![]() The appeal lay in its subsystem-driven design, in which traffic, population, disasters, and utilities begin to interplay in surprising ways. It was your sandbox – an empty canvas, a blank check. SimCity declined to dictate an end-game scenario. What did the disembodied view represent? (A mayor’s daydreams over a topo map? A satellite feed? The eye of God?) And what did it mean to ‘win’ the game? SimCity‘s creator, Will Wright, coined the term “software toy” to emphasize his innovation, and for years SimCity remained the most popular software toy on the market as players wrangled with the game’s open-ended questions. ![]() Its tilt-shift world could exist only in computer space, powered by a million computing cycles per second. SimCity was video gaming’s first indigenous species. Digital paint software and virtual engineering kits such as Electronic Arts’ Construction Set series had existed for some time, but these were borrowed capital – video game adaptations of art class and Erector sets. Bullfrog’s Populouswas several months away, and Myst wouldn’t turn exploration into an industry staple for another four years. Back in February 1989, a game with neither an objective nor protagonist was still a novelty.
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