Last week, a sound clip Web site made some Internet ripples with two notable retro collections: Super Nintendo and Sony’s (SNE) PlayStation. Combined, the two collections feature more than 1,500 “I remember that” clips uploaded by site users. Most of the files are no more than one or two seconds long, but their footprint is immediately felt by players. Why is that?

“Retro gaming sounds like these helped define millions of childhoods and made an impression when they were most sensitive–during one’s formative years,” says Scott Steinberg, a videogame insider and author of Videogame Marketing and PR. “As such, they instantly evoke a sense of nostalgia that warms the heart and causes the occasional involuntary thumb twitch.”

Steinberg tells Ars these sounds were also heard a lot more than in modern games. Not by design, but by requirement. “Old-school games were harder–necessitating more plays–and consumed at a point in most players’ lives (their grade school/teen years) when disposable income was minimal,” he argues. “This prompted players to spend countless hours with popular titles to get more bang for their buck, and thus exposed everyone to more plays of each jingle than is common today.”

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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.

I got a chance to play a near-complete version of it today; it looks great. Fans of the series will recognize the SimCity 3000 look and feel, but the addition of touchscreen controls makes sense for things like zoning (creating a certain type of building zone). Using the multi-touch capabilities of the iPhone to do things like zooming in and out of your city also makes the game a good fit for the device.

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