The Rise and Fall of SimCity - The History of the SimCity Franchise

reticulating splines if that phrase tickles your nostalgia you probably have spent some time playing SimCity the series that inspired a genre once held a lofty status as one of the greatest ever created but hard times have befallen both the franchise and the studio that spawned it today on our Kate ology we're going to examine the rise and fall of SimCity from its roots as a level builder - it's unfortunate resting place as an also-ran no one would blame you if you hadn't heard of will rights first game the raid on bungling BAE Wright himself calls it mediocre but that's clearly an attempt at self deprecation raid on bugling bay was a top-down shooter released in 1984 in which the player controlled a helicopter whose mission it was to destroy military infrastructure such as roads buildings and factories the origin of the game though starts several years prior when Wright lived in New York City his primary interest at the time was robotics and he had an Apple 2 computer that he used for them while at the computer store the only one in New York at the time right noticed that computer games were going on sale right had been a gamer in his youth mostly intricate tabletop wargames like the kind that inspired Dungeons & Dragons his interest was piqued and he began playing games on his Apple - over time he became convinced that he wanted to try his hand at creating a game well the Apple 2 market was seemingly saturated a brand new computer system the Commodore 64 was not so he became an early adopter and started learning everything he could about programming on the Commodore his inspiration for bungling bay was his love of helicopters a game that he played on Apple 2 called Conway's life and the urge to create a world big enough for the player to get lost in during the production of the game Wright created two programs called chatot and wetted the former being a character editor and the latter being a world editor the second one wedded is the key to this story as it would be this program that would go on to become Sin City classic by the time he finished programming bungling bay Wright had moved to the Bay Area in California and began shopping the game two publishers all passed on it except for one brøderbund which at the time was housed in an old liquor store brøderbund worked with right to finish the game upon its release in the US on a Commodore 64 raid on bundling Bay would go on to sell 20,000 units right mentioned in his GDC post-mortem that he believes piracy may have played a part in suppressing the sales numbers brøderbund also had the game licensed and reprogrammed to appear on two other platforms the MSX which was a Japanese home computer and a Famicom in Japan in fact bungling BAE along with loadrunner were among the first u.s. produced games to appear on the NES the NES port of bungling bay would sell a whopping 800,000 copies in Japan raid attributes' the staggering difference to the cartridge system that Nintendo used being very difficult to pirate regardless the money received from that allowed right the freedom to toy around with whetted which was calling him back now that he had finished bungling BAE as Weda evolved Wright began taking inspiration from the works of Jay Forrester and his book urban dynamics Wright was also inspired by Stanislaw lambs story the seven Sally about a tyrant being given control of a simulated city SimCity was born however it would be a while still before it found its way into the world meanwhile Jeff Braun was looking to get into game development a font developer for the Amiga Bron had started hosting pizza and beer parties in an effort to meet people in the game industry at one of these parties he met a man who had programmed a city simulator game what was feeling kind of down because all the publishers he had shown it to had passed on it the man obviously was Will Wright and the game was SimCity apparently in the 1980s publishers were wary about a game that couldn't actually be completed Wright showed were on the game and Brahe knew that they had winner on their hands using the funds left over from the sale of bungling Bay right and grande joined together to form their own publishing company called Maxis the name Maxis doesn't mean anything anecdotally some people say that it was chosen because it means 6:00 a.m. backwards however the true story is that the name comes from a contest that Jeff Braun held amongst friends and family before they got to work on publishing Sim City broad pushed one game titled sky chase through the pipes in order to work out all the kinks of game publishing it's strange to think that the honor of first game published by Maxis was not actually SimCity but this game that not many have heard of regardless after the initial experience of publishing Braun and Wright would reach out for help for SimCity help came in the form of Wright's friends at brøderbund who would work as distributors for the game the impact the game had on the strategy and simulation market was well legendary many games including civilization were inspired by SimCity's release and its audacity to be a game where the objective was set by the player themselves the game would receive numerous accolades but quite possibly the biggest moments in the game's young life was when two publications Time magazine and the New York Times acknowledged its existence in the New York Times article several City planning professionals were interviewed alongside Jeff Braun to talk about the effectiveness of SimCity and actually demonstrating how a city would behave in the period following SimCity's release Wright Braun and Maxis began the expansion of the sim Empire simearth put the player in the position to simulate the development of an