DOS

SimCity

Trivia

SimCity was named #6 overall among the “150 Best Games of All Time” by Computer Gaming World Magazine (15th Anniversary Issue--November 1996).

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3030) on May 01, 2008.

Dr. Wright from the SNES version appears as an assist trophy in the Wii game Super Smash Bros.: Brawl.

Contributed by Sciere (91368) on Apr 01, 2008.

The original game's source was released under a GPL license in January 2008. The game's name was changed to Micropolis because Electronic Arts holds the license, and plane crashes have been removed because of the 9/11 incident.

Contributed by Sciere (91368) on Jan 15, 2008.

SimCity will be one of the games included with the One Laptop Per Child Program's $100 laptops.

To celebrate the release of SimCity 4: Rush Hour, EA Games put a web-based version of this original SimCity game up on their website for play.

At the time of this writing, the URL is http://simcity.ea.com/play/simcity_classic.php

The Commodore 64 version of the this game is awful, and is missing features that even the Spectrum version has. Some of the things missing are fire and police stations, the eval stat screen, stadiums, and meltdowns.

Again according to the Planning Commission Handbook, the church-tornado connection was implemented in order to discourage "impious" players from bulldozing churches due to perceived (not actual) effects on these public buildings' effects on the tax base. The connection only exists in the IBM version and is inspired by the phrase "acts of God" used in the insurance industry to describe property damage-causing natural disasters.

According to Johnny L Wilson's "SimCity Planning Commission Handbook", a big influence on Will Wright in formulating the concept of this game (or "software toy") was an anthology of short stories by Stanislaw Lem entitled "The Cyberiad" -- especially one in which master inventor Trurl builds deposed tyrant Excelsius a "kingdom in a box" in which to harmlessly exercise his tyrannical urges. (Eventually, the people in the box manage to overthrow Excelsius.)

Some of the game's "random disasters" aren't really random at all. For instance, if you demolish a church a tornado will strike your city...every time!

As well as the one mentioned below, another inspiration for SimCity was Will Wright's first game, Raid on Bungeling Bay. He was having much more fun building levels than playing them, so he decided to create a game out of it.

In the PC releases of SimCity, the monster that can destroy your city in a large red lizard. In the SNES release, the monster is Bowser, from the Mario games!

In the original DOS release of Simcity, the copy protection was handled a bit different than most games.

The game gave you 3 square symbols, and then asked you to enter a City and Population. The copy protection itself was printed on dark red papers (therefore uncopyable).

Contributed by Chris Martin (1121) on Sep 07, 2001.

A strange thing in SimCity: If you query (Q) the RADAR (or is it something else? The moving part, anyways) at the airport, it is reported as industrial, instead of airport.

SimCity was Maxis' first title for Windows.

SimCity was inspired by the work Jay Forrester did at MIT. Using a specialized programming language called DYNAMO, he modeled various statistics about the world to determine how to create high quality of life. He also wrote a program to assist in urban planning.

SimCity was voted #31 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll published by Game Informer Magazine (Issue 100, August 2001).

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3030) on Jul 28, 2001.

In the 200th aniversary issue of Computer Gaming World, this game earned the number two spot on the readers' choice list of the top ten games of all time. It earned number five on the staff's list. In issue 150, the game earned spot six on the staff list.

This game is a member of Computer Gaming World magazine's Hall of Fame.

The change in box designs (see cover scans) was due to trademark infringement- the use of Godzilla on the cover wasn't appreciated by Toho Studios.