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Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
SimCity is back -- and managing municipal utilities has never been so much fun.
Feb 3, 1999 | I knew I was hooked when I didn't think twice about sending in the cops to kick some hippie ass. How dare those freaks set fire to my toxic waste plant!
Suddenly, I knew exactly how Rudy Giuliani feels when some namby-pamby bleeding heart starts whining about the barricades in front of City Hall. It's not as if I didn't care about the risks involved in converting nerve gas into extra creamy peanut butter; sure I did. But that factory was generating precious capital for my budding city -- the kind of dollars that pay for schools and hospitals and homeless shelters. And now it was on fire!
I listened to the sound of the police sirens I had summoned with grim satisfaction. I was pissed.
And, if I may zoom out a meta-level or two, I was also relieved. As a game reviewer, I had committed the unprofessional, partisan sin of badly wanting SimCity 3000 -- the latest installment in Maxis' hugely popular city-building simulation franchise -- to succeed. But before even popping the CD-ROM into my computer, I feared the game was bound to fail.
The original SimCity and its sequel, SimCity 2000, had been just too much fun. How many hours had I joyously squandered way back in 1993, showering my beloved citizens with marinas and museums and a subway system that beggared description, watching with glee as intricately detailed airports and skyscrapers blossomed on my computer screen?
SimCity occupies a special place in my heart. Even as I waited for SimCity 3000 to load, nostalgia overwhelmed me. In 1993, the possibilities offered by this brilliantly realized simulation game -- in its then-latest incarnation as SimCity 2000 -- seemed to symbolize a particular kind of excitement inherent in the personal computer. For me, it was all happening at once. When I wasn't building seaports and cold fusion plants, I was discovering the joys of e-mail and alarming my wife and sister with grandiose blather about the revolutionary potential of my brand new 486 IBM clone. And heck -- in late 1993, the World Wide Web was beginning to take off with all the exuberance and breakneck acceleration of a thriving SimCity!
So great was my fanhood that I wangled a freelance assignment to profile the company Maxis -- headquartered just over the Berkeley Hills in beautiful Orinda. I remember being charmed when Maxis co-founder and CEO Jeff Braun told me he had chosen the company's Orinda location precisely because it adjoined a subway station. The incentives to public transit in SimCity weren't an accident -- they represented the fundamental beliefs of the company's founders.
SimCity, at heart, was more than a game, it was a lesson in the inter-relatedness of things. Sure, some of the underlying assumptions seemed based on Reaganesque supply-side theories: If you raise taxes, industry flees. But it wasn't quite that simple. Pollution control, traffic relief, education -- there were good reasons for taxes, as well.
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