SimCity is the first game of the series of the same name, developed and published by Maxis. It was initially released on February 1989 for Mac and Amiga, with ports for various home computers coming later, as well as a port for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.
It started with Will Wright working on 1984's Raid on Bungeling Bay for the Commodore 64, and finding himself growing fond of designing islands through the level editor, which eventually turned to a fondness for urban planning. His development for Micropolis started in 1985 on the C64, though it was initially dismissed by Brøderbund for the idea that the game couldn't be won or lost. Wright and fellow developer Jeff Braun would leave Brøderbund to form Maxis, eventually completing the game in 1989 with Brøderbund signing an initial publishing deal.
Compared to what would come afterward, the gameplay for SimCity was simple, involving an overhead grid with 3x3 zone blocks and not much in the way of utilities aside from roads/railroads and power plants. It did become a commercial success, selling a million copies by 1992 and being particularly influential for the budding simulation genre. After some other less successful releases by Maxis, they would eventually release a sequel in 1993 in the form of SimCity 2000.
The original 1989 game contains examples of:
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The Monster disaster involves a giant, Godzilla-like being leaving a trail of destruction in your city.
- Boom Town: The Dullsville scenario requires greatly increasing the city size to a metropolis within 30 years, starting with $5000.
- Copy Protection: SimCity came with a folded dark red sheet of paper with dozens of city names and "code blocks" printed in slightly darker red that was impossible to duplicate with contemporary facsimile machines. You have to enter the city name corresponding to the blocks, otherwise the game would wreck your city with disasters.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The first game is this in all sorts of ways if you come to it from one of the later installments:
- The view is entirely top-down, not isometric or 3D;
- The view's not zoomable at all;
- Zones are a fixed 3x3 size. Although some scenarios have arbitrarily shaped zones, they're not as easily reconstructed.
- There are no different zone densities; low/high density is all decided by the game;
- There's only one type of road - no highways;
- There's no water system;
- There's no underground view or construction whatsoever: no water pipes, no subways, nothing;
- The land is entirely flat;
- There's no education systems, health systems (schools and hospitals can be built by the game on zoned land) or garbage systems;
- There are very few sounds and no music at all.
- Game-Breaking Bug: Subverted. When the game was tested under then-upcoming Windows 95, it would crash because a critical bug caused the game to read memory right after it freed it. Under the single-threaded operating systems of the time, this didn't have any adverse effects, but under Windows 95, the memory might have already been reallocated and either contain garbage or cause an access violation. Raymond Chen and the other Microsoft developers at the time were obsessed with backwards compatibility, and wrote an exception into Windows 95 that would specifically check to see if SimCity was running and put the memory allocator into a special mode that would delay the freeing of memory, thus ensuring the game would run without incident.
- Game Maker: Will Wright conceived it as a scenario editor for his WWII game Raid on Bungeling Bay and programmed it as such for the Commodore 64 in 1985, before expanding it to a full-fledged application. Several developers turned "the toy game" down because it wasn't "arcadey" enough.
- Unbuilt Trope: SimCity is arguably the Trope Codifier for Construction and Management Games. However, much of the lasting appeal of the classic game, as well as the sequels, is the disaster scenarios, and the ability to deliberately destroy a thriving city with disasters. This is, literally and figuratively, a Genre Deconstruction made by the first widespread game of the genre.
- Violation of Common Sense: It was a viable strategy to build no roads whatsoever in the original, relying exclusively on train tracks laid out in the same fashion. While this method was twice as expensive, it completely eliminated traffic as a concern and the majority of one's pollution as well.