From SimCity to Real Girlfriend: 20 years of sim games

Simulations have been one of gaming's most important genres. In part one of …

In the process of completing his first game, Raid on Bungeling Bay, Will Wright developed a level editor that he found more entertaining than the game itself. Digging deeper into theories of urban planning and architecture, Wright converted the editor into a stand-alone product—arguably more "software toy" than game—that asked players to build and manage a city. You could zone land for residential, commercial, or industrial use, place roads, power lines, police stations, and more, all in the hopes of forging a livable, desirable city that could attract "sims" to settle and work.

In essence, Wright created a city simulator—and he put you in charge, as a kind of all-powerful mayor who lived (and ruled) so long as the city did.

The game was a quintiessential sim: almost entirely open-ended, with no clear goals except those you set yourself. Still, designing the spaces, seeing the dynamic responses as your city faltered or thrived, and trying to better tune the balance in order to attract a larger population proved an immensely satisfying experience. You could burn the city down, reveling in the destruction—and many players did—but at its core, Wright's creation emphasized construction and player creativity.

But the world wasn't ready for Micropolis, and Wright couldn't find a publisher for the unusual Commodore 64 game. In 1987, some three years later, Wright met Jeff Braun at a now-famous pizza party, after which the two formed a company called Maxis. A co-publishing agreement with Brøderbund followed in 1989, with the game—now renamed SimCity—released soon after for Amiga and Macintosh (other platforms followed in 1990).

After a slow start, which was in line with expectations of modest sales from everyone except Braun, word-of-mouth spread and the game turned into a big hit. At a time when games were still very much considered a part of the cultural backwater, SimCity was even discussed favorably in mainstream publications such as Time magazine and The New York Times, while government agencies, private contractors, and educational institutions contacted Maxis about engine-licensing or custom builds.

The desire to simulate reality—to establish a set of rules and systems that represent some aspect of life—seems inherent in all of us. Children play house, have tea parties with invisible tea, and pretend to be cops, robbers, astronauts, explorers, or doctors. Eventually, those children grow up to be game developers, and they start cranking out digital sims of nearly every imaginable activity.

Simulation games existed long before video games came along, of course, but even limiting ourselves this way still leaves a huge pool of potential games. So, before we explore the long history of sims from Wright and others, let's lay out some ground rules for what is and is not included.

Existential questions

In researching this article, I came across two major stumbling blocks. First was the seemingly innocuous question, "What is a sim game?" Some critics take the narrow view that only vehicle sims can claim the label, while others think immediately of the Sim franchise (of which SimCity, SimAnt, and The Sims are perhaps most famous) developed primarily by Maxis and Will Wright.

Others take a holistic view, insisting that anything which accurately models or mimics real-life or real-life systems should be considered a sim game—but this is particularly subjective since it requires a definition of what, precisely, constitutes an "accurate" model and it rules out sims set in the future.

The second issue was deciding where to draw the line between a pure "simulation" and a "simulation game," and then further between a "simulation game" and a "game with sim elements." Is Flight Simulator a game or something else? What about VBS1? Should sports games, racing games, god games, and sim hybrids such as Balance of Power, Stronghold, or Close Combat: First to Fight be included? Can games set in the future be considered valid sims? What about games that simulate social interactions but do so in a fantasy environment—as is the case with Animal Crossing?

Reality being messy as usual, I compromised in a way that I hope provides something close to the best possible overview of the sim genre's evolution in a single article. (Cue the arguments over excluded titles.) Here, then, is my idiosyncratic list of criteria:

Sports games will be ignored completely, with the exception of racing sims—which will be discussed briefly—because sport sims are more a subset of the sports genre than the sim genre (and because they should be examined in their proper context). For similar reasons, tactical shooters are also out, no matter how realistic, unless the shooting is done entirely from within a vehicle.

The pliable nature of sim games makes genre hybrids impossible to avoid completely, but an emphasis will be placed on games that seem to put simulation above roleplaying, story, or strategy elements. In the case of non-vehicle simulations, the less direct the player's control, the more likely it will be covered. For vehicle sims (including space and flight sims), I've leaned more toward "hardcore" simulations which attempt to model physics and controls as realistically as possible, while still remaining anchored in the realm of video games rather than actual training aides.

That said, this article is mostly concerned with influential and/or innovative games—so a number of great sequels and spiritual successors are likely to be glossed over or left out entirely, especially if they were released in the past few years.

Let's dive in.

Why stop at cities?

