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This review is going to be a little hard to write because it covers two games with substantial differences: the console version of SimCity (SNES) and the computer game versions, which after 1993 was renamed SimCity Classic to help differentiate it from SimCity 2000. I've already written about one of the main guides for the game, too. It is not, however, to be confused with the ill-fated SimCity (aka "SimCity 2013").

The original SimCity as released for computers (all the ones that were on the market at the time, Commodore-64, DOS, Macintosh, Atari ST, and Amiga), is a top-down view game where you're basically slapping down 3x3 tiles of Residential (green), Commercial (blue), and Industrial (yellow), along with other features like police stations to control crime, roads/rail to control traffic (you can replace all the roads with rail, owing to Will Wright's personal hatred of roads/love of mass transit), and so forth, but at some point you're basically waiting for the simulation year to roll over so you can continue to slap down the same 3x3 squares. There are some disasters you can trigger, including a Godzilla-like monster (on the box—later changed to red from green with a different cry, in order to quell copyright complaints), but really, it's all quite dull, especially with no music or rewards. No wonder the suits at Brøderbund (the original distributor) demanded a compromise with the addition of scenarios.

As far as computer game versions go (going with the Mac version, the version differences are described here), there's not a lot to get out of it, since pretty much everything it does SimCity 2000 does much better and I just don't have the nostalgia for it. There were some attempts to squeeze some life out of the original SimCity including a few forgotten multiplayer versions and a licensed "special edition" called SimCity Enhanced (published by Interplay, basically adding short videos to events, but no change to the game itself). At least Maxis made a 32-bit version (available on Archive.org). It runs fine, if a bit fast (though it needs some patching to save your game properly). It's good because you can stretch out the screen size without being limited by DOS or pulling out a Mac emulator, but arguably one of the best versions is the version published by Nintendo for the Super NES, which added music, an expanded color palette, a few more rewards, and a new interface starring a Japanese interpretation of Will Wright, Dr. Wright, as well as a few Nintendo-specific bits, like the big reward at 500k people is a statue of Mario, or the monster attack being Bowser rather than Not-Godzilla. The game also changes the color of Residential from green to red, probably for television contrast reasons. However, the low resolution of the system, the lack of more than two save files, and the terrible control scheme mean that the SNES version is definitely not the definitive version of the game.

Some years back the SimCity source code was released as "Micropolis" and while that has resulted in some things like this somewhat stripped-down JavaScript port, the code and its forks have resulted in nothing non-trivial. It would've been nice to backport the soundtrack of the SNES version, for starters. (Perhaps giving the game a SimCity 2000-level redo but in an entirely new direction would be TOO ambitious).

I will say this: the top-down view is underappreciated, especially that's how Google Earth is shown and how you can get a good sense of scale of a city, it's underutilized in other works, and can help cover up how bad everything else looks. Case in point, this heavily-modded Cities: Skylines screenshot, though again it doesn't have the same scale real cities have because I hated Cities: Skylines, and not just because it was the disappointment of the decade. There's a camera mod for SimCity 4, too, but the top-down view looks a bit unnatural. I would assume that top-down view is avoided in many of these city sims because it doesn't show off skyscrapers, and it makes the weird scale more obvious.

FINAL RATING:   

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