Sim City
There are riots in the streets. Those inner-city slums are falling into disarray as the surrounding air is blackened by the new industrial park. The police are stretched thin trying to stop the crime downtown. The local primary school has 200 pupils and only three teachers. Rolling blackouts hit the suburbs. A two-mile tailback clogs the high street. The council is haemorrhaging money just trying to keep up. What are you going to do about it, your honour?
Sim City shouldn't work. It just couldn't possibly. Yet somehow, shouldering the complex burdens of mayorship for hours on end is all rendered worthwhile when an apartment block spring up in place of previously run-down council houses. As you watch the new office block develop from the ground up, you forget all of the hassle you had making sure your citizens would have an easy commute. It is a shining example of the joys of construction; the electronic equivalent of continuing a Lego model despite kneeling painfully on a two-er.
Town
It all began way back in 1989, with Maxis Software's Sim City. On the face of it, a very simple idea: Build a city with houses, businesses and factories, and ensure the needs of the populace are met. You accomplish this by marking out "zones" for residential, commercial, or industrial use. Provide them with power from a nearby plant, link them together with roads, and then sit back and watch as your empty land begins to fill with little buildings. The key is that you don't have total control over the construction in your city. It is mostly handled by a third party, with your input limited to coercion. Zone residential near pollution-churning factories and expect the real estate prices to plummet, resulting in desolate shacks. On the other hand, that nice waterfront housing estate within easy reach of the police station will attract a much healthier array of two-story semis.
If you manage the delicate balance between give and take (giving your citizens what they want, and taking their money in return) you can see your small town prosper and grow into a mighty megalopolis. That is your only reward, simply watching your city develop. If you so wish, you may spice things up by testing your god-like powers and subjecting the public to an earthquake or alien invasion and seeing how they cope, but there's no real end to it all. Being the fickle demihuman you are, when you tire of a city you simply unleash a barrage of disasters and build a new one from the rubble.
City
See? It shouldn't work, should it? But you keep coming back, testing out your latest strategies on the unsuspecting people. Maxis took their smash hit to the next level - or should I say century? - in 1993, with Sim City 2000. The key word was "more," more options, more detail, more control. The city model's complexity increased tenfold, putting you in charge of the residents' health and education, ensuring they had a good supply of (uncontaminated) water, and decorating your concrete jungle with greenery and recreational facilities. Zones could now be different sizes and set at different "densities," resulting in finer control over what may be constructed there. Traffic a problem? Place more roads. Build a subway network. Fund a parking fines ordinance to discourage driving at the expense of angering those who do.
For all this added stress, you need extra reward, and Sim City 2000 doesn't disappoint there. A new high-resolution isometric graphics engine shows off your creation in glorious detail, with a much wider variety of buildings on display and a terraformable hillscape on which to display them. As well as being delicious eye-candy, the visuals also help to convey important information about local conditions. Poor estates are filled with pastel-coloured bungalows and deserted shells of houses, while vehicles crawl bumper-to-bumper along heavily trafficked roads. The visual feedback works both ways, resulting in a more immediate sense of accomplishment. Rows of derelict apartment blocks begin to shine again as a sign that the new local park and school are improving land values, resulting in the nearby shops getting a facelift as the new residents move in. We may know that behind it all is just a load of complex number-crunching as in the original, but seeing the results of your actions played out like this ensured 2000 was a good year for Maxis.
Metropolis
More Sim games followed, but it wasn't until 1999 that a true sequel was released. Continuing the millennial feel, Sim City 3000 follows the accepted trend of increased detail, although the promised 3D engine was abandoned in favour of a smoother isometric display. Essentially the same game as its predecessor, it takes advantage of the more recent technology to to greatly improve the look of its cities and further complicate the number-juggling going on behind the scenes. New medium-density zones and waste management features may not be revolutionary, but the underlying game was never in need of "fixing" anyway.
The real revolution came in 2003, when the series returned to the more usual numbering system for Sim City 4. This latest offering ramps the detail and difficulty through the roof, requiring facilities to be tweaked at the local level to provide for the individual members and businesses of the city. If a school is underperforming, increase its funding to employ more teachers. Ease the employment problems of a low-wealth residential block by adding a small commercial high street nearby. Zoom in close to monitor commuters heading to work in the morning, and reduce the traffic with a few well-placed bus stops. It is even possible to introduce individual characters to your city and monitor their thoughts and movements as they go about their daily lives. And listen to their endless complaints when something goes wrong. Then when you've built yourself a city, there's the challenge of linking it to all of your others in the region.
So Sim City, then. Pandering to the needs of an entire population for the sole purpose of attracting more residents to have to watch over. A vicious circle of megalopolitan proportions. It just shouldn't work.
Ooh, they've built a new multi-storey car park downtown...