Building on the success of SimCity, Maxis soon explored other avenues of simulation. Will Wright's SimEarth (1990) perhaps foreshadowed Spore with its huge scope and a focus on evolution. Playing the role of Gaia, a complex entity first proposed by James Lovelock that ties together all life on Earth and the feedback systems in place to support this life, you were tasked with guiding the development of life through Earth's ten billion year lifespan.

While the game was certainly captivating once you got the hang of how to play, SimEarth bit off more than it could chew—its cluttered visuals and excessive use of menus only added to the confusion when tracking the development of animals, plants, pollution, disease, famine, continents, oceans, people, and other aspects of life on Earth.

Taking a more focused effort to Earth-based ecosystems, another Wright-led project called SimLife (1992) tried to simulate genetics and the interaction between species and the environment. It (largely) failed as both a game and a scientific simulation, though, as it lacked clarity in player feedback and goal-setting while simultaneously falling short on the intricacies of scientific research on the subject.

The most patient of players were treated to an interactive playground in the spirit of The Island of Doctor Moreau, but everyone else just got frustrated. After the mixed successes and failures of SimEarth, SimLife's inability to make evolution and genetics engaging for a general audience suggested that the inner workings of biological life were too dense a topic even for sim games.

Not so with action/platformer/sim hybrid E.V.O.: Search for Eden, a Super Nintendo game from 1993 (1992 in Japan) that put you in the role of a single life form. You could evolve progressively by collecting and spending evolution points gained from eating other life forms—your choice of meal would both affect and be affected by your development.

Given the considerable liberties E.V.O. took in its simulation of the evolutionary process and its depiction of the geological time scale, it's debatable whether the game even deserves a place in this article—it's among the least realistically modeled titles mentioned and features significant non-sim gameplay elements. But E.V.O. was one of only a few games to capture the essence of evolutionary theory—that of adaptation and natural selection through inherited genetic traits. E.V.O. was a rare console-only sim game, and many of its ideas were reproduced in 2008's evolution-themed hit Spore. For that alone, it earns a mention as an interesting contribution to the evolution of life sims.

Spore was anticipated as the "complete" Sim game—a SimEverything—thanks to its enormous scope that took players from primordial goo all the way through their evolution to become galactic traders, with several distinct and separate game modes. Unfortunately for hardcore sim fans, the science behind Spore was played down in the interests of garnering broader appeal.

The result was a game that better modeled ideas of creationism than evolutionary theory, and which felt lacking in all but the final (space) stages and the brilliant Creature Creator (which reached approximately 1.8 million player-created species within eighteen days of Spore's release, and passed the 100 million mark within a year).

Hail ants!

SimAnt is one of the stranger games to emerge from the mind of Will Wright—not because it's about an ant colony, but because it has a campaign mode in which your goal is to drive the humans out of their house. It also features an experimental mode in which you can build ant mazes, poison the colony, control a spider, or drive the ants crazy with overuse of pheromone trails.

The real magic of SimAnt was the way it captured the fascination many children have with ants—especially regarding their behavior in a variety of challenging situations (such as when you cover the entry to their nest or drop a spider into their midst).

You played as the leader of the black colony—a sentient being who could switch bodies at will—and could lead assaults against the fiendish ant-lions and spiders or the evil red colony. One of the most fascinating exploits involved infiltrating the red colony—effectively becoming a spy. Done appropriately, you could get the red ants to feed you even as you set about dismantling their nest from the inside.

YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING

SimCity 2000 was released to much hype and anticipation in 1994, close on the heels of the underrated SimFarm—the "Country Cousin" of SimCity. Will Wright returned to lead the design after the new team's early efforts to improve on the original faltered.

The top-down view was switched out in favor of 2D isometric with four viewing angles, and an additional viewing mode was added for managing water pipes and subway routes. Meanwhile, the process of building a city took on an extra evolutionary step—certain buildings would not be available for construction until the game's timeline indicated their requisite technology had been invented, so power plants built early in a city's life would become obsolete over time and airports would not be available at the default 1900 start time, while late-game technologies such as arcologies enabled population explosions in already-crowded cities.

Perhaps the most engaging additions were in the feedback systems, though. SimCity 2000 introduced in-game newspapers to the franchise, with articles detailing the concerns, tragedies, and triumphs of everyday sims—always delivered in a charming, humorous manner. There was also a panel of advisors which could be consulted on budget matters, the most memorable of whom turned furious at the slightest cut to the transport budget—threatening you with the words, "YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING. YOU WILL REGRET THIS!"

