SimCity 3000

SimCity 3000 was not the last SimCity game. It already feels like the dying of something, though. Britain fell for this kind of management game hard in the early ‘90s, with our own Bullfrog mastering it from Populous to Dungeon Keeper, from Amiga to PC. But in 1999 the PlayStation had not only taken the top spot for games, but was in the process of lifting other consoles up with it, and this type of game just didn’t work for it. There would continue to be plenty of space for games to thrive on the PC, but there wouldn’t be enough for many hits this big, and hits with ‘Sim’ in the title were all about to come from elsewhere.

Adding to the impression of its time being up, SimCity 3000 doesn’t take the series very far forwards at all. If this was a first follow-up, taking the original game and giving it an isometric 3D makeover and a few tweaks might be enough to seem fresh. But SimCity 2000 already did all of that five years earlier. Against that, additions like being able to cut a water deal with your neighbouring city and manage waste disposal looks, well, a bit rubbish. And it’s not like the world of football management where you have changes in a real world sport to provide the impetus of updates. Though there is a scenario in the world version I played where you manage Seoul through the 2003 World Cup (does being wrong by a year get around some rights issues?), but I doubt anyone was going in for the topicality.

Playing essentially the same game again for a third time, connecting up water and power and starting to see the machine of the city whirring into motion, it’s hard not to think a bit harder about some of what hasn’t changed. Bullfrog turned this type of game and the possibility to act horrendously in them into a source of satire, but SimCity has never had that kind of sharpness The conservatism of not shaking it up more extends to some of the assumptions underlying the simulation. When I got messages from my public safety advisor in her police uniform telling me that police coverage was poor, “many parts of the city have no police protection at all, and Sims walk in fear” I had to wonder whether Sims really all had that same experience. Maybe some of the were happy with the lack of police and would prefer funding to go to some other alternative approaches instead?

Could I ask them? Well, no. You do get the occasional petition from individuals, but you can’t be proactive or selective about who they are. I appeared to be stuck with the views of the people being filtered via the equivalents of the Taxpayers’ Alliance and Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells. Otherwise it’s just taking the models on trust, and sub-sub-Onion human interest headlines scrolling along the news ticker between the actual updates, or rather the actual updates and other updates which turn out to not be there any more when you click on them. My advisors might have disagreements with each other on the best approach for me to take, but they were all arguing within the same unspoken framework. If nothing else, SimCity 3000 gave me an appetite for getting to see people’s lives as something other than numbers in a capitalist macroeconomic model.

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Top of the charts for week ending 13 February 1999:

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