And there’s been something of a pent-up demand for a “real” sequel to 2003’s excellent SimCity 4. That edition was deliberately kneecapped before release by EA: among other issues, it was a single player game that required an always-on internet connection, and for too long after release there weren’t enough servers for everyone to actually connect to. And it’s possible that C:S wouldn’t exist (or at least, wouldn’t have easily sold more than 500,000 copies in less than a week after release) if the last SimCity hadn’t been such a dud. But it’s primarily excellent at being a Maxis-style city builder.Ĭ:S comes from Colossal Order, a Finnish studio whose only two previous titles are Cities in Motion 1 & 2 – games which are very much spiritual successors to Chris Sawyer’s beloved 1994 classic Transport Tycoon. Is that kind of thing necessary for a good city builder, though? I ask this because I’ve been plugged into Cities: Skylines for the last week, and it’s a game which a lot of people are saying is the game that SimCity (the 2013 version, not the 1989 one) should have been. The relative unlikelihood of global influenza pandemic absent a perfect storm of rapid, transcontinental transmission.” The relationship between serving size consistency and profitability in an ice cream parlor. The amplifying effect of natural disaster and global unrest on oil futures. Just as photography offers a way of seeing aspects of the world we often look past, game design becomes an exercise in operating that world, of manipulating the weird mechanisms that turn its gears when we’re not looking. “The best games model the systems in our world – or the ones of imagination – by means of systems running in software. “In these games, players experience a model of some aspect of the world, in a role that forces them to see that model in a different light, and in a context that’s bigger than their individual actions.

(Not that there was much left of the company from its heyday Wright left in 2009, after the release of Spore, to run an entertainment think tank.) Games developer and theorist Ian Bogost has a thoughtful eulogy for Maxis over at the Atlantic, in which he argues that the “abstraction” of the Sim games successfully helped “wrest us from the temptation of personal identification”:

A couple of weeks ago, EA announced it would be closing the Maxis studio in Emeryville, California, which it’s owned since 1997, and was absorbing most of its staff.

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