entire planet by giving them control over temperature atmosphere and other elements sim aunt was probably the weirdest of the original entries by allowing players to take control of simulated ant colonies though both games were well-received they weren't the hit that SimCity was another game that Maxis would publish was a train which is actually the third game in the Japanese take the a-train series though wasn't developed by Maxis a train would have a similar isometric point of view that the upcoming SimCity 2000 would utilize in 1993 Maxis released the highly anticipated sequel to Sim City called SimCity 2000 the game was a smash hit mm code designed by Will Wright and Fred Haslam is probably the most well known version of the game among the late 20's and older among the changes between SimCity 1 or classic and 2000 where a new point of view diametric instead of top-down allowing for placement of individual development tiles instead of 3 by 3 blocks educational facilities water pipes subways more power plant options and so on most importantly however was the introduction of the phrase I started this whole episode off with reticulating splines something very soothing about that during the development of SimCity 2000 Wright was thinking about the future of game design in interviews that came packaged with the special edition of SimCity 2000 Wright mentions the idea of data being interconnected between games will be able to in the future although our games to connect interface and share data whenever applicable so that as you buy our products it will be more like you're buying an addition to a library of tools rather than a standalone game that you'll play for two or three weeks and get tired of this is a pretty intriguing idea back in the early 90s however putting it into practice at least for right would have to wait for the better part of a decade for now though SimCity 2000 marked the departure of will write from the SimCity series as the project lead SimCity 2000 was a critical darling and a best-seller for Maxis the company would find the game ported on a variety of platforms and it remained a strong seller for the following several years during that time Maxis started to experiment a little bit more with its sim releases and the company board became more interested and simply just shipping games for the sake of shipping them rather than because they were ready Maxis went public in 1995 and for a time between its public offering in the sales of SimCity 2000 the gravy train wouldn't end however was a bunch of failures in dodgy acquisitions such as the texas-based Studios cinema Tronics it wasn't long before Maxis was in dire straits during this time they turned to the thing they knew best the SimCity franchise will write as I mentioned before was no longer involved in any meaningful way in an interview right once stated that he could only muster about 10 years of interest in any given franchise so he was off to work on something new game that the board had no interest in pursuing but we'll touch on that later SimCity 3000 the company pinned its hopes on SimCity 3000 coming out of the gate the idea was to make a 3d version of SimCity which to many and management at Maxis at the time made sense 3000 3d right sure anyway the game was a disaster at this point with computers being unable to generate the horsepower to manage a 3d city simulation in the vein of SimCity following a disaster is showing at e3 and on the brink of ruin Maxis started looking for buyers and one came willing to spend Electronic Arts one of the largest publishers in the business purchased Maxis in June of 1997 through a 125 million dollar stock swap upper management would be weeded out in the months after the purchase what EA had acquired was a company with low morale but sitting on a gold mine of an IP as well as one of the sharpest game designers on the planet EA placed Luc bartholet in charge of its newest subsidiary and he looked at what was going on SimCity 3000 in 3d appalled him and he quickly put Lucy Bradshaw and charged to write the ship the 3d design was entirely scrapped instead the game would be the same style as 2000 there were a few other changes including the introduction of tunnels the ability to trade with neighbouring cities and switching out the newspaper for a ticker the game was a well-received continuation of the franchise however I've seen some articles my research that claimed that 3,000 is the weakest of the middle three games in the franchise in an article by Richard Moss on Ars Technica comm he states that the problems were many poor terrain tools annoying water management as well as contradictory advisors and poorly thought-out historical landmarks that 3000 was released in such a good shape though after the disaster that was the 3d version is amazing SimCity 3000 was released in January of 1999 and would go on to become a multi-million copy selling game for Maxis and EA SimCity 4 would be a few years off and in the interim a new champion for the company would step forth the sims will talk about the sims in another episode of archaeology however the impact it had on Maxis ei was massive and it wouldn't be unfair to say that around this point the sims became the studio's primary focus SimCity 4 was the first Maxis SimCity game to be created using 3d graphics though you wouldn't necessarily know it as the game utilizes a similar isometric style point of view as the previous games one of the interesting aspects of SimCity 4 was introduction of the my sim mode which allowed for players to import their characters from the sins into the game I find this neat given will rights thoughts on this very idea 10 years earlier with the release of SimCity 2000 those simcopter in the streets of SimCity allowed for the importing of