To my eleven-year-old credit, I totally understood the concept of what they are - enormous self-sufficient skyscrapers with almost everything necessary for their population - food, clean air, power, water, etc. Reticulating splines.īut it was Arcologies in particular that caught my imagination and are something I'm still utterly fascinated by today. The demented newspaper articles that referred to llamas on every other line. Power plants exploding every half-century. Building my Mayor's house on a raised area surrounded by waterfalls. The inexplicably angry transport advisor. Other games around the same time tried to include people, but failed miserably - ending up with cartoonish caricatures.Ĭertain aspects of SimCity 2000 have stayed with me more than others. There were buildings, cars, and roads, but no actual people - just like the game itself. Oddly there were never any other people in this vision. I imagined living in the streets that I was building on the screen, working in the warehouses and chemical plants and driving back over the suspension bridge to my home on the far side of the lake. The reason it had such a powerful effect was because it fueled my imagination.
#Simcity 2000 water shortage simulator#
I'd played NES games before but I never really felt much of a connection to them - they never grabbed me in a way that Maxis' city-building simulator managed to do. I was able to really lose myself for the very first time. Playing SimCity 2000, I was able to tune out much of what ailed my eleven-year-old self - mostly homework and the perpetual cold that every child of a certain age suffers from. I'd never considered that town planning might be just as much of an art as a science.
I'd never considered that a public transit network might be based on principles honed over decades or even centuries. I'd never considered that a particular road layout might be more than just filling the space between buildings. I'd lived in cities for much of my life, but I'd never really thought of them as a whole - as more than a collection of houses, streets, and neighborhoods.
#Simcity 2000 water shortage manual#
At the end of the manual is a "gallery" of art, poetry, essays, and short stories that address people's experiences of and feelings about cities.Īs an eleven-year-old kid this blew my tiny little mind. Spread throughout the rest of the book, on every other page or so, are more quotes - chosen by the architect Richard Bartlett. It opens with a quote from the Danish urban planner, Steen Eiler Rasmussen: "To search for the ideal city today is useless. About once a year, I leaf through it - not for nostalgia, but because it's such a beautiful creation. The game CD, or perhaps even floppy disks - I can't remember - have long disappeared, but I still own the manual. I still have the manual for SimCity 2000. This week in Gaming Made Me, Wired UK's Duncan Geere recalls how Sim City 2000 (and its incredible manual) taught him utopian values, gave him a life-long fascination with impossible habitats and brought about a new sense of just what manner of strange beast is a city.
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