SimCity (1989) is one of the earliest ‘sandbox’ video games. Instead of giving players a story to follow, sandbox games give players the space and tools to create, destroy or explore.
Unlike many action-packed games of the era, SimCity immerses the player in a world of tax policy and industrial zoning – drawing from real-life principles of urban design to get players to build their own city and respond to ever-changing problems.
SimCity was an unexpected hit – a testament to designer Will Wright’s genius for system and algorithmic design. In his notebooks, Wright wrote about his design rules: “Let players control as much as possible. Only diverge from reality when necessary for gameplay.”
There’s no winning or losing in SimCity. Players – and the taxpayers of their game cities – decide what makes a good city, and whether or not they’ve built one.
Curator Notes
SimCity Timeline
1984: Raid on Bungeling Bay
While creating his first videogame, the top-down-shooter Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984), designer Will Wright realised that he enjoyed creating the game’s cities just as much as he enjoyed destroying them. The idea for SimCity was born.
See a playthrough of the Commodore 64 version in World of Longplays' YouTube video below.
1989: SimCity
While SimCity has no explicit narrative, the social and cultural perspectives of the US in the late 1980s are embedded within the game’s design. Environmental pollution is a key metric of a city’s wellbeing – at the same time, the only way to lower crime rates is to build more police stations.
1993: SimCity 2000
Released in 1993 (the same year as the world wide web), SimCity 2000 engages more deeply with inequality and social structures. Digital citizens can riot against an unpopular mayor. Wright, a keen environmentalist, also introduced solar, wind and hydroelectric power sources.
1999: SimCity 3000
SimCity 3000 introduced more complex economic mechanics, like trading with neighbouring cities, and business deals with privately-owned prisons.
These deals could unbalance your city – a maximum-security prison might lower the surrounding land value, while its profits might sustain the amenities of a wealthy neighbourhood, well out of view.
Magnasanti: the utopias and dystopias of SimCity
SimCity was celebrated not just as a videogame, but as an educational tool. The controversial international program One Laptop Per Child gave laptops to children in developing countries, and included SimCity to help them imagine and design their own future cities.
But while SimCity’s financial, economic and environmental features are complex, it can overlook the human impact of top-down city planning.
Vincent Ocasla’s Magnasanti (2010) explores how a perfectly planned city can still feel strange and lifeless.
Over four years, Ocasla carried out detailed calculations to achieve maximum efficiency within the constraints of SimCity 3000. The result is Magnasanti – a city of six million people made up of uniform grey towers with no fire stations, hospitals, schools or roads. By the game’s logic, the city runs well but its people live under strict police control and only travel between home and work.
How to Get Rid of Homeless
Matteo Bittanti’s 600-page book How to Get Rid of Homeless (2015) explores the effects of SimCity’s dehumanising logic.
He collected thousands of forum posts from the 2013 MMO version of SimCity. In this forum, players responded to the introduction of homelessness into the game, often using cruel, classist and racist language. By highlighting the sheer volume of player messages, Bittanti reveals how ‘systems thinking’ can reduce complex social issues to numbers and problems to be ‘solved’ in the minds of players.
Buy the book here or browse images of the forum screenshots.
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