When I started playing city-building games I didn’t take them too seriously. I’m used to the idea of games teaching me something, but playing SimCity was the first time I truly experienced educational games.
I had played many games before picking up SimCity, but never had a game mirrored my career as closely as this. I’ve worked as a construction manager for over a decade. Managing construction crews is all about deadlines, resources, balancing budgets, making sure the electrical work doesn’t impede plumbing, and ensuring that everyone is happy with the progress. My daughter introduced me to SimCity 2000 in 2011 – trying to get me to play video games like “normal” gamers since I was into Super Metroid. I looked at the isometric grid of cities and said, “This is just project management with pictures.”
That first game of SimCity 2000 lasted me three hours. I kept telling myself “I’ll stop once I fix this problem” – first the traffic, then when I balanced out my budget. I didn’t stop playing, and by the time Jennifer woke me up from my bean-fueled stupor, I had emptied half the pantry into coffee and had covered my kitchen table with notes about zoning.
“I knew it!” Jennifer shouted when I woke up. “You’re playing again! Dad, you know that it autosaves, right?” I looked at her, confused. I had played for eight straight hours with no interruptions.
One of the benefits of starting your city-building game hobby with SimCity and not growing up on it is that you can appreciate SimCity for what it really is. Yes, those Sims flying around your city are adorable cartoon representations of data, but they have needs that you must fulfill. Build too many homes without proper infrastructure, and your sims won’t be happy. That trash your industry produces? You’re responsible for making sure that it gets disposed of. SimCity stripped away the fluff and presented players with a system that they could manage.
As I started playing older SimCity games, going backward from SimCity 2000, I discovered other gems. I found the original SimCity and fired it up in an emulator. While the SNES port of SimCity was interesting because Nintendo added some QOL features that the PC version did not have – there was a Mr. Wright who would come around and give you hints – the graphics and interface felt clunky when compared to newer games. It felt like playing with hand tools after using power tools. Sure you can still build something with hand tools, but why bother when you have better options?
SimCity 3000 would consume me for the next six months. SC3000 added waste management to the game. It seemed trivial, but sending your trash to other cities for money added another layer to city-planning. You could ship your trash to other cities, but if you send too much, they’ll stop accepting your waste. You now had to manage landfills – which are inexpensive but create perpetual pollution – with waste-to-energy plants – which provide clean energy but are expensive to build.
The first city I made that was somewhat large-scale was named Riverside. I never can think of good names for my cities so I usually go with the most literal name possible. Riverside was built around a natural river, and I tried to use the terrain to my advantage when designing my city. Building Riverside felt more gradual because I stopped so much to look up real-life city planning strategies. I read about zoning ordinances, traffic flow, and city budgets. “You’re stupid. It’s just a game!” Jennifer would laugh. But I was learning about project management and seeing patterns that would benefit me at work.
I had fun causing disasters in SimCity 3000. Earthquakes, tornadoes, and alien invasions were fun to watch my city cope with, but I realised that the fun part of disasters was coming up with solutions to make my city better than it was before the disaster struck. Construction work is like that – something will always go wrong. It’s your job to fix it.
I did not buy SimCity 4 when it released in 2003. I picked it up around 2012 or so. I loved the regional aspect of SimCity 4. You could create several cities that linked to each other with airports and railways, and each city could specialize in certain services. You could have one city full of factories, one full of universities, and one city that served as a residential suburb for people who worked in the other cities. The regional playstyle of SimCity 4 was the most realistic representation of how actual metro areas operate. Not only that, but you controlled all aspects of those cities.
Traffic flow was amazing in SimCity 4. Each Sim has a job, and each Sim takes the same route to and from work every day. You could watch individual cars on the road to see where congestion was building up. I spent hours designing highway systems just to make Mario insane-looking cloverleafs that I’m sure would please any traffic engineer. My coworkers would rib me about playing SimCity so much. “Tim’s playing SimCity on his free time now, guys. Might as well just untie him.”
