My relationship with SimCity began on a rainy Saturday in 1992 when my dad came home from a garage sale with a stack of SNES cartridges. “This one looked different,” he said, handing me SimCity. “The guy selling it said it’s not really a game where you win or lose. You just… build a city?” He seemed genuinely perplexed, which immediately piqued my interest. A video game that wasn’t about defeating a final boss or rescuing a princess? What was the point?
I popped the cartridge in, expecting to be bored within minutes. Six hours later, my mom had to physically stand in front of the TV to get my attention for dinner. “The food’s been ready for twenty minutes! What are you doing that’s so interesting?” I tried explaining that I was carefully balancing residential and commercial zoning while strategically placing police stations to maximize coverage, but her eyes glazed over somewhere around “property tax optimization.”
That was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with virtual city planning that has survived console generations, PC upgrades, and countless hours that probably should have been spent doing more productive things—like, I don’t know, going outside or talking to other humans. But there was something uniquely captivating about SimCity that no other game had offered me: the ability to create something complex, watch it evolve, and deal with the consequences of my decisions.
The SNES version was a remarkable port of the original PC game, adapted beautifully for console play by Nintendo’s teams. It even added elements not found in the original, like the helpful Mr. Wright character who would pop up with advice, and Bowser as the monster who could attack your city instead of the generic monster in the PC version. But what really hooked me was the open-ended sandbox nature of it all. Every city I built was different, reflecting whatever my current obsession was.
There was Gridopolis, my first serious attempt, with its ruthlessly efficient perpendicular streets and symmetrical zoning patterns. It looked great on paper but turned into a traffic nightmare because I’d created perfect bottlenecks at every major intersection. Then came Rivertown, built along a winding waterway, which taught me painful lessons about flood control and the importance of bridges. My personal favorite was probably Megaland, an ambitious metropolis where I tried to create distinct neighborhoods with their own character—a downtown financial district, suburban residential areas, an industrial zone carefully placed downwind from everything else.
The disasters were a particular highlight, though I’d never admit to my friends how often I deliberately triggered them when I got bored with peaceful city management. Tornadoes ripping through downtown. Earthquakes destroying my carefully planned infrastructure. Even the occasional monster attack, which I’d try to mitigate by quickly bulldozing a path of least resistance through low-value industrial zones. There was something darkly satisfying about rebuilding after catastrophe, seeing the city slowly recover from devastation—a lesson in resilience that real urban planners unfortunately have to deal with in much more serious contexts.
When SimCity 2000 came out in 1993, I begged my parents for a PC capable of running it. The isometric view, the expanded building options, the underground water pipes and subway systems—it was like SimCity had grown up alongside me, becoming more complex just as I was ready for deeper challenges. I saved up birthday money, combined it with Christmas cash, and added in proceeds from shoveling neighbors’ driveways that winter to buy a used Gateway computer from my uncle, primarily for this single game.
SimCity 2000 transformed my approach to city building. Suddenly I had to worry about water distribution, different elevations of land, and power plants that eventually expired, creating dead zones of pollution if not promptly replaced. The newspaper headlines provided amusing commentary on my mayoral decisions, sometimes eerily prescient in predicting problems that would arise from my haphazard planning. “TRAFFIC NIGHTMARE CONTINUES,” the SimCity Press would declare, days before my commercial districts would become gridlocked due to my stubborn refusal to invest in public transportation.
My most catastrophic SimCity 2000 failure was a city I’d named New Belleview (after our actual suburban neighborhood, but with delusions of grandeur). I’d created this massive metropolitan area with skyscrapers, an intricate subway system, and parks dotting the landscape. It was beautiful, profitable, and growing steadily. Then I made a fatal error—I decided to trim the budget by reducing the funding for fire departments. “They’re just sitting there anyway,” I rationalized, “I haven’t had a fire in ages.”
Three in-game days later, a fire broke out in the industrial sector. With reduced staff and equipment, the fire department couldn’t contain it. The blaze spread to nearby commercial buildings, creating a chain reaction that eventually engulfed nearly a third of my city. I frantically tried to create firebreaks by bulldozing buildings in the fire’s path, but I’d waited too long. When the inferno finally burned itself out, my budget was in ruins from the lost tax revenue, and rebuilding seemed insurmountable. I abandoned New Belleview, a harsh lesson in false economy and emergency preparedness that has stuck with me through every SimCity game since.
