, and as you pointed out in your notes, they could be good or bad. You could get things like the police think that your car is too expressive, drive it out of town without getting arrested. And you could, if it gave you something like that that was vaguely criminal, you could

sometimes say, what's my alternative? And then it's like, oh, you can drive a police car to catch this speeder or things like that. And it was, it was really awkward to control. Oh, it's very awkward. Because you're using W-Sad controls to navigate this overhead, like, isometric environment. But at the same time, it was kind of a way to see, like, how well are your streets really laid out? How easy is it to get around your city? Oh, yeah, for sure. And there was a such a, just a huge focus on roads with Rush Hour expansion pack, which now just comes with the game now. It's like five bucks. Everything together is five bucks.

I think everything together is 20. Oh, 20? Yeah. Really? Wow. Okay. I didn't know it's sold that expensive. Yeah, with Rush Hour, like, I feel like the focus... I say, I think, but I just bought it as research. It is. Okay. Thank you, Michael. I feel like there's the weird focus on roads in Rush

in Rush Hour. Like, in the Sims, when I'm building a house, it's like, what kind of roof do you want? There's like 30 different kinds of roofs. I'm like, I don't even know what any of these are. With rush hour, there are like dozens of types of roads, like any kind of highway configuration you can think of like a clover leaf. If you like to build roads, I don't know who out there does, but like this is made for you.

There's a weird. Psychopaths. Yeah, exactly. There is such a crazy focus on roads. And to the point where there is a road query tool that's separate from the query tool where you can click on the road, it'll tell you how many people pass on it and things like that. And if you click on a house, it'll show you the trip the residents take every day to go to work. And if you click on like a workplace, it'll tell you.

you the trip people take home. So like the simulation runs at that deep of a level where you can find out people's commute times, how they get to work, what roads they take, things like that. It's really super deep, super dense. If you want to get down to that level, you can. And like I said, it is probably the most intimidating. But if you want the complete, complex SimCity experience and you've never played this, I totally recommend it. I mean, it, I can't see where they would go from here, which is why SimCity 2013. The answer is City Skylines. Yeah, exactly. Another game did it, I guess. But we won't, we won't talk about SimCity

2013 but I feel like SimCity 4 really does hold up it still looks beautiful it's a 2D game but it still looks very beautiful and I did enjoy some parts of SimCity 2013 I do think it was kind of

sabotage from the inside it was an inside job SimCity was an inside job It was a half-baked idea that was never fully realized and it was fundamentally broken and that was that was that there was a lot of

dishonesty with that I think did not help them at all Well I mean it was I mean we're not going to get into it too much No no we can bring it up at least was extremely fun to play at the start. Yes, yes.

You're like, oh, my God, this is great. Very pretty, very pretty. Very pretty. Well, like the UI was fun. Like, you went through it really fast. But as soon as you got to the midgame, everything went to, you know. Like, the traffic was the biggest problem. Like, just the traffic was totally effed.

And, like, you could build your city around certain concepts, which was a great idea. You could build it around, like, tourism, or if you could build it around, like, a, commercial city. And if you built your city on tourism, well, you just give up because you couldn't get enough money because the traffic and everything was too much of a problem. Like, the AI was just totally bugged. Yeah, that's true. I did read articles about that before today. Like, they were lying about how the AI worked. It was just kind of like a random assortment that didn't work out the way that they told people it would. So I feel like it's been patched to hell and back. I don't know how fixed it is now, but I feel like they've done a ton of patches that might make it a much more playable

experience but there is still that like Katz said once your city gets big enough it does kind of fall apart the experience i wasn't at the review event at the time but i i think there was a review event i did not do it but the people it just goes to show the dangers of a review event because people went there and played it for a while and they built up a city and then they wrote the review right well that's not nearly enough time to really like kind of grok the problems that this game had i did a preview event for that and i was really into it because i'm like this is great this is what I wanted is what I've been waiting for. But again, I didn't get that deep level SimCity play.

That is what is important eventually. And one consequence was that a lot of sites gave what was actually a fundamentally broken game, like 9.0s and that kind of thing. And it was only later that the real problems started to come out from people who were putting lots of time and energy into this game. And that was a huge problem ultimately because, well, and not only that, like, nobody could get into the game because it was always online. Like, you couldn't play it offline.

That's been fixed now. Yeah, thank God. And again, they made excuses like, oh, it's because it has to be online, but it never did. It was for piracy. Piracy completely, yeah. Yeah, you know, and that was kind of the end for Maxis. I mean, they still got the Sims. Like Sims 4 came out just recently.

To be fair, I will say I have a friend who works at Maxis, and what he told me is that it was one office that was shuttered, but that the larger company is still around. Oh, really? That's good to hear. Weird. Okay. Why didn't they tell me that? I was so sad.

I don't know. It was communicated during D.C. It was not communicated. Okay. The Sims will continue into perpetuity. Unless they closed another one during GDC and I didn't hear. This was last year. They closed the office in the East Bay.

