Contents:
SimCity 2000
The Intro
Title: SimCity 2000
Release year: 1993
Developed by: Maxis
Genre: Simulation
Platform replayed on: PC
God-mode.
Isn’t that what simulation builder games are really all about? You get to create and control whichever type of sandbox you’re in.
But creating is one thing; controlling your creation is quite another altogether.
Will I be able to remember how to build a city from the ground up (literally) and run it successfully for 150 years? It’s been a long time since I’ve played SimCity 2000—probably not even since its eponymous year 2000 (which itself seems a long time ago…).
My first memory of the SimCity series was with the original: SimCity. I remember a friend having it in the early 90s, though I can’t recall which platform we played it on.
Image by Luiz Pacheco via MobyGames
It wasn’t until around the time SimCity 2000 was released that I really started to explore the series. At that time, we used to hire video games. We could hire Nintendo and Sega consoles and games from the video store (remember those?), but there were also some specialist stores for hiring PC games. I remember a couple of physical stores, where you could browse all the big-box PC games in all their glory—I was like the clichéd “kid in a candy store”. There was also a mail order service (pre-Internet!), where you could select games from a catalogue, send an order form, and then wait by the letterbox for a few weeks (it’s called snail mail for a reason).
The reason I mention these PC-game hiring services is that I distinctly recall the “Sim” games available at the time. I say “Sim”, as it wasn’t just cities that were being simulated. I remember SimAnt (1991) and SimLife (1992) among almost twenty “Sim” games developed by Maxis in the 90s.
I can’t recall exactly when I played SimCity 2000, but I know I must have hired it out at some stage in the mid-90s.
But what exactly is SimCity 2000? Let’s load it up and find out.
The Game
Well, maybe loading this game up isn’t the best way to start. You see, SimCity 2000 is a city-builder simulation, and it’s quite complex.
Back in the 90s, games didn’t feature in-game tutorials; they included manuals. And I’m talking about hard-copy manuals here.
You didn’t learn SimCity 2000 by playing it; you learned by reading a manual. Thankfully, the manual included with SimCity 2000 features tutorials to get your city up and running.
Once you have your city established, where to next? The challenge in a city-builder simulation is the balancing act of managing income and expenditure so your city remains solvent, while at the same time providing and maintaining an environment which keeps your populace happy, healthy, and safe.
Simple, right? Let’s just say that as in real life, a utopian fantasy remains just that in SimCity 2000: a fantasy. It’s a numbers game: keep the majority happy most of the time.
Once you’re comfortable with building and running a city, SimCity 2000 also provides some custom scenarios. In these scenarios, you are tested with how well you can solve a problem or recover from a disaster. There are plenty of them, from natural disasters to alien invasions.
To get started with a standard city build, you can customise your starting landscape, as well as your starting financial position and starting year.
Your city is then established, and then you’re on your own to determine its destiny.
The basics of getting started in SimCity 2000 are zoning, electricity, and water.
And roads are a good idea, too.
You’ll need to be able to power your population with electricity, and keep them hydrated.
Zoning is divided into three types: industrial, commercial, and residential. Essentially, areas to work, shop, and live. Each zone type is further split into light and heavy. For example, heavy residential is for high-density housing such as apartments, where light residential will be more suburban.
As your city matures and the population increases, your citizens will start demanding more services. These include policing, fire service, medical services, and education.
Eventually, your citizens will even want to be entertained and have fun!
But it’s not all fun and games—each year you will need to face the budget.
If you want to realise your utopian dreams in SimCity 2000, you will need to carefully balance how much to tax and how much to spend.
And if you think managing your city has become mundane or, dare I say it, easy, you can always take control of mother nature and throw a disaster upon your citizens.
A clichéd expression for simulations, but the possibilities are endless.
So how was I going to focus this replay of SimCity 2000 to ensure I didn’t end up going down endless tangents? Let’s take a look.
The Replay
I wanted to set some ground rules for how I was going to approach SimCity 2000 after all these years. I decided upon the following:
- random map, no customising the landscape
- start in 1900 (the earliest start point)
- easy mode (start with $20,000)
- disasters left on (they can be disabled)
- no reloads
- play through until at least 2050
I think most of those are self-explanatory. I remember when I first played this I used to flatten the entire map so I didn’t have to deal with elevation. This time, I decided to “play it as it lies”. I also thought I’d leave myself to the mercy of random disasters, where I always used to turn this off.
