SimCity 4

Overview

SimCity 4 sparked my imagination like nothing else as far as hopes and dreams went, but it's unfortunately a flawed game that did not live up to its potential...but still might in the end. The first version I wrote for Carbon-izer in September 2015 can be seen here, with the 2023 version found here. The current edition below was updated October 2026. It cuts out a lot of the rambling and changes the last paragraph somewhat.

Review

Sometime around the year 2000, I briefly engaged my brother in a conversation on a road trip to Houston (US-290, actually) about what a hypothetical "SimCity 4000" would have. I'm sure everyone thought that the sequel to SimCity 3000 would called "SimCity 4000" following the precedent set forward by SimCity 2000. (Sometimes it is that way. I'm sure the iPhone and the PlayStation 5 were predicted and discussed long before they became reality). I was psyched in spring 2002 when I discovered a magazine advertising "SimCity 4" on the cover at the local OfficeMax, which I really wanted because I needed a magazine for a project at school but sadly didn't get. When Maxis announced its SimCity 4 preview series soon after, I was out in the Grand Canyon at the time, though the end result was never as intriguing as the preview cover (which featured a hapless hot dog vendor Sim being thrown in the air).

SimCity 4 was first released in January 2003, but I couldn't really enjoy it because it was a Windows only game, and I had a Mac. That was all right. I still paid attention to the websites when I could, and was interested when an expansion pack, "SimCity 4: Rush Hour", was announced soon after. While SimCity 3000 continued to occupy most of the SimCity time, I was still hanging out on SimCity sites, like the now-defunct SimGlobal.net. But it was eventually released for Mac under Aspyr Media, yet the family's iMac we had at home wasn't quite up to snuff enough to really play it right, and I don't think I even had at that point (the price point for the Mac version was really high, and was given a rather mediocre port by Aspyr Media).

I didn't play SimCity 4 continuously, it came and went. There were times when things malfunctioned and I couldn't play for a while, there were times when I got really into it, there were times when I started to design buildings for it. In spring 2004, I purchased the Prima strategy guide (a monochrome but weighty volume, though it was no SimCity 2000: Power, Politics, and Planning at the GameStop at Vista Ridge Mall. It had assumed it would be quickly out of date, as by that time, The Sims (which had some intercompatibility with SimCity 4) was gearing up for a 3D sequel after having gone through a record-busting seven expansion packs (The Sims 2, released in 2004, would receive 8 over four years). I believed that at the time, SimCity 4 would get a second expansion pack, with Rush Hour coming out for Mac at about the time the second one would come out, just as Rush Hour was released in fall 2003 like the Mac version of the base game had been. Unfortunately, poor sales of the game doomed it, though I didn't know it at the time. Later I found out some of the cut content of the game...the base game had other things cut including ordinances, dirt roads, upgradeable buildings, and more. Ocean Quigley, one of the artists at Maxis, included a number of SimCity features on his blog that never saw the light some years after the game was released, and that included some really intriguing stuff, like extensive decay masks for buildings. Even the Rush Hour expansion pack had some things cut, the official SimCity 4 website (now gone) mentioned "classic American road marks" (whatever they meant by that) and railyards. Apparently, there was a second expansion planned that was more nature-focused and added salt water. (I don't remember where I read that. Don't quote me on that.) The only thing SimCity 4 got after Rush Hour was a prop pack called "Castle Ramparts". (One wonders if a medieval-themed expansion pack was thought up at the time). I would also assume that the second expansion pack would've contained scenarios, something that they've had in most every game (even if it wasn't in the original SimCity 3000, it was added in SimCity 3000 Unlimited).

Despite EA effectively abandoning the game at that point, the mod community was just getting started. Around that time, I discovered Simtropolis, and the first thing that I really wanted, a hydroelectric dam structure by SimPegasus. It wasn't actually functional as far as managing water in your city was concerned, but it still left a profound impact in my view of the game. Around that time there was a new family computer purchased that did play SimCity 4 properly. With all the mods out there, my imagination began to run. When I took the first real trip again to the Houston area in a number of years, my eyes were really opened to the possibility of the program. Mostly the freeway (the intriguing HOV lane among them) and the endless strip malls (many with names I did not know). Much of this has been documented on Carbon-izer, including a few links of what the highway looked like in 2005. Bigger projects, like the "Rural Highway Mod" to take advantage of the unfinished dirt road network, were beginning, along with the "Network Add-On Mod" which did some bug fixes and some hacked-up versions of roads and railroads (extensive updates have gone on since and it barely resembles what it was 20 years ago). I remember that they had elevated roads (basically bridge pieces) that you could place as "puzzle pieces" (ploppable, instead of dragging), with things like intersections on viaducts possible (like what I saw in Galveston around this time. With all the mods out there, my imagination began to run. When I took the first real trip again to the Houston area in a number of years, my eyes were really opened to the possibility of the program. Mostly the freeway (the intriguing HOV lane among them) and the endless strip malls (many with names I did not know). Much of this has been documented on Carbon-izer, including a few links of what the highway looked like in 2005. Of course, that never happened (there were lots of limitations SimCity 4 had, like the inability to make larger lots without it turning into a crime hub), but it was that same sort of wonder that helped make this website (or at least that part of the website) possible. (Most of the major corridors that really got the imagination running have been written about.)

