Us Lonely Spline-Searchers
If Queen Victoria, Genghis Khan or Charlemagne were alive today and they were, of course, partial to sitting down on their imperious backsides behind a computer screen for hours at a time, I think their video gaming tipple of choice would be SimCity. Now, granted, Age of Empires has its resource-management and its base-building, and Total War its epic battles, but neither come close to matching the feeling of omnipotence and overlordship, that Zen-like oneness, that an evening spent mucking about in any of Maxis’ virtual city-builder sandboxes inspires.
I wrote in-depth about the virtues of the SimCity series – specifically, 3000 – in a retrospective review during the summer months. Despite being drip-fed a staple of nightmarish management games for eight weeks, SimCity 3000, after all its years gathering dust on my shelf, managed to captivate me with its intricacy and compelling gameplay: it was fantastically refreshing. The beauty of the SimCity series, to me at least, is not so much in the actual building, but watching everything work. There’s something a little wondrous and childlike in guiding your coal-powered housing estate to a fully-fledged industrial and commercial capital city, dotted with skyscrapers, laced with highways and fuelled by a legion of fusion power plants. It’s a treat when combined with appealing visuals and an ambient, almost ethereal soundtrack. In fact, I imagine a weary gamer beholding his bustling, functioning metropolis is akin to what a watchmaker feels as the final cog in his crafted machine turns and brings it to life.
The release of SimCity 2000 also coincided with a massive surge in obsessive-compulsive disorders. Strange...
I’ll keep the history brief: In the beginning (or, more specifically, 1989), SimCity formed from the void under the leadership of Will Wright at Maxis, a small, Seattle-based studio; it was the game that put him on the map and started him down his course to industry stardom. SimCity went on to inspire and influence an entire genre of games, and revolutionised it again in 1993 with SimCity 2000, often cited as the best in the series. In 1999, SimCity 3000 was born to a lesser reception, but a good one nonetheless, and was followed in 2003 by SimCity 4, which included limited incorporation with Wright’s other global sensation, The Sims.
But alas that our investigation into the whereabouts of SimCity 5 begins rather hopelessly. SimCity 4 released in a post-Sims world to a largely uninterested wider audience, in an era of gaming where the PC’s more peculiar genres and sub-genres – like the city-builders, tycoon, and management games – were dwindling into a niche of hardcore enthusiasts. Indeed, speaking with the Seattle P-I in 2004 in the wake of SimCity 4‘s just-above-average review scores, Wright reasoned that the series had become comparatively unpopular because of its increasing, unnecessary complexity:
“SimCity kind of worked itself into a corner, because we were still appealing to this core SimCity group. It had gotten a little complicated for people who had never played SimCity. We want to take it back to its roots where somebody who had never heard of SimCity can pick it up and enjoy playing it without thinking it was really, really hard.”
Impostor! Who are you, and what have you done with the real SimCity?!
Far from returning to the accessibility of the series’ first and second games, in 2007, Maxis threw a curveball at SimCity. In fact, such a mighty throw it was that Maxis disappeared from the space-time continuum entirely and was replaced by Tilted Mill Entertainment (the folks behind city-builders Children of the Nile and Caesar IV) who birthed SimCity Societies, a game 10% successor and 90% spin-off; Tilted Mill’s focus shifted from city building to “social engineering” and, as a result, nearly every defining aspect of the previous games was stripped out, from zoning to advisors and power grids to pipelines. It seemed to miss the point entirely, and this was echoed by critics.
Then, nothing. The llamas went silent. All hope seemed gone when Will Wright left Maxis in early 2009 to join Stupid Fun Club, his creative energies already long spent on the highly ambitious Spore. Later that year, EA Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw told Shack News that the mega-corporation was – with the original SimCity team in tow – as dedicated to the series as ever, and that it sought to “reinterpret” it. Indeed, they’ve done quite a bit of reinterpretation: since SimCity Societies, we’ve seen multiple incarnations and ports of the series on the DS, iPhone and iPad; and in May of this year, information leaked regarding a Facebook version of SimCity, to arrive sometime in the near future. One struggles to imagine anything beyond a stripped down, micropayment-driven brand-name cash-in, but I’m dying to be proven wrong.
There’s a glimmer of possibility twinkling faintly on the horizon for religious SimCity-ites. In August, EA announced that it intended to bring back and reimagine “a couple of old franchises”, and beyond the definite reboot of Syndicate and curious re-registration of the Alpha Centauri patent, one can only hope that not only is this retro renaissance not literally limited to two, but also includes SimCity. Unless EA is certain it’ll be able to make a good buck from SimCity 5, though, again, I have difficulty envisaging anything beyond a Facebook instalment or at best, SimCity Societies 2, with PSN and XBLA in mind.
Cities XL, a seductive temptress.
Whilst we wait in vigil for official word – sort of like the old knight in The Last Crusade – the city-building genre still has a limited selection to offer to those tiring of SimCity 4. Cities XL is, by the looks of it, your current best bet; though sadly buggy and a little sparse features-wise, it’s a visual feast and retains enough of the SimCity feel that it may be enough to scratch your itch. Also worth keeping an eye on is the embryonic open-source city-builder, The Metropolis Project. Though it’s in pre-production, the scope and ambition is quite staggering, and there’s a chance for you to share your input and donate.
SimCity 5, if it ever arrives, needs to turn a dying genre on its head, satisfying both the long-term enthusiasts and the investors at EA. It needs to be simple enough to appeal to new players, but not so simple that its sole semblance to the series is in name only; it also needs to maintain its characteristic charm and humour, its feel and its challenge, its superb sense of progression and reward. With digital distribution stronger than ever, a dedicated fanbase and impressive current-gen technologies, it’s a game that can’t come soon enough. We’ve got splines to reticulate, damn it!
