SC3K is similar enough in structure to SC2K that it can actually load SC2K city save files directly; SC3K being a relatively strict superset of SC2K in terms of available elements and their sizes certainly doesn't hinder that backwards-compatibility at all.

The only things that would actively break when you did this were related to maximum terrain steepness for underground elements (metro, water pipes), 90-degree rail connections would sever (at least, graphically), and hydroelectric power generators as they're the only power building not implemented.

The arcologies were also dropped from SC3K, but to be fair those were mostly just designed to be population boosters in SC2K- something that wasn't necessary in SC3K now that the simulator was allowed to keep track of more than 250 buildings (or at least, so the manual and the query tool say).

Earlier versions of SimCity 2000 are more limited in this regard as arcologies after the first 150 special buildings don't count towards the population count; the later versions do, however.

Very few games do that today (EU4, a favorite of mine, for example) but the trend now is to confuse the user with graphics while giving really little in term of content.

I’d say quite a few. Just not AAA publisher shovelware.

The big new Zelda that just came out does exactly this. They took the shell of the last game and spent six years just making things to flesh out the game much further.

There's also plenty of sim games in the indie market, Factorio, Banished, Frostpunk. Then things that are close to the market like They Are Billions, Kenshi, etc. to name a few I've personally had time to play. Kenshi is a bit rough around the edges, but absolutely brilliant in terms of sandbox play.

There's also the Endless series from Amplitutde studios, Endless Legend, Endless Space 1 + 2, that are of a vein of Civ games, plus they've recently brought out Humandkind (though to mixed reviews unfortunately).

The popular sim genre in recent times has been more 3rd person building mixed with exploration, there was the wave of multiplayer ones like Minecraft, Rust, Arc Evolved, etc. And then single player ones like Subnautica, etc.

So there's stuff out there if you want it, it's just not a very popular genre at the moment.

The budget mechanics are a joke, before long the player has practically endless money.

One rather unknown point that, while not directly related, highlights this is how in C:S your income depends on your current budget. I.e. you magically receive less income if you have 10 million in the bank, and receive more if you're in debt. That point alone makes objectively comparing and strategizing unnecessarily hard, and it feels like the game really does not want you to work with numbers instead of paint buckets.

Yes, technically you can still play a bunch of cool 4X games, but most people still making them (with the exception of like, CAs Total War, which also notably defocused the 4X part in favor of RTS combat) is copying the Paradox approach and Paradox is largely known for its absurd depth and mechanics... which unfortunately translates to the games devolving into spreadsheet simulators with fancy graphics.

Civilization was the right mix between "flavorful civilizations", "fun endgoals" and "reasonable to achieve victory against the computer". Most 4X games, because they copied the Paradox approach, kinda suffer from the fact that they pretty much demand immediate mastery of the systems if you want to succeed, unless you're playing with friends (in which case you have more control over each other's bumbling and one person can just hyperfocus on learning one system, while the other can focus on another.)

Its the difference between SimCity and Cities: Skylines. SimCity (before the final game) is a sandbox toy that lets you build a super dysfunctional city but y'know, as long as the taxes don't go in the red, you're doing fine! Cities: Skylines otoh has way harsher feedback tools if you don't build a highly functional city. That's fine if you're already tuned in on SimCity as a game and crave a higher challenge, but if you're new to these kinds of games, Cities: Skylines is just too much.

Take clarity in communication. Pong is maximally clear: the background is black, an interactive object is white. Every white object is integral to the game. The further you move away from this ideal towards photorealism, the less clear this distinction becomes. You must add more UI elements on top to compensate for the loss of clarity, creating mounting tension between the functional and the ornate.

When a bush has the gall to shoot you.

You'll be surprised, but gaming magazines used to say the same thing(s) even in the 80s. It's a platitude.

Fun thing: A famous game developer of that time, but can't remember which one, once said that "the name of game companies aren't creative enough". /shrug

However, try playing the first level of Super Mario Bros on original NES hardware. The game mechanics basically still hold up.

All Atari 2600 games were worse than NES games, and primitive as anything. But try Breakout with paddles on an original 2600; again, the mechanics are good and it’s fun, at least briefly.

The same is true for MSDOS games, Genesis, 2600, MSX, PS1/2/3/4, XBox, GB, GC etc etc etc. The majority of games out there are just not good or have aged poorly on the graphic/playability front. I personally would recommend only a very small handful of games on the NES. Also one issue with some of these older systems is they were meant to be played on a 15-20 inch PAL/NTSC screen with interlacing. You splat that across a 65 inch OLED they tend to look bad. Your brain is good at making up the detail.

Talking specifically about the usual suspects but hell, even some indie games are doing it now, in indie games it seems more popular to release a new game entirely which is basically 1.0 with new maps but thankfully there are tons of passion projects that get new content for years and years who really deserve more support.

This is probably true as well, but the internet editor map editors use are often very different than what they would offer the community, requiring a lot of polish compared to what's used internally (and we all know that the 20% last polish takes 80% of the time) Although there are some games that offer the very same experience, like what Crysis had (with the CryEngine Editor) and ARMA series.

These games were a product of their time and you definitely do have an age based selection bias!

99 pages long my friend.

Checkout the manual for StarCraft, which gives you the entire backstory!