And with that, let’s found a city!
Let’s take a look at the hand I was dealt.
As you can see, Presentville is quite undulating. The first decision then is where I should start zoning. I thought a flat piece of land would be best.
Here goes nothing—let’s get zoning!
With the zoning down, it was time to build a power plant and some underground water pipes.
Success! By April 1900 I had my first residents moving in.
Industry followed, with construction well under way by 1901.
By 1902, it was starting to look like a small town. There was now demand for commercial zoning, and a church had already been established!
All seemed to be going well, but I was blowing through all of my $20,000 initial funding. By 1903, I had built a railway, a bridge over the river, and connected Presentville by road to two of the four neighbouring cities.
The residents were now demanding police and fire protection. After building stations to protect and to serve, I was down to $1,500. Tough decisions would need to be made soon.
I needed to turn my budget deficits into budget surpluses, so it was either reduce expenditure, increase property taxes, or a combination of the two.
It was here that I made a mistake that I remembered in hindsight that you just can’t make in SimCity 2000: I reduced funding to the transit authority. Basically, I decreased spending on road and rail maintenance. When I soon started noticing damage on my road and rail networks, I realised my mistake.
So I could get away with reducing police department and fire department spending, but if I didn’t want to continue repairing my roads and rails, I would need to keep the transit authority fully funded. Lesson re-learned!
It wasn’t all bad news though—Presentville had now reached a population of 2,000.
I was also being rewarded for this achievement.
It was at this point where I started experimenting with the city ordinances tab in SimCity 2000. Here, you can boost your income with sales and income taxes, parking fines, and even legalised gambling. You can also introduce various initiatives across education, health and safety, advertising, and the environment. These add to the overall image and quality of life in your city. These include initiatives such as pro-reading campaigns, free clinics, tourist advertising, and pollution controls. I wanted to set a high standard for Presentville from the start, so as you can see below, I implemented most of these initiatives.
Now, the mistake I made above with the transit authority funding was minor compared to the next one I was about to make.
I issued a $10k bond.
In the short term, there was growth, as I expanded Presentville to meet the demand for further residential and industrial zones.
However, it wasn’t long before the annual bond repayments started to cripple my budget.
I issued the bond in 1907, and by 1912 Presentville was broke. It was beginning to look like my replay of SimCity 2000 might be coming to a very quick end…
Compared to my neighbours, Presentville was still the most popular place to live, and the expansion had been a success. But until I paid off that bond, growth would stagnate as I didn’t have the funding room in the budget to do anything.
I increased property taxes for the first time to start running a budget surplus, so I could save up enough to pay off the bond.
It took me until 1949 until I had enough to make the repayment. There was just one problem.
The Presentville power plant was nearing the end of its life! This was another SimCity 2000 detail I had forgotten about. I couldn’t believe it. I was finally ready to rid the city of the crippling bond repayments, but I needed to purchase a new power plant.
Eventually, the old power plant had had enough.
I wanted to open another oil power plant, but instead had to go with the cheaper coal power plant. The environment would pay the price for my mishandling of the budget all these years.
Finally, in 1962, 55 years after issuing the bond, I paid it off.
Free of debt, Presentville began to grow. In 1969, the population hit 10,000, and a city hall was granted. There was also enough money for that zoo that had been in demand since the 1920s.
It felt like I had a fresh start now, so it was time for expansion. I found a nice little piece of flat land to the south, and zoned for the highly in demand residential and commercial zones.
By the early 80s, the new neighbourhood was flourishing.
However, in order to really expand, I knew I had to cross the river. By the late 80s, I had zoned for residential and industrial construction, but nothing happened. I thought adding a marina and a library might make the residential zone more attractive.
The marina and the library didn’t help. What did help, was ensuring the zones were watered and powered properly. I found that SimCity 2000 can be quite picky with where your power lines and water pipes are. If they’re not sufficiently spread across a zone, the construction won’t come.
