SimCity 2000
SimCity 2000 is a city-building simulation video game jointly developed by Will Wright and Fred Haslam of Maxis. It is the successor to SimCity Classic and was released for Apple Macintosh and MS-DOS personal computers in 1993, after which it was released on many other platforms over the following years, such as the Sega Saturn and SNES game consoles in 1995 and the PlayStation in 1996.
SimCity 2000 is played from an isometric perspective as opposed to the previous title, which was played from a top-down perspective. The objective of the game is to create a city, develop residential and industrial areas, build infrastructure such as power and water facilities and collect taxes for further development of the city. Importance is put on increasing the standard of living of the population, maintaining a balance between the different sectors, and monitoring the region's environmental situation to prevent the settlement from declining and going bankrupt, as extreme deficit spending gets a game over.
SimCity 2000 was critically praised for its vibrant and detailed graphics, improved control menu, gameplay and music. An approximate total of 4.23 million copies of SimCity 2000 have been sold, mainly in the United States, Europe and Japan. While its predecessor pioneered the city-building genre of video games, SimCity 2000 would become the model upon which subsequent urban simulators would be based over the course of the next decades.
Gameplay
The unexpected and enduring success of the original SimCity, combined with the relative lack of success with other "Sim" titles, finally motivated the development of a sequel. SimCity 2000 was a major extension of the concept. It had a near-isometric dimetric view instead of overhead, land could have different elevations, and underground layers were introduced for water pipes, subways and road tunnels.New types of facilities include prisons, schools, libraries, museums, marinas, hospitals and arcologies. Players can build highways, roads, bus depots, railway tracks, subways, train depots and zone land for seaports and airports. There are a total of nine varieties of power plants in SimCity 2000, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, wind turbines, hydroelectric dams, solar and the futuristic fusion power and satellite microwave plants. Most types of power plants have a limited life span and must be rebuilt periodically. Players can build highways to neighboring cities to increase trade and the population.
The budget and finance controls are also much more elaborate—tax rates can be set individually for residential, commercial and industrial zones. Enacting city ordinances and connecting to neighboring cities became possible. The budget controls are very important in running the city effectively.
Another new addition in SimCity 2000 is the query tool. Using the query tool on tiles reveals information such as structure name and type, altitude, and land value. Certain tiles also display additional information; power plants, for example, display the percentage of power being consumed when queried, and querying roads displays the amount of traffic on that tile. Querying a library and selecting "Ruminate" displays an essay written by Neil Gaiman.
Graphics were added for buildings under construction in the residential, commercial, and industrial zones, as well as darkened buildings depicting abandoned buildings as a result of urban decay.
News comes in the form of several pre-written newspaper articles with variable names that could either be called up immediately or could be subscribed to on a yearly basis. The newspaper option provided many humorous stories as well as relevant ones, such as new technology, warnings about aging power plants, recent disasters and opinion polls. SimCity 2000 is the only game in the entire series to have this feature, though newer versions have a news ticker. The newspapers had random titles, and prices based on the simulated year. Certain newspapers have a special monthly humor advice column by "Miss Sim". Some headlines have no purpose whatsoever in the game, such as "Bald Radio Found" or "Frog Convention".
Though there is no "true" victory sequence in SimCity 2000, the "exodus" is a close parallel. An "exodus" occurs during the year 2051 or later, when 300 or more Launch Arcologies are constructed; the following January each one "takes off" into space so that their inhabitants can form new civilizations on distant worlds. This reduces the city's population to those who are not living in the Launch Arcologies, but it also opens wide areas for redevelopment and returns their construction cost to the city treasury. This is related to the event in SimEarth where all cities are moved into rocket-propelled domes that then leave to "found new worlds".
The game also included several playable scenarios, in which the player must deal with a disaster and rebuild the city to meet a set of victory conditions. These were based in versions of real-life cities, and some were based on real events such as the Oakland firestorm of 1991, the 1989 Hurricane Hugo in Charleston, South Carolina, the Great Flood of 1993 in Davenport, Iowa, or dealing with the 1970s economic recession in Flint, Michigan—but also included more fanciful ones such as a "monster" destroying Hollywood in 2001. More scenarios added with the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit included a nuclear meltdown in Manhattan in 2007.