maps the my sim mode was more fleshed-out version of Wright's idea though not to the extent that games would take it in the future released in January 2003 four years after SimCity 3000 SimCity 4 was generally well received by critics however it was noted for having a very steep learning curve will write in an interview with the Seattle post-intelligencer would be later quoted as saying SimCity worked itself into a corner we were still appealing to this core SimCity grew it had gotten a little complicated for people who had never played SimCity regardless there is an overall aura that 4 was a step in the right direction for the series after many felt that 3000 was a step backwards even if that stepped involved creating a possibly overwhelming game personally I probably have spent the most time with four out of all the games and it is my favorite so taste in this matter are very subjective we could say that the franchise for the most part ended here I don't mean that to disparage what followed but what did follow were two games that were disappointing one because it was incorrectly labeled a SimCity game and another because its sheer number of technical difficulties and reduction of scope I'm not going to spend a lot of time on SimCity societies it wasn't developed by Maxis and in all honesty it's not that connected to the series proper it was more of a game with SimCity flavoring rather than a SimCity game SimCity societies basically stripped away all the city building elements of the series in favour of focusing on the social engineering element players managed concepts like prosperity as resources in order to make certain buildings work it's not game and it undoubtedly disappointed banned that at the time we're looking forward to something more along the lines of SimCity 5 and here we are SimCity 2013 is not a bad game with a few slight changes to its launch and without the weight of expectations as the first cropper SimCity game in a decade SimCity 2013 might not have had the negative backlash and initially received unfortunately the game for better or worse is irrevocably tied to its time and place in gaming history and until we hear otherwise from Electronic Arts it may have been the final vowel for this legendary series stone Lybrand the lead designer for the game said that Maxis took feedback that SimCity 4 was too complicated and made an effort to strip away some of the unnecessary complexities in the game this is part of the reason why the game was not called SimCity 5 he mentioned in an interview with The Atlantic that this decision was particularly freeing because they could redesign SimCity from the ground up rather than just take SimCity 4 with some more stuff thrown in SimCity 2013 ditched the traditional isometric style view of its predecessors for a full 3d camera additionally 2013 was the first game in the series to allow for curved roads without the use of mods before the game's release SimCity was receiving a huge amount of buzz however clouds started to form almost immediately with concerns over the always online components of the release the drm for the game required an internet connection to validate which prompted people to wonder what would happen when the servers for the game were ultimately shut down as the games circulated around publications for review however the initial feedback was positive but when the game was released on March 6 2013 the EA servers could not handle the load players had to wait for hours to play the game and EA and Mac's has scrambled to try to push out adjustments just to make the game work in an interview with game informer ocean Quigley the game's creative director said that although he was proud of the work they had done watching this happen was like being on a sinking ship since city 2013 would never quite recover from the early launch woes a game that should have taken the same gaming mind space as grand strategies like civilization slowly petered out over the past several years the most recent release in the series has been a mobile free-to-play version of SimCity the games value as an intellectual property is seemingly damaged with games like cities skylines taking the lead in the city simulation genre it's tough to imagine the franchise rising back to prominence in what may be the final nail in the coffin ea shut down Maxis in March of 2015 the end to this episode feels somewhat somber it's easy to pin the fall of the franchise on SimCity 2013 but in all honesty there was rot in the bones since the near disaster that was SimCity 3000 the closure of Maxis even if it was just a name at this point seems like a metaphorical stone tied to the feet of the franchise when we see another SimCity in the future I'm unsure however if the past few years have shown us anything with franchises like Doom and Resident Evil finding new life it's that we shouldn't count out that comeback that will do it for today's episode of archaeology my name is spoiler Kevin follow me on twitter at spoiler Kevin if you enjoyed this video leave a like and comment down below today's question what was your favorite simulation style game if you enjoyed this content consider subscribing with notifications thanks for watching and take care everyone [Music]

Channel: Arcadology

Views: 38,405

Keywords: rise and fall of simcity, arcadology, spoiler kevin, simcity, sim city, history of simcity, history of sim city, simcity history, sim city history, history maxis, maxis history, simcity 4, simcity 2013, sim, ea, maxis, simcity gameplay, city builder, electronic arts, will wright, jeff braun, simcity 2000, simcity societies, simcity background, simcity classic, simcity classic history, simcity 3000, raid and bungeling bay, city

Id: XCeNGO6v4Ks

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2017