#24: SimCity (Maxis, Amiga, 1989)

Storytelling indie singer Courtney Barnett’s 2015 album starts with its best song, “Elevator Operator”, in which she sings about a disaffected young man who skips work and takes a lift to the top of a Melbourne skyscraper. A fellow passenger mistakenly thinks he’s planning to kill himself, and he explains to her the reality:

“I come up here for perception and clarity/I like to imagine I’m playing SimCity”

There’s a hint of the game’s cultural legacy for you! And there, too, is part of the explanation for it. Before 1989, people would already go up to high places and enjoy the calming experience of seeing the bigger patterns of the world laid out in front of them. SimCity didn’t invent that perspective. It just created a clever simulation of it with an added element of control, and that was enough.