I had this phase of my childhood where I was obsessed in urban development. Truthfully, I’m still fascinated by cities. I grew up in a small town where a building with three floors might as well have been a high-rise. But I think where my love of urban density all began was with SimCity on the SNES.

There are quite a few memories of SimCity locked in my memory. I remember the first time playing it. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I just tried to build something that crudely resembled my hometown, which isn’t really how you’re supposed to play the game. Pfft, town planners must’ve sucked. I figured it all out, though, even as a dumb kid. Not too long after, I learned the optimal way of building a city to maximize population. If you look the most optimized strategy up online, that’s exactly what I figured out at, like, six or seven years old without any outside help.

But SimCity 2000 always eluded me. I didn’t own it, for starters, but whenever I’d sit down to play it on someone else’s computer, I couldn’t decipher it. When I later did get it for my PC in high school, I still couldn’t get anywhere without cheating. Years later, into adulthood, a working city was still beyond my capabilities. Roughly the same issue I had with SimCity 4, if I’m being honest.

Fast-forward to the present day, and I’ve tackled much more complicated city builders. I’m proficient in managing traffic in Cities: Skylines. I’ve been able to balance resources and production in survival city builders like Timberborn. I even figured out Cities: Skylines 2 in its poor launch state, and then I figured it out again after they completely revamped the economy.

So, I went back to SimCity 2000 to have my revenge. This time I built a working city, and I found that my main area of difficulty isn’t in its complexities, but rather its simplifications.

BREAKING GROUND

SimCity 2000 feels considerably different from the original. Conceptually, the idea is the same, but so much has been overhauled and expanded. 

Said concept is, of course, building a city. Its main mode just has you build indefinitely, optimizing and expanding until you’ve optimized and expanded to the limit. Your biggest obstacle is just balancing the books, which is easier said than done and where I ultimately failed previously. There’s no end goal, really, it just goes until you’re satisfied.

You can also play scenarios, which are mission-based. You’re given a city that is struggling in some way, whether it’s been hit by a disaster or just sucks in general, and you have a short time span to fix things. These can be pretty fun and are a decent test of the skills you build. Still, I imagine most people will just play the sandbox mode until they’ve had their fill and never look at the scenarios. That’s what I did. I forced myself to look at them for the purposes of this review. So… you’re welcome.

One of the most dramatic is the zoning. In the original, residential, commercial, and industrial (which I may refer to as RCI from here out) were plopped down in 3×3 blocks. In SimCity 2000, you paint them on. From there, your residents will build on them based on property value, so you’ll sometimes just get a grid of tiny houses or factories, whereas well-placed property will sprout into towering skyscrapers or bulky complexes. However, they only build up to three tiles away from the nearest street, so the most effective shape for them is a six-by-something rectangle.

TURN ON THE TAPS

Your city has more needs now. Water, being the biggest one. Pumps have to be placed near water sources, and pipes need to be laid. Each building adds its own tile of pipe beneath it, so you only need to lay connecting pipes. Technically, buildings don’t even need water, but your city will suck without it. Also, the game doesn’t differentiate between bodies of water, so you can place a pond and that functions like a never depleting reservoir.

While we’re on the subject, you can also place water on a slope and then build a hydroelectric dam on it to generate clean, reliable power. Most power plants spontaneously explode after 50 years, but dams don’t, so it’s actually an effective strategy to just have hills covered in dams. Weird stuff.

Property value is the most important part of SimCity 2000. Everything you do is, essentially, a way to improve property value. You place police stations to keep crime away, schools to educate your hapless citizens, stadiums to add worth to their pathetic lives. You’ll also want to set industrial areas away far enough away from their houses so they aren’t sucking carcinogens all day and putting strain on your health care. However, industrial can’t be too far away, since that’s where they mostly work, but that leads me to my biggest difficulty with this game: transportation.

HIT THE LIGHTS

Traffic has come a long way since SimCity 2000. In modern city builders like Cities Skylines, your citizens are simulated accurately enough that it’s easy to see how they’re getting around town. That wasn’t possible in SimCity 2000, and I can’t figure out how they abstract it. You can place trains, planes, and, er, highways, but how they’re utilized is a mystery to me.

I’d think you’d place one end of a subway station in a residential area, then the other in an industrial or commercial, and the simulation would take a portion of the population and say they’re using public transportation to commute instead, then relieve some congestion on the surrounding streets. That doesn’t seem to be the case, however. Subways have never been my strength in city builders, but I at least understand their utilization, so the system in my city made functional sense. However, some stations were used heavily, while others sat practically idle.

Highways and trains, I’m also not sure about. I don’t know that they affect a person’s commute in any way and is instead maybe just something that industry likes having around.

And I wish I could give you a clearer picture on why, but, honestly, I have no idea. I’ve tried to find information on the subject and found very little. Bus stations maybe suppress traffic on nearby roads. You might not have to build schools and hospitals near anything for them to serve their function. That’s all I got.

THESE MEAN STREETS

There’s a lot of abstraction in the simulation of SimCity 2000, and only really vague information is often given. Knowing what thing will solve what problem is rarely clear outside of water and electricity. That leads to a successful city requiring a lot of trial and error. And sometimes that trial and error exposes mechanics that can be exploited, which somewhat sucks the fun out of the overall experience.

It’s not that there isn’t any skill involved. The fact that my since-evolved city building skills were still applicable, even with the abstractions, is evidence of that. It’s just that, even with my more advanced urban planning brain, there was still a lot of mystery to me.

But, at the same time, I think that’s one of the things that make it worthwhile to play older games that, in most ways, have been superseded by newer titles. When the technology just wasn’t there to do something that is cornerstone to modern titles, they had to get creative. And that’s worth seeing, even if it can sometimes detract from the experience, such as with SimCity 2000. Art is often about overcoming limitations, just as much as it is about vision. An idea is cool and all, but making an idea work is what creates interesting art.

And SimCity 2000, with all its limitations, is where the formula for city builders was really laid. Games like Cities: Skylines still use its paint-on zoning system and ploppable utilities. Things have become a lot more sophisticated, but it’s worth going back to see the handwaving that had to be done before you could follow every car in town. In terms of actually being enjoyable… Well, yes. However, in the long term, I’d rather be able to see and understand what effect my new highway intersection has had on traffic than just see a bunch of dots pile up on the road for no discernable reason.

But on the other hand, Cities: Skylines doesn’t let you fly through your creation in SimCopter or drive through its streets in Streets of SimCity. If you’re into that sort of thing.

7/10

This review was conducted on a digital copy of the DOS version. It was purchased via GOG by the author.