Re-release this: SimCity (SNES)

Pioneering game designer Will Wright was able to take the time to figure out what SimCity was in the first place because of Nintendo. Not directly — Nintendo didn’t fund the initial version of the city management game or anything like that. But his first-ever game, Raid on Bungeling Bay, released in 1984, and Hudson Soft ended up porting it to the industry-changing Nintendo Famicon in 1985 in Japan, where it sold exponentially more copies than it did for the piracy-impacted Commodore 64 in North America.

As Wright himself explained in an interview with Game Developer back in 2011, when asked about the gap between 1984’s Raid on Bungeling Bay and 1989’s SimCity, those funds took the pressure off of immediately releasing a follow-up.

And Wright needed that time, because SimCity was something completely new: a city-building and management game, and completely open-ended. There weren’t even win/loss conditions within it, as you just tried to make a city, and dealt with the ups and downs of such a thing for as long as you felt like until you were satisfied — it owed a considerable amount to the imagination of the player, in this regard, so it was difficult to market and get publishers intrigued by it at all since there wasn’t any (at that time) obvious hook. The perils of being first.

With publishers like Brøderbund intrigued but concerned about its market viability and open-endedness, SimCity ended up being published by Maxis itself, at least the initial North American versions on Mac OS, MS-DOS, Amiga, IBM PC, and the Commodore 64. And it found its audience, even if it took some time — as the Video Game History Foundation detailed, it took three years, but it sold over a million copies on computers by 1992.

Much earlier, however, the game’s existence came to the attention of Nintendo. Much earlier, as in 1989 Nintendo gave Jeff Braun a call and explained that the creator of Mario wanted to put SimCity on a Nintendo console. Apparently, Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to make a game where “players created their own world,” per Chaim Gingold’s Building SimCity, and it turned out that game already existed in SimCity. Intrigued, a partnership was proposed, where Nintendo EAD and Intelligent Systems would develop a console version of SimCity with the assistance of Maxis. Will Wright and Jeff Braun were flown out to Kyoto after, per Gingold, a deal was agreed to for a $1 royalty per cartridge sold, plus an upfront $1 million for agreeing to a deal right then and there in Nintendo of America’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

The result of this partnership was SimCity on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which served as a launch game in North America in August of 1991 after already releasing in Japan months earlier. Here, a game that had seemed like it should only be played with a keyboard and mouse given how intricate it was had to be played on a controller with four directional buttons, four face buttons, select and start buttons, and two shoulder buttons. And it worked, seemingly effortlessly. It’s truly a marvel even all these decades later in how it all just works.

But what sticks out the most is what Nintendo, in consultation with Wright, changed for SimCity on the SNES. The game is still open-ended, but there more structures in place, more personality, a robust array of new specialty buildings with significant effects, and, for those who want it, advice. From the esteemed, green-haired Dr. Wright, a cartoon likeness of Will Wright who is here to help and tell you what your city is doing well and what it’s doing terribly. The six scenarios are now more structured, too — these are timed missions in a real-life city, facing either a real-life disaster (1906 San Francisco earthquake), a hypothetical one (Rio de Janeiro flooding, 2047), or Bowser, in place of Godzilla, attacking Tokyo in 1991. Hey, who needs a Godzilla license when you have Bowser in-house?

There are also two exclusive scenarios here: an alien attack on Las Vegas in 2096, and Freeland. There’s no water in Freeland — that’s more territory to build on! — but also no specialty buildings. Oh, and the trees look like Mario’s face when viewed from above.

When playing with a city you began, you start from a piece of land full of trees and varying amounts of water, and your goal is to build up an efficient, highly populated city. You start as a village, and quickly work your way up to a town once you reach a population of 2,000. From there, you become a city at 10,000, then a capital at 50,000, a metropolis at 100,000, and, if you can build up to 500,000, a megalopolis. As far as win conditions go, that’s the one: the game continues from there, but getting to 500,000 will take some serious skill, planning, and revising, as well as the ability to listen to and properly respond to the wants and needs of the citizenry.

At certain points, you receive those aforementioned specialty buildings. Building roads and train tracks gets you a choice between a casino and an amusement park — casinos make more money for you annually, but raise crime, so there’s a tradeoff. Building enough parks can get you a large park. Becoming a town gets you the mayor’s house, which boosts growth of nearby residential zones. Construct enough police and fire stations, and get headquarters for those, which have significantly more coverage — and for less money — than standard stations. Build an Expo among industrial zones, and see both growth and income rise. Libraries become an option when enough residential zones become schools, and add to your annual income.

The most important of these new specialty buildings, however, is the bank. In the original SimCity, you would spend much of — or all of — your starting money building up a city, and then waiting for tax dollars to roll in to refill your budget, and work on what needed work. SimCity on the SNES, though, gets you $100, $200, or $300, depending on the special building in question, which significantly boosts your annual income and makes it easier to build extensive police and firefighter coverage, or that next huge residential space, or to simply be able to pay off your loan, which you’re able to take out by building a bank.

Consider: you start with $20,000 on easy — the game is the same regardless of whether you play on easy, normal, or hard, but the starting money changes — but something like a nuclear power plant costs $5,000. And as your city grows, you will need more than one of those, or else suffer incessant brownouts due to a lack of power. Stadiums and seaports cost $3,000, and your city will require at least one of each, depending on its size. An airport is even pricier, and you’ll need one of those, too. A single residential, commercial, or industrial zone costs just $100, but you build those in groups, connect them with roads and power, ensure there is police and fire coverage — $500 per station, plus annual charges — and eventually have to incorporate a rail system, too. It’s not cheap to do any of this, and $20,000 doesn’t last very long.

