Revisiting SimCity: First Impressions

1991’s SimCity for Super Nintendo was my first foray into Maxis’s simulation series.

I obsessed over this game for a period of time as a kid — going so far as to convert a green-haired treasure troll into a facsimile of Dr. Wright, the in-game homage to Maxis co-founder and SimCity creator Will Wright. I’ve always found this game to be relaxing, so it seemed like a good game to choose to start this experiment.

The game has three modes of play: free play, scenarios, and practice mode. Practice mode challenges you to build a city (population: 30,000 or greater) on a small island. There’s not much to this mode as it is just a means of teaching the basic mechanics of the game, but it was enough for me to form my renewed first impressions of the game.

Move over, Isabelle! Dr. Wright was the original mayor’s assistant.

SimCity is one of the few cursor-based games I remember playing and enjoying on any console. It’s a shame that it came out too early to take advantage of the mouse bundled and Mario Paint, but for what it’s worth, the controller works well here. (I wish there was an option to assign a permanent bulldoze button, though.)

The game is every bit as relaxing as I remember it, thanks in no small part to its soundtrack. As I grew my tiny population-zero village into a small town and a blossoming city, the music was a perfect accompaniment. (The music for capitals and metropolises is not nearly as relaxing, but still well-suited to the gameplay for cities those size.) And there is the title screen music. I could probably sit in front of the title screen with its panning cityscape and simple rolling melody for hours. I was surprised to learn that the game’s composer was Nintendo veteran Soyo Oka and not a Maxis alumnus, because the music reminds me of the same type of thoughtful composition, well-paired with a simulation game, that I am used to from later Maxis titles on the PC.

One train. Hundreds of tiny cars in gridlock. Equally effective, but one generates traffic and pollution.

The game’s mechanics are more rudimentary than I remembered, and I wonder if this is due to the game’s age or to specific limitations on the platform. Nowhere is this more obvious than the traffic mechanics. On one hand, play the game straight and one will find that traffic on roads quickly becomes punishing and unmanageable — even in a small town. On the other hand, there is zero penalty (other than cost) for completely replacing all of the roads with rails. The result is that the best-made cities in the game will bear little resemblance to a real-world city. I’m absolutely an advocate for public transportation in real life, but the thirty years of city sims since this game has proven that managing roads — not eliminating them — is one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of the genre.

Something that I’d forgotten about, but perhaps my all-time favorite feature of this game, is the four-season mechanic spanning the game’s calendar year. It doesn’t appear to have any actual impact on gameplay, but it helps to cut the monotony and keep the map looking fresh. It gives a town personality, too. Such a clear yet simple depiction of the passing of time, I think, makes it one of the other relaxing aspects of this game. I can’t recall if any of the later SimCity games had this seasonal mechanic. But if they did, I certainly doubt it was ever used to as charming effect as it is here.

Left to right: Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring

Enough with the practice town. It’s easy to get to a population of 30,000 people. Next up: the scenarios.