No game captured my imagination when I was growing up like SimCity. Certainly, a part of it was my God complex, but more it was the open-ended nature of a game with few rules that let you build a city. I spent countless hours on my computer playing it; I even spent countless hours on the Super Nintendo playing it when it was ported to that console. Now it’s coming to the iPhone–countless hours will be lost again.
Spore, after more than 10 years of development time, is finally available for the PC and Mac. The game comes from the mind of the talented Will Wright, the man who gave us The Sims and the original SimCity titles.
Shortly after Will Wright released yet another version of his SimCity in the mid 1990s, I was visiting Maxis’ studios and chatting with Will about evolutionary system and self-generating software. SimCity was a city that built itself according to a few rules — which the player tweaked and tried to maximize. It was the ultimate nerd god-game, the nerd playing god. Will offered to give me a peek preview of his next project. SimCity was so cool, I was expecting something even more generative, more ambitious, more god-like–something like Spore.
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