So, build a bank, and take a $10,000 loan when offered. You have to pay it back $500 per year for 20 years, which is incredible given that there is no interest, but you can do it if you plan correctly and build up a large enough city that it’s making enough in taxes and from specialty buildings to offset the expenses of police, fire, and loan payments. It doesn’t immediately solve all of your problems, but compared to the original’s version of tax-money only — no special building income, no loans — it’s a significant change. And also completely optional, if you’d prefer to go at it like in the home computers edition: no one makes you construct specialty buildings or take out a loan, but the choice is there to make.

Maxis either took note or had a direct hand in these changes by Nintendo to the formula, as much of this was incorporated into the 1993 sequel, SimCity 2000. So, if your favorite SimCity arrived on the scene after the SNES edition released, it’s not just Will Wright and Maxis you have to thank for that, but a relatively early case of Nintendo seeing a quality game and noting that, with a few tweaks, it would be an even better one. And, while there is serious depth here, if you are intimidated by the idea of having to negotiate with neighboring cities or dealing with trash or piping in water, as future games in the series required, then the SNES version of SimCity is still simple enough to cater to you.

Building a megalopolis is difficult, but you have decades of strategy to lean on now. My go-to is what’s known as the “donut,” where you build a 3×3 square of residential, commercial, or industrial zones — nine of the same one, to be clear — with an empty square in the middle, to be filled in later by parks, police or fire stations, or specialty buildings that will enhance the growth of the “donut”. Those buildings (and parks) don’t need to be touched by roads to work, so you build roads on the outside of the “donut” and slap some power lines down to adjacent donuts, and off you go. The paired-up commercial and residential buildings, which combine two zones together into massive conjoined skyscrapers, are the kind of efficient building you need to be able to fit 500,000 people into a single map, of which there are 1,000 to choose from in the game.

The donut is actually fairly basic, however, since there are some serious considerations for you to mull over as you play. It might actually have too much road in it, since that’s space that could be buildings if you wanted to be maximally efficient with it. Traffic will be a problem as you grow, too, with the citizens always complaining about it no matter how efficient or intelligent your road design is. The only solution is to never build roads, and go entirely rail from the start — it’s more expensive, and considerably so, but your citizens can’t complain about traffic if there isn’t any. Pollution is the other, but this one isn’t avoidable: industrial zones create jobs, especially early on, and your seaport and airport are also significant sources of pollution. Coal power plants are cheaper, but produce a ton of pollution, so you’ll want to go with nuclear, which is cleaner as far as these things go. What you can do is build your airport off in a corner of the map, and build your industrial donuts on the perimeter, so that some amount of pollution outpouring from them actually goes off the map instead of being counted against you. And, as you grow, maybe consider replacing some industrial donuts with commercial ones, to transition the kind of city you are in the first place.

Efficiency is vital: you will run out of space before you get anywhere near 500,000 citizens, but that’s where the constant tweaking comes in. You can get there, but you want a map with as little water as possible, and to plan ahead. Another things that helps is the “money code” that gets you $999,999 after you’ve spent all of your money and messed around with certain options and held certain buttons while going over your annual expenses and taxes. You don’t need that to win, of course, but if you don’t want to play a single city for decades and decades and decades in order to raise the cash to build a megalopolis, well. It can make for a fun afternoon, at least.

The SNES edition of SimCity is a marvel, but it wasn’t the only version of the game developed by Nintendo, either. In fact, an NES SimCity was shown off at the January 1991 Winter Consumer Electronics Show, but that was all anyone who wasn’t working for Nintendo had seen of it for decades, since the game ended up being canceled as everything was eventually restarted for the SNES. The Video Game History Foundation — which confirmed that idea that Nintendo transitioned from the NES version to the SNES one through its own reporting — got its hands on the prototype, however, which Frank Cifaldi deemed playable in 2018 even though it is “obviously not a finished game, as there are critical bugs, typos, and missing content,” as “the majority of the game’s features are intact in one form or another”. It’s also significantly different than its SNES counterpart, if for no other reason than, as Cifaldi pointed out, you can’t even build the “donuts” of the SNES version due to the tiling system of the NES version of the game making it impossible to build that shape — the specialty buildings are 3×3 tiles, but everything else is 2×2, so the larger 3×3 grid won’t work!

At least one portion of the NES game lives on, however, in the form of the theme used for your city’s metropolis era — composer Soyo Oka handled both the NES and SNES soundtracks of SimCity, and used the metropolis theme from the unreleased NES edition for the latter game.

The only real issue that SimCity on the SNES has is that it’s no longer available in the present: it was once available for Nintendo’s Virtual Console on the Wii but was removed, which tended to only happen when licensing issues came up. It’s unconfirmed but entirely possible that EA, which purchased Maxis in 1997, decided to change its mind about licensing out an emulated version of the early SNES hit — it didn’t appear on the Wii U Virtual Console, nor was it one of the SNES games available on the 3DS’ Virtual Console, either. And it hasn’t made an appearance on the SNES portion of Nintendo Switch Online, either.

Whatever is keeping Nintendo from putting this gem out there again, though, needs to be worked through: SimCity on the SNES is a triumph, not just a showcase for what the 16-bit home console was capable of with the proper care even of a computer port, but of what Nintendo was able to improve upon even when talking about the works of someone as talented as Will Wright and the team at Maxis. It’s still a blast to play decades later, whether you’re talking about in its slow-burn, “true” form, or you just want to get to the money code and build and bulldoze freely without having to worry about cash. Neither is wrong; it’s your city to create and do with what you will. Up to and including unleashing Bowser on it, if you get bored with success.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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