I must have played Sim City 2000 for five years straight. I made a thousand cities, some small farmer villages other suburban burgs lined with trees and schools. I made epic metropolises that covered the ground like moss and rose into the sky, well beyond the long lost streets. The later simcity games were even more visceral. Simcity 4 was practically a city planning guide and my cities, all interconnected and interdependent, were amorphous and uncontrollable. They ate away at the land and leveled entire mountains, expanding without any particular guide or reason. Some cities I let flounder, others I forced higher and wider, hungry organisms intent on becoming organisms of their own.
While the later games, simcity 3000 and simcity 4, were visually stunning and phenomenal games, they lacked part of what made simcity 2000 special and not the least of that was the extended manual that came with the special edition (or perhaps commemorative edition, I don’t remember anymore.) It was a standard game manual (back when games actually came with those. Allow me a moment to weep over my long lost Baldur’s Gate manual, a dusty tome with faded pages and gold ink. That was a masterpiece.) The simcity 2000 manual came with a dozen essays and a similar number of images written about cities. They described cities as homes of people and their lives and similarly as mindless corporate jails where the inhabitants are little more than guests. They applauded the glorious gentrification of a decaying, forgotten neighborhood and bemoaned the crime infested grime of the city center.
Simple as that manual was, those writers are really what gave me an interest in ‘the city’ as something more than a crowded nuisance, a place to live while hoping to live elsewhere. The photos found at . A ghostly Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower looming over a darkened city, bright streets dizzying with activity, all cities as lived in and inevitably forgotten as Rome. It is history, like a textbook, but it is current history and so it is very alien and tells a story without ignoring the details.