But as stupid as I thought designing roads in SimCity was, it actually better prepared me for how I managed traffic on the job. I started thinking about how materials flowed around a jobsite. Where should I place my concrete trucks? How do my workers move around the site? How can I time my deliveries to prevent congestion? It was the same concept I used playing SimCity, just on a smaller scale.
Budgeting in SimCity 4 was by far the most realistic budgeting system of any game I’ve played. There was never enough money to do all of the things I wanted to do in my city. I had to learn to prioritize and decide if I should spend my money on schools (which will help your city in the long run) or should I spend on fixing roads (which will help your city right now). Raise taxes too high, and people will abandon your city. Lower taxes too much and you won’t be able to provide enough services. It all sounded very familiar to my job as a construction manager, except I didn’t stand to lose my house playing SimCity.
I failed many times making cities in SimCity 4. I built a city called Millfield. See the pattern yet? I’m horrendous at naming cities. Build around a natural river, and made sure I utilized the natural terrain. Millfield was going great, I was even balancing my economy when I thought I could cut expenses by cutting the fire department’s budget. “We haven’t had a fire in months!” Three days later, a catastrophic fire burned through downtown Millfield, killing nearly 200k of my sims and burning away half of my city. Not only did I lose half of my city, but my budget went from a surplus to a deficit. Fun times. Lesson learned – never cut your emergency services.
SimCity released back in 2013 was…. contentious. The city limits you could build were much smaller than previous SimCities, and there was a lot of backlash about the game always needing to be connected to the internet. To make matters worse, launch day had plenty of bugs that prevented players from actually playing the game for weeks. Longtime fans of SimCity were absolutely outraged with the game’s new direction. I kind of enjoyed it, though.
Specializing your city’s economy was more in-depth than previous games. You could create cities that solely focused on creating electronics or cities that had to thrive on casino tourism. Each type of city had their own challenges and benefits. I also have to applaud the graphics in this game. Seeing those little Sims go about their day was never boring.
Fast forward to today, and most city-builders prefer Cities: Skylines. I understand why. You can build larger cities, there are mods to make the game whatever you want it to be, and the traffic and economy feel more realistic than SimCity. I love Cities: Skylines and have spent thousands of hours building massive cities. I still fire up the old school SimCity games every now and then though, specifically SimCity 4. There’s something nostalgic about playing the classics.
Funny enough, playing city-builders has changed how I view real-life cities. I can’t drive through Denver without redesigning I-25 in my head. I see a traffic jam and think, “Man, those people could really use a nice highway interchange.” I analyze how cities grow around shopping centres, or how commercial zoning grows around transport hubs. City-building helped me understand that a city is truly a giant system.
My coworkers still joke about how our foreman plays video games where he builds cities on his off-time. “Don’t you get enough of managing construction sites at work?” Sure, but there’s something satisfying about building that perfect city. You don’t have to deal with weather effects that halt traffic or wait weeks for permits in SimCity.
I recently got my neighbour’s son into Cities: Skylines. He’s 12, the same age my daughter was when she introduced me to video games. It’s fun watching him learn the same lessons that I did. He’ll build roads all willy-nilly because he doesn’t care about the in-game budget, and then wonders why his city goes bankrupt. It reminds me of how I used to play SimCity – throwing roads everywhere because more roads means less traffic. Learn from my mistakes!
Another reason I love city-building games so much is that you have to think ahead. Sometimes decisions you make won’t show an immediate return. You build that university, but it’ll take time to improve your education levels and start attracting hi-tech businesses. Plant that park down by the apartments and it’ll take time for property values to go up. City building requires you to think ahead, and that’s a useful skill to have.
That’s probably why I never really got into other styles of video games. City-building requires that mindset that I use at work. When you’re coordinating multiple trades on a construction site, it’s the same type of systems-oriented thinking, just with different variables.
These days I still play city-builders, I’ve just branched out more to play other games. I love the Anno series for the economic aspects of the game, Tropico for the political agendas, and I’ll even play city-builder games on my phone when I’m eating lunch. But SimCity will forever be my gold standard for city-building games. SimCity taught me you can have fun playing a game and learn something at the same time without it being lecturesIMeteron-style.
Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.
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