The zoning balance in SimCity required an intuitive understanding of systems that I didn’t realize was actually teaching me rudimentary urban planning principles. Residential zones needed to be near commercial ones for shopping, but not so close to industrial areas that pollution would drive down property values. Commercial zones thrived on traffic but couldn’t function without nearby residents as customers and employees. Industrial zones provided crucial jobs but needed good transportation links to move goods. Finding the right mix was a constantly evolving puzzle, and I filled notebooks with different zoning patterns and their outcomes, creating my own amateur urban planning guide.
Power management became increasingly complex with each SimCity iteration. In the SNES version, it was fairly simple—just build enough power plants and connect everything with power lines. By SimCity 2000, I was juggling coal, nuclear, and wind options, each with their own cost-benefit analyses. I learned about load capacity the hard way when my growing city started experiencing brownouts because I’d neglected to scale up my power infrastructure. And the first time I had a nuclear meltdown due to neglecting maintenance funding, I felt a genuine panic that seemed disproportionate to the fate of digital citizens, yet entirely appropriate given the hours I’d invested in their well-being.
Transportation networks evolved from simple roads in the original to complex systems of highways, subways, and eventually airports and seaports in later versions. I discovered that wider roads didn’t necessarily solve traffic problems if they all led to the same bottlenecks. I learned that public transportation could reduce traffic but required density to be cost-effective. These weren’t just game mechanics; they were simplified versions of actual urban planning challenges that cities face every day. I found myself looking at real-world traffic patterns differently, sometimes mentally redesigning intersections in my hometown based on principles I’d learned from SimCity—a habit that continues to this day and probably makes me insufferable on road trips.
The tax system in SimCity offered another layer of strategy. Set taxes too high, and residents and businesses would leave. Set them too low, and you couldn’t fund essential services. But the real complexity came in differential tax rates—charging industrial zones more than residential, for instance, or creating tax incentives to develop certain areas. I once created a city with a deliberate “wealthy enclave” by surrounding a small residential zone with parks, museums, and reduced taxation, while funding it on the backs of heavily taxed industrial zones. The environmental messaging wasn’t exactly subtle—my polluter-pays principle was both effective in-game and formative to my early understanding of environmental economics.
SimCity 3000 arrived while I was in college, and I probably spent more time with it than with some of my actual courses. The added complexity of waste management, neighboring cities, and more detailed citizen demands created an even deeper simulation. I’d find myself thinking about garbage solutions at 3 AM, weighing the trade-offs between landfills (cheap but creating permanent pollution) versus incinerators (expensive but more sustainable long-term). These digital dilemmas mirrored real-world issues that actual city planners grapple with, creating a strange overlap between my gaming hobby and genuine policy considerations.
My most successful SimCity 3000 creation was a city I called Riverside (I wasn’t winning any awards for creative naming). Built along a winding river with careful attention to pollution management, it grew organically rather than according to a rigid master plan. I allowed neighborhoods to develop their own character, intervening with infrastructure and services rather than forcing a particular vision. The result was a city that seemed to have a life of its own, with distinct districts that emerged from the simulation rather than from my top-down planning. It taught me that sometimes the best approach was to create favorable conditions and then get out of the way—a philosophy that works surprisingly well in both city simulation and actual management situations.
SimCity 4 represented the apex of the classic SimCity formula for me. Released in 2003, it added region play (connecting multiple cities in a shared area), more sophisticated transportation options, and incredible customization. I spent an embarrassing amount of time crafting perfect interchanges and meticulously detailing neighborhoods. The rush of finally seeing a region of interconnected, specialized cities functioning together—one focused on manufacturing, another on education and technology, a third as a bedroom community—was genuinely satisfying in a way that’s hard to explain to non-SimCity players.
The most challenging and rewarding aspect of SimCity 4 was the traffic. The game’s more advanced simulation meant that every Sim had somewhere specific to go, creating realistic rush hours and congestion patterns. I remember spending an entire weekend redesigning the highway system in my main city, carefully adding ramps, one-way streets, and subway connections to alleviate persistent gridlock. When I finally solved it, seeing the traffic flow smoothly through my carefully engineered solution, I felt a pride that rivaled actual academic achievements from the same period. I may have gotten a B+ in Advanced Macroeconomics that semester, but I got an unofficial A+ in virtual traffic engineering.
SimCity 2000’s arcologies represented my first experience with “endgame” content in a simulation. These massive, self-contained structures became available only after your city reached megalopolis status, offering a glimpse of a science fiction future. Launch Arcologies could eventually blast off into space, taking a portion of your population to the stars—a strangely poetic conclusion to a city’s development. I spent dozens of hours pushing cities to their limits just to unlock these structures, seeing them as the ultimate achievement in virtual urban development. The Plymouth Arco, with its glass and steel design, became a personal white whale—I built city after city trying to create the perfect conditions for it to thrive.