Growing pains at Maxis

But the mid- to late-90s were tough years for Maxis. The company was pushing to become the next EA, but it lacked the resources to do so—even after SimCity 2000's massive success. Management culture shifted as Maxis' public profile grew and unit sales and releases per year became hard targets. As a result, the games suffered immensely. Titles such as SimCopter, which let players fly a helicopter through cities they had created in SimCity 2000, and SimIsle, which was something of an ecological spin on SimCity, were rushed out the door, full of bugs and barely finished.

One impressive title made it out of the company around this time, but it was developed in Japan and only published by Maxis. Yoot Saito's SimTower: The Vertical Empire (1994) mixed the SimCity formula with the business management aspects of tycoon games, charging you with building and managing a modern skyscraper. In the process, you could track the moods and behaviors of residents, visitors, and workers—enabling you to better tune the placement of elevators, shops, offices, condos, or other facilities.

Tropical paradise

SimCity wasn't the first video game to explore the idea of creating a society—though it was the first to garner mainstream success—and Tropico (2001) wasn't the first to do so on an island. Those honors perhaps go to Utopia, a 1981 Intellivision game released by Mattel Electronics and developed by Don Daglow.

Utopia took its queue from Thomas More's sixteenth century book of the same name, which depicted a seemingly perfect—yet inherently flawed—island society in a philosophical musing on humanity's imperfection. You were charged with ruling one island while your opponent ruled another, and you needed to build factories, farms, schools, and other buildings to keep your people happy and help them thrive. The game also simulated basic weather patterns, movements of fish populations, and pirates.

Where SimCity demanded you build a capitalist paradise—a city reliant entirely on private enterprise for its continued prosperity—Tropico simulated the development of a banana republic that could be either capitalist or socialist in outlook, with you as the corrupt leader.

Beginning in 1950, you had fifty years to guide your small Caribbean island-nation to prosperity. In the process, you had to appease or eliminate political factions, manage relations with the United States and Soviet Union, keep your people fed, and get rich from the export of raw materials. If you weren't doing a good job, your people would revolt. If you lost support of the military, there'd inevitably be a coup d'état to force you out of power—a failed state even if you avoided assassination.

Rome wasn't built in a day

Sims also went back in time. The ancient Romans have a reputation for being great city planners, so it comes as no surprise that someone thought to make a city-building game set in ancient Rome. Caesar was released for the Amiga in 1992, with the addition of military planning (but not fighting or combat) further differentiating the game from SimCity. The fusing of history, city building, and a touch of real-time strategy proved a hit, and a sequel followed in 1995. Caesar II better upheld the idea of a living city than SimCity, with citizens, soldiers, and workers visibly moving around the screen attending to their business.

The early 90s also brought other interesting twists to the city-building genre, including strategy-sim hybrids Castles (1991) and Castles 2 (1992), both of which involved building and designing castles, The Patrician (1992), which focused more on trading simulation, and the first two games in real-time strategy series The Settlers (1993).

The Settlers I and II contained considerable simulation elements, with each building manned by an autonomous citizen who relied on an efficient transportation and supply network to both get the resources he needed and to send out whatever he produced. Building a network of roads and trying to manage the distribution of resources—you had charge of the entire economy, including food and even beer distribution—fit well with the slow pace of the games, which took hours to play and stole away months of fans' lives. Later Settlers games de-emphasized these elements, trending the series more toward traditional (but still slow-paced) real-time strategy.

Other historically themed city building games were released around the turn of the century, including a third Caesar game, which further emphasized the life sim aspects of the series, Anno 1602 (1998), the first entry in the excellent RTS/city-building/trading-sim hybrid Anno series, and a number of less successful games from Caesar developer Impressions Games.

Caesar IV, the most recent title in the Caesar series, would not arrive until 2006, with development led by former members of the now-defunct Impressions Games. It featured fully 3D graphics—as has been the trend—in place of the isometric view of old.

Complexity

All of these were blown out of the water by SimCity 3000 (1999), however, which significantly added to the complexity of its predecessor and required players to manage even garbage disposal and to strike business deals with neighboring cities.

SimCity 4 emerged in 2003, receiving rave reviews and a number of awards while also being criticized for overly difficult gameplay—the series had become too complex for many people to appreciate. There was an overhaul of the transportation system, a much more detailed simulation of city life, the addition of regions that contain multiple cities, the addition of a MySim mode (for integration with The Sims), a day/night cycle, and countless other changes from the earlier SimCity games.

But a wealth of new features and enhancements meant nothing to those who couldn't build even a functional suburb. It looked like building and management games had peaked, and SimCity in particular could not risk further deepening the complexity.