I think we'll come full circle with generative ML tooling as games will have to compete in wider areas than just marketing & graphics.

FWIW, I have a pet theory that WoW took over at that point not because of the MMO concept (which already existed), but because their UX was so smooth. That was the first MMO that "just worked" to understand what you were trying to click. The others at that time would take multiple tries to click an object correctly.

In any case, the success of WoW is what changed the direction of gaming a few years after all those games came out, so I'm agreeing with you that it was an incredible era.

Roguelikes

Dwarf Fortress

Factorio

EU4

My theory is that deep gameplay and AAA 3D graphics are mutually exclusive because deep gameplay fundamentally requires "tile grids" of some kind, which don't lend themselves to AAA 3D graphics.

(Diablo 1 and 2 kind of railed against this by taking the approach, "Hey, what if we took a tile-based roguelike and rendered it in isometric 3Dsortof?" At the time, that isometric 3Dsortof was state of the art, I guess.)

I cannot think of a more revolutionary span of games over 3 years.

  Super Mario Bros 3
  Zelda II
  Mega Man
  John Madden Football
  Battle Chess
  Tetris
  Contra
  Double Dragon
  Street Fighter
  Castlevania
  Metal Gear
  Metroid
  Mike Tyson's Punch Out
  Final Fantasy
  The Legend of Zelda
  Dragon Quest
  Super Mario Bros
  Adventure Island
  Paper Boy
  Gauntlet

Graphics hardware at the time wouldn't be able to handle a city builder with the depth and scale of SimCity 2000.

Heck, it wouldn't have been able to handle a 3D version of the original SimCity unless the draw distance was limited to like 300 feet.

For proof, check out SimCopter. I can't imagine trying to play a city builder with those graphics.

You don't have to do that. Leaving the sliders at defaults work just fine. You only need to tweak them if you wanted to micro-optimize spending, which rarely needed given how easy it is to make a profitable city to start with.

The open creation of any layout you could think of was my favorite aspect of the game.

Anyone have a particular recommendation on how to play SC 2000 today on Windows 10?

In other words an alternate history of population and human development.

A multi-player Sim Earth.

That said, there are a lot of games where the details of the simulation compound on themselves in interesting ways (Dwarf Fortress, Dominions, DC:Barbarossa, Shadow Empire, Paradox games). I enjoy those sorts of games, more minimalism and abstraction isn't always more fun.

I am asking, because I think I haven't seen the multiplayer support in any railroad/transport-tycoon game. I remember in Railroad Tycoon 2 and then in Sid Meier's Railroads [0] we could play against NPC. Same as us, NPC is establishing a company and we may buy all his stocks to win.

[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/7600/Sid_Meiers_Railroads...

In OpenRTC, each player gets full control over managing the same park from a shared pool of funds. Mayhem may ensure if you set your game to public and don't configure permissions carefully.

In my mind, such an OpenSC2K's multiplayer would work like the latter. Each player managing the same city. Though if they removed game engine restrictions, it would be nifty if each player could manage his own city on one big shared map, similar to OpenRTC.

But to do it right, I'd want it to be the scale of a moderately large nation like the USA. You'd buy plots of land one square mile as you expand. The game world would be seeded with a major highway and railroad system that you could not remove, just add connections to.

I'd want traffic to be simulated in the same depth as Cities: Skylines, and have freight have to move over a thousand miles to reach destinations.

But most importantly, I'd want the entire game world to be seamless. You should be able to pan from one side of the country to the other.

But such an ambitious game would require immense processing power. I don't know how I would scale it.

SimCity 2000, much like Hunter S. Thompson's description of mid-sixties San Francisco, represented a harmonic convergence of factors that established a high-water mark of game design.

It was a time when the energy of a whole generation of computer hardware and game developers came to a head in a round shiny disc, for reasons that were hard to fully grasp at the time and even harder to explain in retrospect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc

Just as Thompson describes the sense of being alive in that corner of time and the world, there was a similar sense of knowing that you were part of something special when playing SimCity 2000, a testament to constructive expression and augmented imagination, instead of pre-scripted storytelling and showboating special effects.

It marked a technological zenith, fruitfully applying the latest technology in a way that later versions fell short. It was an inflection point in simulation game design and immersive production values, having reached a point where any further elaboration would only lead to diminishing returns. It struck the ideal balance of complexity by remaining true to the original SimCity Classic, while learning from the oversimplification of SimAnt and the overcomplication of SimEarth.

And just like the high-water mark described by Thompson, the peak of SimCity 2000's game design was a place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. Subsequent versions, despite their technological advancements, could not recapture the magic of that moment. They were like the Las Vegas of today, where with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark of game design that was SimCity 2000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk

In a 1996 talk, Will Wright dove into how the designs of SimAnt and SimEarth both influenced SimCity 2000. During a Q&A session, a student asked what he was making next, so he also gave a sneak peek into his current project, Dollhouse, which was later renamed The Sims.

Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26

Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.

He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.

This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...

Use and reproduction: The materials are open for research use and may be used freely for non-commercial purposes with an attribution. For commercial permission requests, please contact the Stanford University Archives ([email protected]).

https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999

Who programmed the original games? Is that unimportant? Did Will Wright program?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Hopkins