The History of City-Building Games (arstechnica.com) 67
An anonymous reader writes: If you ask most gamers, the first city-building game they played was SimCity, or some sequel thereof. Though SimCity ended up defining the genre for years, it was far from the first. This article goes through the history of city-building games. It began before man first landed on the moon: "While extremely limited in its simulation, Doug Dyment's The Sumer Game was the first computer game to concern itself with matters of city building and management. He coded The Sumer Game in 1968 on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 minicomputer, using the FOCAL programming language. David H. Ahl ported it to BASIC a few years later retitled as Hamurabi (with the second 'm' dropped in order to fit an eight-character naming limit). The Sumer Game, or Hamurabi, put you in charge of the ancient city-state of Sumer. You couldn't build anything, but you could buy and sell land, plant seeds, and feed (or starve) your people. The goal was to grow your economy so that your city could expand and support a larger population, but rats and the plague stood in your way. And if you were truly a terrible leader your people would rebel, casting you off from the throne."
Incomplete (Score:3, Funny)
These games, some of which are great, will remain incomplete until they feature reserved bike lanes.
Re:Incomplete (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, these games need to include the political disaster where you get stuck with a crack-smoking mayor, yelling: "Bitch set me up ... goddamn bitch!"
Marion Barry and Rob Ford would be perfect role models!
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Actually, these games need to include the political disaster where you get stuck with a crack-smoking mayor, yelling: "Bitch set me up ... goddamn bitch!"
Marion Barry and Rob Ford would be perfect role models!
How would that be bad for the city? ;)
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How about the pro sports team that threatens to leave unless you put the city heavily in debt in order to build them a new arena/stadium?
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I have found, that we are sometimes too focused on the economy, that we are missing the greater good in leadership.
There are so many bad decisions made, with the argument that it would be good for the economy.
Lets legalize x, y and z. Because it would be good for the economy.
Lets open up murder zones, where you just need to pay a tax to knock off your rival. It would be good for the economy.
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I am willing to bet if they were accurate enough, they would probably find that a particular level of corruption is actually good overall.
Much of our tax money is wasted on making sure there isn't corruption going on. That small company will need to go threw the complex bidding process wasting our tax money because of the government oversight, which all in alls will make the process more expensive, then just risking the occasional corruption.
But once it goes too far, then the system starts to collapse, as
Re:Incomplete (Score:4, Informative)
These games, some of which are great, will remain incomplete until they feature reserved bike lanes.
Well you're in luck! Cities: Skylines added that in with their first expansion(after dark). Now the only thing that the game is missing is disasters.
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The new expansion pack for Skylines has bike lanes.
remember playing this (Score:3)
Wow... I had forgotten about this game. As I recall each turn you'd make a decision about allocation of resources (buying land, planting seed, and feeding) and then see the results, with an occasional disaster thrown in. For a simple game it was remarkably fun. And it beat doing whatever I was supposed to be doing on the computer at the time.
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As I recall it, Hamurabi was as entertaining as any computer game today, but didn't hold your attention very long.
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I played an early PC version called RULER.EXE, written in BASIC and compiled with Microsoft Basic 1.0. I still have it in my DOSBox folder. This one had no popular revolt feature, so if you wanted to you could just buy low and sell high. When you hit 1,000,000 acres, it said you now own the world, and you won the game.
Re:remember playing this (Score:5, Interesting)
Being the clever guy in the class, i modified the basic it was written in to be quite "boyish". Instead of wheat and stuff, it was sperm for the prostitutes. I forget the exact changes. Anyhow the girls in the class loved it (why i did it in the first place) and they played it with the teacher in the room and where in hysterics. So the teacher watched....
Well so much for being the smart kid. I was the only one that could code, so despite the girls pleading the 5th or whatever you do when your 12 in NZ, i was busted. Fortunately i had also just got into a lot of trouble with current crush of the month (she was tall and had amazing boobs in catholic uniform! ) by trying to hit on her with fancy things. Stolen things. Her dad was the local police constable. It did not end well. My parents didn't know what to do. So they did nothing!