That was the best part of SimCity 4, unlike any other SimCity before it (except for maybe the PC version of SimCity 3000 Unlimited, I don't think I ever got into mods with that game), you could add buildings to the game instead of replacing them. Both SimCity Classic and SimCity 2000 had some level of building editing but these replaced the existing game's graphics, it didn't add anything new. But because I was stuck on the Mac version, it had all the bugs of the Windows version plus some (in particular, no patch was created for night-lighting of custom buildings, meaning that the coolest buildings like Microwave Rectenna Plant never lived up its potential.

SimCity 4 had some of best video game-playing memories ever, ranked among the Game Boy Pokémon games and Mario 64, and despite its problems the mods made it more special. One of my favorite memories was getting some Toys R Us models, and while the models weren't all that there (most models had the problem of a parking lot that wasn't proportional to the building, and the parking lot that was there looked kinda weird), I will never forget that if you queried the building, you would get the audio of the first seven or so seconds of this commercial, and that would fade into the ambient noises of the city. Arguably, the lack of a proper successor has enabled SimCity 4 modding to go on as long as it had, in the late 2000s there were rumors of a "SimCity 5" and that turned out to be a bit with SimCity Societies, which greatly simplified the game and there was a backlash to it, with an oft-circulated altered screenshot which Simtropolis mods made sure to remove because either the rampant spamming of the image, the potentially offensive imagery, or perhaps the fact that it hit the common "EA is a money-grubbing fascist" sentiment a little too hard on the head.

By the early 2010s, the game had lost a lot of luster for me and I had moved onto other games. There were long-running issues with the SimCity 4 fansites like Simtropolis that couldn't be resolved, and many of the projects I had seen over the years never came to pass. (One example was a full recreation of the Boston Big Dig circa 2007, which included some cool renderings, but never got released). My dreams of becoming big in the SimCity 4 building-modeling scene never came to fruition, and the world that I wanted to create in my game could never happen anyway. Not with the present game, at least. (d while the models weren't all that there (back in 2013 I had started on a "Division One" Wal-Mart and despite pretty recognizable it had a while to go). But by and large, the mods were just a way to cover for that, and at a certain point it's just a fancy picture to paste into your city. This wasn't as pronounced it was in Cities: Skylines but it was there. The simulation isn't much deeper than it was in the 1990s games. Despite having a tile-based system with similar footprints for civic buildings (the Large Police Station is a 3x3 building, for instance, just as with all police stations dating back to the original), it is not compatible with SimCity 3000 (cut content indicates that this was not the original plan). There are ways to import "My Sims" from The Sims and a way to use the game to create custom neighborhoods for The Sims 2 but that's it.

I mentioned this in some of my other reviews regarding Maxis games, but less than ten years prior to the release of SimCity 4, the CD version of SimCity 2000 had suggested that there would be more intercompatibility with other Sim games in the future and SimCity 4 could support that. The SimCity 4 Building Architect Tool helped create game-compatible renderings from 3D models, but not from any other title. It would've been interesting for SimCity 3000 to import golf courses from SimGolf (I'm sure that was that was part of the plan at some point) but that still probably would've been a bridge too far for late 1990s technology. With SimCity 4, that might've been possible...but SimGolf had long been forgotten by that time, and it wasn't coming back. I think that what happened was that EA really wanted SimCity 4 to be an extension of The Sims (ironically, The Sims was originally built as an extension of SimCity 2000) but that didn't work out marketing-wise or game-wise. (The attempt at integration was very poor. Even if you wanted to expand your Sims family into a bigger world, you'd be disappointed.) Then when they finally did come around and release a "real" SimCity title ("SimCity 2013") it would be hobbled with an always-online component and by the time Maxis released an offline patch, it and the whole series were killed off for good. A very sad end to one of the best video game series, not just SimCity but of classic Maxis Sim titles, which were already on life support under EA...stuff like SimCoaster was just a rebadged version of Bullfrog's Theme Park World, for instance).