The cheat codes in SimCity were always a moral dilemma for me. I knew about FUND (free money) in the original, and similar budget-boosting codes in later games, but using them felt like cheating myself out of the actual challenge. I established a personal rule: I could start a “sandbox” city with cheats to experiment with designs, but my “real” cities had to be built honestly. The one exception was the occasional disaster cheat—because sometimes, you just need to see a giant lizard stomp through downtown after a particularly rough day of classes. I rationalized this as “stress testing” my city’s emergency response systems, but really, watching tiny firefighters battle apocalyptic disasters was just cathartic fun.
SimCity taught me patience in a way few other games did. Unlike action games with immediate feedback, city simulators required long-term thinking and planning. The consequences of decisions often wouldn’t become apparent for in-game months or years. Building a proper education system wouldn’t show results until a new generation of Sims had grown up with better schools. Transportation networks needed time to influence development patterns. This long feedback loop taught me to think several steps ahead and consider secondary effects—skills that transferred surprisingly well to real-life project planning.
The thing about SimCity that kept me coming back was its emergent storytelling. I never just built a city—I built a city with a history, with neighborhoods that had their own character, with problems it had overcome and successes it had achieved. The abandoned industrial zone that I transformed into an arts district after pollution cleanup. The flood-prone riverside that became premium real estate after I invested in levees and drainage systems. The traffic-choked downtown that flourished after I bulldozed old roads and replaced them with a modern transit hub. These weren’t stories the game explicitly told—they emerged from the interaction between my decisions and the simulation’s responses.
My relationship with the series has continued through all its iterations, including the controversial 2013 SimCity (with its initially frustrating always-online requirement and limited city sizes) and SimCity BuildIt on mobile. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, but all tap into that fundamental drive to create, nurture, and sometimes chaotically destroy virtual urban spaces. The 2013 version, despite its limitations, offered the most detailed simulation of economic specialization—creating a city focused entirely on electronics manufacturing or gambling felt like a different game each time.
Cities: Skylines has now largely taken up the mantle that SimCity established, addressing many of the frustrations fans had with the 2013 release. The torch has been passed, but it’s still essentially the same flame—the desire to build something complex and watch it evolve, to solve problems creatively, and to express yourself through urban design. I’ve spent hundreds of hours with Cities: Skylines, crafting ever more detailed and realistic cities, but I still fire up the older SimCity games occasionally, like visiting old friends or childhood neighborhoods.
What’s remarkable about my SimCity obsession is how it’s dovetailed with my actual life in unexpected ways. Those hours of carefully balancing budgets and planning infrastructure gave me an intuitive understanding of systems thinking that’s been valuable in my career. I find myself applying SimCity principles to real-world problems—breaking complex systems down into interconnected components, identifying bottlenecks, considering how changes in one area might affect others. It’s not that playing SimCity made me smarter, exactly, but it did train me to think about problems in a particular way that’s proven surprisingly useful.
There’s something almost meditative about building a city from nothing, guiding its growth through challenges, and seeing it thrive. In a world where so many things are beyond our control, SimCity offers a contained universe where problems have solutions, where patience and planning are rewarded, and where even catastrophic failure can be overcome with persistence. That’s probably why I still find myself returning to it, decades after that rainy Saturday when my dad brought home a curious game that wasn’t about winning or losing, but about building something and making it work.
Last month, I introduced my nephew to SimCity through the mobile version. After the initial “where are the weapons?” confusion, he became engrossed in the same way I had been at his age. Watching him discover the same principles I had—that dense residential areas need parks to stay happy, that industrial pollution affects nearby homes, that a city needs balanced growth to thrive—was like seeing the passing of a torch. He now sends me screenshots of his cities, and I offer suggestions and praise his solutions to urban challenges. I don’t tell him that he’s learning systems thinking, resource management, and long-term planning. I just enjoy watching the same fascination develop that has kept me building digital cities for thirty years and counting.
“Why don’t you reduce funding to the fire department?” he asked recently, looking to solve a budget shortfall. I smiled, thinking of New Belleview in flames. “Trust me,” I said, “some lessons are best learned through experience.” I’ll be there to help him rebuild afterward, just as I’ve rebuilt my own virtual cities countless times. Because that’s the ultimate message of SimCity: with enough persistence, creativity, and willingness to learn from mistakes, you can build something remarkable—even if it only exists in pixels.