Development
Fred Haslam recalled being pitched on a sequel for SimCity at a Maxis company dinner in December 1990, just as he and Will Wright had finished SimEarth. Wright had spent five years working on the original game and did not want to work on the sequel, delegating the task to Haslam. Haslam spent the first 8 months of 1991 working on a top-down two-dimensional game. At that point, Maxis had contracted to work on the game A-Train, which used near-isometric dimetric projection to represent the landscape. Maxis decided that the SimCity sequel should also use this graphical style. Haslam spent the next year trying to accomplish this task without success, at which point Will Wright joined the team.Haslam and Wright worked together to complete the game, and each found their input complemented the other's. Haslam gives examples such as including the square grid from A-Train, which Wright then removed for the underground view. Haslam also describes how Wright wanted to add labels for locations, which Haslam also used to signify neighbor connections. Wright's other additions were arcologies, microsimulations, and the underground view. Haslam's additions included the city newspaper, free-size zoning, and the ability to issue bonds. Haslam coded the lists of variable terms in the newspaper headlines, with Debra Larson writing the actual newspaper articles. Other features were removed during the production process, such as zones for mining, farming and lumbering, one-way streets, and tidal waves.
The art team researched buildings extensively in creating the realistic look of the buildings. Jenny Martin, the art director, and her team were conscious of buildings having distinct identities: "Cities don't have one style, so we wanted to make a mix of the deco and the modern and the old style ornate buildings." 3 x 3 tile buildings were designed first, then were cut down to create 2 x 2 tile buildings, which were in turn cut down to create 1 x 1 tile buildings. Using Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint on 486 PCs, Jenny and her team of four worked full-time on the art and appearance of the game for four months.
There are only about ten minutes of music in the game. The music lead, Sue Kasper, was told to make the music moody and dark, like in Blade Runner. However she stated she was held back in this goal by the limited capability of sound cards at the time to sustain long notes. "One of the limitations you're working with is sustain. To have it really moody and dark you need a lot of sustainy-type sounds". The music team had to include multiple MIDI files for the DOS and Windows releases. Different versions of each MIDI file were optimised for different cards. CD-quality sound was not used because of the storage required. Many versions of the base game shipped on two 1.44 Mb floppy disks. To include the 10 minutes of music at CD quality would have required over 100 Mb of space. The 10 minutes of MIDI music by comparison took up only around 100 Kb of space.
Maxis had a reputation for including extra information in their manuals beyond that which was needed to play the game. With this in mind, documentation manager Michael Bremer had initially wanted to write about trends in city planning. However, while researching this topic, he learned that most cities are not planned at all. So Bremer took a subjective view of the city, and included "people's opinions, in words and pictures, of what "city" means to them. There're a few poems, some drawings, some photos, a couple of essays... I think it all turned out great".
Expansion
In 1994, Maxis released an expansion pack to SimCity 2000 called Scenarios Vol. I: Great Disasters, which included new scenarios based on a number of possible disasters. These disasters generally destroy the city and require the player to rebuild the city. They include: A UFO attack, two nuclear meltdown scenarios, two major chemical spill scenarios, a large flood, a major hurricane, two firestorm scenarios, a volcano, an earthquake, a high power microwave beam misfire, riots, and a typhoon.Alongside the Great Disasters Scenarios package came the introduction of a separate toolset called the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit. It enabled players to modify the images used in-game to represent various buildings in much the same manner as general image manipulation software. The player was able to create basic bitmap files of a standard size with a standard 256 color palette. The use of limited palette cycling, which permitted animation, was also possible.
A number of pre-altered graphics packages were distributed, including some which replaced the reward buildings with images of various well known international buildings, such as the Eiffel Tower, but most buildings were made by fan-artists and shared on the Internet. Several SCURK designs influenced the designs of SimCity 3000s original buildings. The cities made in SCURK can be saved and played in SimCity 2000. SCURK can also be used to create custom cities for SimCopter and Streets of SimCity.