Filling the void

There hasn't been a new SimCity in eight years—unless you count the largely forgettable 2007 spin-off SimCity Societies, which introduced six "societal values" that would change the appearance of a city as it developed. While fans clamor for an update to the seminal city building franchise, others have stepped in to fill the void.

The Tropico series continues, with Tropico 3 released to critical praise in late 2009. This installment took the game into polygonal 3D and fleshed out the political simulation—it even featured a customizable avatar for your in-game persona, who travels around the island interacting with the environment or addressing his subjects (or running from insurgents).

Cities XL 2011 ditched the MMO component that was core to its unsuccessful predecessor (Cities XL), which allowed trading between players on a shared "planet," and focused instead on the previously under-emphasized single-player campaign. The thing that the Cities XL franchise seems to have going for it is an easier learning curve than SimCity 4, making deep city-building games accessible to a new generation (without forcing them to play the older titles in the genre).

Fans of the simplicity found in older city-building sims still have a place to go, though, as there are portable adaptations of SimCity 3000 for the Nintendo DS and Apple's iOS devices and open-source projects such as LinCity and Micropolis (which is based on the original SimCity). More accessible titles like Virtual City can also serve as nice introductions to the genre.

The prolonged absence of SimCity may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, as it encourages new developers to tackle the genre and innovate without fear of being crushed by the name recognition and marketing power of the genre mainstay.

Playing "the man"

Most games that simulate politics or government do so in a roundabout fashion, making it either a mere element of a broader management sim—such as in Tropico—or integrating it into a strategy game—such as in Civilization or Romance of the Three Kingdoms. But some put the gameplay focus squarely on political wheelings and dealings. Chief among these is Chris Crawford's influential Cold War-themed Balance of Power (1985), which put the player in the shoes of either the President of the United States or the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In a somewhat cynical but nonetheless realistic and complex simulation of superpower relations, your goal was to prevent nuclear war—a task far more difficult than it sounds.

More recently, Elixir Studios produced Republic: The Revolution (2003), which simulated a grassroots political movement in which you attempted to overthrow the president of a fictional former Soviet state. This was followed by the impressive Democracy (2005) by Positech Games. In both Democracy and its sequel, Democracy 2 (2007), you were cast as president or prime minister of one of ten democratic nations. By balancing taxes, public opinion, party policies, and lobby groups, you needed to keep the country stable and the people happy enough to re-elect you. Much like actually running a country, it was a challenge.

Gettin' serious

Democracy is a fine example of the growing sim offshoot known as serious games. These are games that tackle real-world issues, which are made explicitly to inform or persuade players on their chosen topic. While government sims and economic sims are among the most common serious games, they are certainly not the only kinds. Many of the vehicle sims discussed in this feature may be considered serious games; other examples include America's Army, Simport, Darfur is Dying, and IBM's CityOne.

But when reality's a bit of a drag, you can always play a god instead.

If'n I was God

Peter Molyneux is perhaps best known today for the Fable series and his tendency to make ridiculous—and perhaps misleading—promises about features in upcoming games. But long before Fable, he created a genre. In Populous (1989), the second game developed by Molyneux's Bullfrog Productions (after an earlier stint in office database software), you were a god. In what would become a recurring theme for Molyneux, you could use your powers for good or evil.

Populous, and god games in general, share with construction and management sims like SimCity an indirect control of the people living in your domain, but they do so on a different level (and they grant you certain other powers such as control of the weather). They are characterized by microworlds in which you can help or hinder the inhabitants but not manage their lives or society. If you treat your subjects poorly, they will either despise you or stop believing in you—perhaps defecting to another, rival god. Your power relies entirely on their faith.

Where this was perhaps done most intriguingly was in another Molyneux-designed game. Released in 2001, Black & White charged players with raising a gigantic creature who lives among the people on a number of islands. As a god, you could be kind or cruel to your creature—or, if you're like me, a bit of both, just to see what would happen. In turn, your creature developed certain behaviors and personality traits that affected its interactions with the villagers. It could become a fearsome beast that ravaged the landscape and everyone in it without warning, or it could become helpful and kindhearted, doing everything possible to keep the people safe, well fed, and entertained.

Black & White unfortunately fell short of its potential, though, with the early stages far outshining the later ones, and the creature AI turning out to be less sophisticated than it at first seemed (although it was good enough that I could raise a poop-eating, people-throwing, eager-to-please gentle giant).

Other interesting developments in the god game genre include RTS/sim hybrid Dungeon Keeper and Afterlife (1996), which satirically modeled creatures, known as Ethically Mature Biological Organisms, who would be sent to heaven or hell (both simulated in mock societies) according to their virtues or sins. Eric Chahi's upcoming From Dust looks likely to be the next evolution in god games, with its tag-line that "nature is the star."

