#24: SimCity (Maxis, Amiga, 1989)

Battle Chess made use of the Amiga’s mouse and primitive windows interface, but this is where the freedom and complication it offers really comes into its own. SimCity is at heart a model of city building with a large array of inputs — different types of building use, transport infrastructure, services, taxes — and of outputs — satisfaction ratings, crime, pollution, growth. The game is in understanding and predicting how one leads to the other, which it keeps tantalisingly at the edge of the player’s reach.