Yeah, the Emeryville one. Everything else is on Redwood Shores. So, I mean, so Sim City lives on through the Sims and the Sims will continue on forever because it continues to make just buckets of money. Sim City itself, RIP. Yeah. I think we'll see it again in our life. times, but probably not any time soon. I think that well has been poisoned a little too much.

Oh, City Skylines just totally took over. Paradox is a, well, frankly, they're a much more respected strategy game designer. Maxis has become like a lifestyle simulator at this point. I still think the SimCity name is important and has recognition. And hopefully... Absolutely. Certainly more mainstream recognition, but City Skyline did really well, which just goes to show the appetite for a big city simulator. Like, people want those kinds of games. But SimCity went, it didn't work. So I guess we have talked about the future of SimCity. Michael, how do you feel about the future of this brand?

Do you think it can ever come back? And how do you want to see it improve if you do want to see it improve? Oh, man, that's a lot of big questions. I think like any brand with universal, was recognizability, I guess, I think it has the potential to come back eventually, whether it's in five years or ten years, whatever. I don't think EA is just going to completely drop that brand. But I don't know. I mean, you know, I'd like to see it stable.

Yeah, me too. Me too. You know, I think it's always a very big undertaking to create something like SimCity. And yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure what the future could hold for that. I will say that EA right now are not being the best stewards of SimCity. There were versions of SimCity for iOS interpretations of 3,000. but I recently went on the iOS store using my iPhone.

I'm like, I'm going to type in SimCity and see what pops up. Currently, the only version I can find is a crappy fish tank game where you have to wait to build things and, like, you know, pay money to buy screws, to build, like, buildings and things like that. It's one of those many games that make Oodles of Money but are awful, cynical, and no fun in any way. Like, that is the only version of SimCity you can play on iOS, and that is a shame.

Like, that game is perfect for iOS. It's perfect for portable gaming, and it sucks that you can't do that now. Didn't it come to DS at one point? It did. Yeah, I believe there was a 3,000-ish version for D.S. Yeah, in some way. You're right, though. SimCity would be fantastic on mobile, except that it would be destroyed by in-app purchases, and that would be that. Yeah, I mean, before they became vampires, there were versions, and they were just not updated for modern iOSes, so they disappeared. So now if you want to play SimCity, you've got that crappy, like, pay-to-play, whatever, and I have no time for that in my life. I hate those games so much. SimCity's dead.

I mean, all we're going to get is a zombie version. Yeah, maybe someone can pry it away from EA and then we'll be happier. I have absolutely no faith in EA. I'm just going to go play City Skylines now. That's true. Maybe I need to move on. So I'm going to move on with this episode. Let's wrap up.

You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, SoundCloud, and Twitch.tvy as Retronauts. And we're also on YouTube. Go to our blog at retronauts.com and go to our page at usgamer.net. Jeremy and me and Kat, we all work there every Monday. You can see a new post about our new episode of Retronauts. It contains links to things we talked about. Perhaps we'll tell you what music we use in this episode. and other things like that.

So we always appreciate people reading our work at U.S. Gamer, regardless of whether or not you want to visit that Retronaut's blog page. How about you guys, Kat? Where can we find you? Hi, I'm Kat Bailey, and I'm a staff editor, well, I'm senior editor over at U.S. Gamer, and I don't think I've ever written about U.S. Sorry, U.S. Sim City over there, but maybe I will at some point.

I'm also the host of Acts of the Blood God, our official RPG podcast. I don't know why I'm calling it official here, but whatever. And it's officially yours. It's officially mine. Well, maybe there's an unofficial acts of the blog, an unofficial U.S. Gamer RPG podcast out there somewhere. I'm secretly running one behind your back. Damn.

That's what Retronauts is, right? Welcome to the better RPG podcast. Oh, snap. And on Twitter, I'm the underscore Capot, where I mostly lament my really crappy sports teams. And Jeremy is still here. Jeremy. Wake up, wake up.

Oh, God. Get over your fear of mayorship and let us know where we can find you. Yeah, I'm, uh, what? Oh, yeah, okay, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and on the internet at usgamer.net and various other projects like Gameboy.org, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Michael, where can we find you? Oh, you can find me on Twitter at Wikiparas, and I run a Vigigigame podcast called Vigigame Apocalypse that goes up every Friday at Vigigigameapocalypse.com or Lasertimepodcast.com, which is a lot easier to

spell. It's part of the larger Lasertime family of quality podcasts. I'm on one of those. You are on one of those. I'm on Talking Simpsons, the chronological exploration of the Simpsons. We should be knee-deep in the season three at this point. So please go to Lasertimepodcast.com

or just search for Talking Simpsons in your podcast device. And you can also find my work on something awful. And you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. It's been a long weekend and we love making episodes, but we'll see you next weekend with a, what next weekend? We'll see you on Monday with a brand new mini episode. Later, folks.

Thank you.