Little Computer People

It could be argued that god games are really just a subset of life sims—games that model people, or perhaps other creatures, and their lives. Such a discussion is largely beyond the scope of this article, but the two sim genres are certainly intertwined, in large part because of a game that so dominates its market that it has become yet another genre all of its own. But before we look at The Sims, let's step back a little.

Before there was a "virtual dollhouse," there was a "House-on-a-Disk." Little Computer People (1985) gave you a (virtual) person who lived in a virtual house, stored on a single floppy diskette. You could look in on your little computer person's life, but only suggest actions for him (never her, due to memory constraints) to perform. Your means of interaction with him were typing, giving gifts, and patting him on the head (occasionally, you could also play cards against him). Sometimes he would ignore you entirely, begging the question of whether he understood you; other times he'd respond in such a sophisticated way that you'd wonder if he understood every word you threw at him.

This use of a distinct personality and mood was a stroke of genius in terms of overcoming technical limitations. The computer person did what he wanted, when he wanted, according to his interests, needs, and desires. Every so often he'd tap on the monitor and ask you a question. And he frequently wrote letters to you from his typewriter on the top floor.

Little Computer People seemed years ahead of its time, and many grew so attached to the person in their computer that the developers set up a service to transfer the "brain" of your little computer person to a new disk in the event of data corruption. But the game didn't turn over enough money to warrant a sequel, and the idea of a game modeled on somebody's domestic life fell dormant until Will Wright and a Maxis programmer secretly put together a demo of what Wright called a "virtual dollhouse."

Grownups play with dolls

Wright's dollhouse game was green-lit shortly after EA's 1997 buyout of Maxis, and was finally released for Windows in February 2000, with the Mac version following five months later. Taking an active role in the daily lives of virtual suburban people proved more popular than anyone predicted—The Sims quickly passed one million sales, eventually reaching 16 million units worldwide (nearly triple the sales of Myst, the previous holder of the title "best-selling PC game of all time").

While the game offered a huge variety of choices and ways to interact with Sims and their possessions—not to mention the architecture and design of their homes—many players opted to simply re-create their own lives, comparing how their virtual selves (and loved ones) acted in the game versus real-life.

True to the open-ended spirit fostered by Wright's design, a common approach was to abuse or run experiments on Sims. There was a certain sadistic thrill in locking a Sim in a room with no exit or toilet (but perhaps with a TV or refrigerator) or watching a Sim drown in an inescapable swimming pool. Enough players had a more productive bent, however, that EA managed to release seven expansions—each more frivolous than the last—and a huge community of creators formed around the build and design tools.

The inevitable sequel, The Sims 2, arrived in 2004, but not before one of the few clones, Space Colony (2003), hit store shelves.

Space Colony took two major departures from The Sims: it eschewed open-ended gameplay for a mission-based structure and a fixed cast of starting characters, and it switched the suburban setting for the unfamiliar world of a futuristic space colony. Space Colony matched The Sims in humor and general zaniness, but it barely put a dent in the sales of EA's behemoth franchise.

The Sims 2 built on the foundations of its predecessor to add weekly cycles, additional life stages, genetic traits (including dominant and recessive genes, which affected the appearance and personality of Sim offspring), 3D graphics, vastly improved AI behavior, and an even more fleshed-out modding system. Eight expansions and nine "stuff packs" followed the initial release, as The Sims franchise filtered further into mainstream culture.

Following the decent-but-shallow MySims console spin-off and the 2008 closure of MMO adaptation EA Land (originally released as The Sims Online), The Sims 3 dropped simultaneously for Mac and Windows in June 2009 (console ports followed in 2010).

The Sims 3 gave players much greater access to the world of their Sims, opening the entire neighborhood and Sims' places of work to meddling and shenanigans. Each Sim had a distinct personality, with certain traits, skills, and goals that affected behavior and growth. And at last the Sims were smart enough that you could play the game entirely as an observer, giving them "life" then watching to see what would happen as they tried to make their own way in the world.

This was done particularly effectively—and poignantly—by Robin Burkinshaw, whose experiment in Sim homelessness followed the eccentric Kev and his daughter Alice as they tried to survive life sleeping on a bench in an abandoned park with no money or possessions.

How about a date?

Apart from a few hybrids such as Persona and Star Ocean, dating sims have never been popular outside Japan. Within Japan, though, the genre thrives, reaching its tentacles into all kinds of games.

135 Comments