Jimmy Maher writes about how SimCity’s massive success bankrolled a run of gloriously earnest flops. Author Will Wright himself admitted SimCity was a caricature of a city, not a real simulation — yet it invented the city-builder genre, legitimized sandbox play, and left its fingerprints on everything from Civilization to modern strategy games.
The follow-ups chased big ideas but not fun: SimEarth (the Gaia hypothesis as a planet), SimAnt (ant colonies as distributed intelligence), and the increasingly abstract SimLife and SimFarm. All were fascinating to think about, tedious to play, and sold a fraction of the original. SimCity kept the lights on, spreading to every platform including the SNES, where Miyamoto turned Wright into the “Dr. Wright” advisor character.
The arc closes with a $10M investment nudging a reluctant Wright into SimCity 2000 — a polished, market-savvy sequel that delivered exactly what was asked and earned Maxis the freedom to stay weird. Affectionate but honest: it admires the ambition while conceding most of these toys were better in theory than in the playing.
See the whole story unfolds in Jimmy’s article here.
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