I also realised that your zones need to have close proximity to roads. It’s a fine balance, as the zones are quite abstract—there will obviously be roads “within” zones that you don’t see and therefore don’t need to build. But zone large areas of land without laying down a nearby road, and again the construction won’t come.
Expansion on the other side of the river was going well. There was even demand for further police and fire protection, so up went the stations.
I then tried zoning a residential area on top of a hill (you can hear the real estate agent now, “Wonderful harbour and city views! Don’t delay—these won’t last!”).
It wasn’t a success.
I changed my strategy though, and it worked. I rezoned the area as a commercial district, and zoned a new expansion in the valley for residential construction.
The year was 2019, and there was demand for an airport. Airports and seaports are not structures you can build like a school or a hospital—in SimCity 2000 you need to zone them. And it’s risky. The zoning is expensive, and if you get the placement or the size wrong the land just ends up being an expensive waste of space.
Thankfully, zoning a large enough area on one of the few flat pieces of land available, the airport moved in.
By the present day (the 2020s), I had further expanded in the south, and I started to utilise nuclear power as the older power plants expired.
The year 2035 marked a big occasion, as Presentville was named the state capital. This was due to the city reaching a population of 30,000.
The reward? A statue of the mayor.
The 2030s brought with it demand for a seaport, and similar to the airport, it has its risks with placement and size.
Again, thankfully, I got this right, and Presentville had a seaport.
As I was nearing my stated 2050 target for this playthrough of SimCity 2000, I had never experienced a disaster. That changed in 2040, as a commercial plane went down.
I was fortunate, as the plane went down outside of the city. But I still had the ridiculous situation of having to build roads so my fire engines could go to the site and put out the fire. The firefighting itself is a mini-game where you get to place your available fire squads (I had two, due to having two fire stations in the city) to try and put out the spreading fire.
The death toll would have been a lot higher had this plane crashed inside the city.
After that sombre moment, I spent the rest of the 2040s expanding.
As I passed 2050, my SimCity 2000 city had reached a population of over 38,000.
And with that, I decided to retire, after 152 years of service to the great city of Presentville.
How was my tenure as a virtual public servant? Possibly like real public servants, the overall experience was mixed.
The Verdict
I have to say that when I looked over the city of Presentville at the end of my playthrough, I felt very satisfied with what I had built. Especially given that I went in pretty cold, and was relying on my previous playthrough experience from almost 30 years ago.
I know I would do better next time, and I’m confident I could grow a bigger city in terms of size and population.
But will there be a next time?
After I managed to pay off the bond, it was quite easy to run a budget surplus. So what did I do with that surplus each year? Expand. Zoning new areas, and watching the city and population grow.
But the repetition got boring.
Further, creating new zones requires a level of micromanagement I found irritating. It was the need to meticulously ensure each zone had adequate power lines and water pipes and roads.
I would prefer for the power and water grids to be taken care of automatically, to avoid situations like I mentioned above where zones remain empty.
I spent a lot of time fixing power and water loss, which took me away from more enjoyable aspects of city building.
After going through decades of rinse and repeat zoning, I was left wondering what else I could do to stay invested. Sure, I could have undertaken interesting projects like a subway or highway system. I could have provided more parks and sports stadiums. Basically, I could have been more creative. For the creative types, there’s a lot of replayability here.
Perhaps I would go in with more of a plan next time. For this playthrough, I just made it up as I went along.
I was also left wondering about what was “under the hood” of SimCity 2000, so to speak. I underfunded the police and fire departments and the hospitals for long periods of time. I also paid for a lot of the city ordinances I mentioned above for my entire playthrough. But what if I didn’t do this? If I better funded the essential services and didn’t pay for so many quality of life initiatives, would it have made that much of a difference? I’m not sure. I’d need to play more, obviously, to determine if there’s a winning formula at play here, or whether there really are multiple pathways to achieve success.
In the end though, I had a good time replaying SimCity 2000, and found satisfaction building something from nothing. If I ever want to play a city builder though, I might look at more recent offerings that (hopefully) offer a more modern interface.
But for a 30 year-old game, the level of complexity on offer in SimCity 2000 is seriously impressive. I recommend checking it out if you’re curious about the origins of the series or city builders in general, or if you are looking for a nostalgia hit.
If you do though, just don’t take out a bond.
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