It wouldn't be fair to say that SimCity 4 hasn't improved since the mid-2000s. The "Network Add-On Mod" is a feat of engineering, stretching the dirt road into a full new network with variable lanes (the "Real Highway Mod") and all sorts of other features, but, and I mean this without animosity or dismissal of the NAM team, it's really just hacked together components from what the game already provides, and there's still a lot of things that present impossible technical limitations. With the NAM, you can make complex, interesting, and functional intersections and from YouTube videos you CAN make a functional stack interchange but it will take AT LEAST an hour to do and that's from someone who helped build the NAM. With a normal person it will likely take far longer.

Because SimCity 4 wasn't a one-and-done game that I went through and then screwed around with years later, it's hard to really talk about it objectively. In the current version of this review, I did talk more about it "Player Notes" as far as future Sims go.

Player Notes

The first version of this page was optimistic about Cities: Skylines (boy, what a disaster that turned out to be) and while there are a few games that scratch the itch of SimCity 4, whether it's Factorio (similar aesthetics, too) or Prison Architect, which also came after the original 2015 review (before it was messed up by Paradox, anyway). I have been burned so many times on so many projects. In the second version of this page, I had hoped for something like Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection, especially given that SimCity 4 practically needs a bevy of mods just to make it run okay.

At this point (late 2026) my hopes of a better city simulator that would address my hopes and dreams, the stuff that would incorporate the QoL updates that I saw in Prison Architect and Factorio and the dream I wanted, creating an ideal city from the (then recent) past and some of the cities I loved on road trips, is more or less dead. The few city simulators under development on Steam don't hold promise, NewCity was a bust despite some great ideas, and the less said about Cities: Skylines II the better. But perhaps AI could help. Already, as of this writing, a third of SimCity 4's code has been decompiled (this stemmed from a previous attempt at making an open-source SimCity 4...which was basically a SimCity 4-compatible knockoff) and that could lead to patches that address core problems (like crime affecting larger lots) rather than just DLLs that attempt to address it, as well as fixing a lot of the hard-coded issues. Maybe we could even create a way to bring SimCity 3000 buildings to the game as intended...and AI could also make buildings, too, I suppose...years ago I remember releasing a list of buildings I "planned" to make, armed with a handful of Microsoft Bing Birds Eye View pictures and other "sources". Over at the Carbon-izer.com Archive there's a 50MB(!) aerial of Northwest Plaza, a mall in the Saint Louis area I was interested in at the time. (After all, SimCity 4 is missing nice regional malls...among other things). It's missing other angles (I may have saved other angles), but I think technology already exists to make that into a 3D building. Maybe SimCity 4 was the city sim that was what we really needed after all. Maybe.

Port & Rerelease Notes

As I mentioned in the main review, SimCity 4 was ported to Mac by Aspyr Media sometime later in 2003 (Wikipedia says this was done by an outfit called "i5works"). Surprisingly, Aspyr has managed to keep SimCity 4 playable on modern Macs through patches, first with the 2007 Intel patch, then around 2019-2020 for 64-bit, and in 2023 for Apple Silicon. Likely none of this would've been done if SimCity 4 didn't have the mod support it did over the years.

Additional Content

I have written additional content for this page...
• SimCity 3000 Compatibility: Written for the 11/01/2026 update, this examines potential cross-compatibility between SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4.
• The Disappearing Dr. Vu: Dr. Vu was originally supposed to look different.
• The Barry Sanders Project: Some information on one of the "BAT teams".
• Other Tips: A very old page I made when I was writing the original 2015 page. Most of these still hold up.

Screenshots

The Network Add-On Mod can do all sorts of fun intersections that aren't in the base game. (Not my picture.)

This was a city I made around 2014-2015 called "No Cheat" but I later renamed it. It featured a loop road.

I downloaded this image almost 9 years to the day from when I originally posted this review (9/21/06 vs. 9/20/15). Must have been that I dug that Days Inn.

A custom building. I dig this style of McDonald's restaurant, and I miss that almost all of these in real life have vanished.

Mods will let you build the true-to-scale airport of your dreams. THIS is the sort of thing I want.