Will Wright became a minor celebrity, hailed as a genius for inventing this new genre of simulation. Everybody knew what it was, even if they weren’t into video games. SimCity, as it was rechristened for release in 1989, captured the public’s imagination like no game ever had. Most processes in the simulation operated on a delay, too - what Chaim Gingold, an expert on the game’s (now publicly available) code, calls a kind of polyrhythm of activity, as the system cycled through different processes to keep the city looking alive and ever-changing.įew players noticed any of this, however. Police and fire stations needed only one tile of road or rail adjacent to them to function. A city might require multiple power plants to meet its power needs, but only one of those plants actually needed to be connected to the power grid.

It took shortcuts to work around the limitations of the technology. Growth was tied to the attractiveness of different zones, which emerged from both a proximity to and distance from other zones (people don’t like to live too close to industry, but they also don’t like long commutes).

Underlying the game was a rough approximation of how cities work. More significantly, he reworked the interface.

(Out of pragmatism more than idealism, Mick Foley, his teenage neighbor from the time, explains: “DOS had great market share but bad graphics and no user interface support, while Amiga and Atari ST had no market share.”) Here he continued to improve the underlying simulation, utilizing the Mac’s greater horsepower. “Micropolis”, as he called it, became a city-building and management simulator with power plants, roads, rail, police and fire departments, and three types of zoning: residential, industrial, and commercial.Īt some point during development he ran out of memory on the Commodore 64 and switched to the more powerful Macintosh. In particular he was drawn to the work of MIT professor Jay Forrester, who conceived the theory of system dynamics - which shows how complex systems evolve through multiple interdependent internal feedback loops. Wright read widely on urban planning and computer modeling theories and incorporated these ideas into the simulation he laid on top of the tile editor.

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