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We had one that simulated the stock market during the Great Depression in the US. I learned a lot from that game. The largest 32 bit int number you can use is 2^31-1, but you need to go well below that because if you hack the code to put that much in your bank account it tends to overflow and you end up trillions in the red.
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Play emulated version (Score:5, Informative)
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Screenshot brings back memories! (Score:2)
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Same here. Model I, 4K RAM, cassette drive.
Arguable (Score:1)
I feel like calling Sumer and Hamurabi for city-building games a bit of a stretch considering that they entirely lacks the city layout part.
The game engine in those cases are no different from other early resource management games like football manager games or similar.
Re:Arguable (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. Heck, Sumer wasn't a city; it was a coalition of city-states. And the game focused primarily on the "state" part, rather than the city. You are the emperor. You're ruling your people. Whether those people were all gathered together into one city, or spread across a wider region wasn't really relevant to the game. You could just as easily have been, say, a count in medieval times, ruling your county. In fact, one of the main elements of the game was deciding how much of your grain to plant, which isn't exactly an activity associated with cities.
I'd say that this game was closer to being the origin of empire-building games like Civ than to city-building games like Sim City.
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When you're nasty or rude to people, don't expect them to be any nicer to you. Not too long ago, you posted, "fuck you and your whole country too," which is part of a long line of uncivil posts.
The OP and the reply to him make valid points. Part of Simcity is managing how resources (e.g., fire departments, police stations, hospitals, schools) are distributed to maximize their value to your city. It's also important to manage traffic to keep property values high. That's absent from other games that focus on
Re:Arguable (Score:5, Insightful)
yea nitpicky things like "THE HISTORY OF CITY BUILDING GAMES" then states "You couldn't build anything, but you could ..."
Jeezus
Heres my history of FPS games, "Tennis for Two", while not first person ...
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Heres my history of FPS games, "Tennis for Two", while not first person ...
Pong
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More of a management game really.
I do recall these sorts of games being available as source code in books and magazines - it was stuff like this that taught me to code.
Basic version == Spaghetti (Score:3)
The BASIC code is the most appalling spaghetti, and would make an excellent illustration for any CS student of How Not To Code.
Re:Basic version == Spaghetti (Score:4, Funny)
A few years back I re-coded the Star Trek game in C. Its lack of structure was not easy to convert, as it liked to do GOTO GAMEOVER type of stuff all over the place. It had to be changed to have a few global variables for the game state, and an outer loop to do one command/turn at a time. And then another outer loop to play the game multiple times.
BASIC's input and output was pretty free-form too, not just the control flow. I needed routines to input one or two integers or a float (sscanf just doesn't work as well as INPUT), and to print floats without those damn trailing zeros. And those line numbers everywhere, I had to create a version of the original code with all unused line numbers blanked out to see the control flow. And then there were those wonderfully descriptive two-character variable names, which I avoided changing when possible.
I should try doing more of those, and Hammurabi sounds like a nice challenge.
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Not sure why I did this, but... Graphviz: The worlds least popular source code viewer. [smariot.com]
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Summary fail (Score:3, Informative)
If you ask most gamers, the first city-building game they played was SimCity, or some sequel thereof. Though SimCity ended up defining the genre for years, it was far from the first.
Uh no. "An anonymous reader" just failed at reading comprehension. That didn't stop the submission from hitting the front page, though. Hopefully this shitty summary is the result of "editing" and not the AC's incompetence. As the article says, Simcity was the first real city-building game, because in the other games you did not build a city. You managed a city, or a civilization.
SimCity was the first city-building game. It was not the first city-managing game, but who cares about that? None of the games which preceded SimCity were anything like it.
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I once tried the Mobility Game, which has the city building aspect too, but focusses more on traffic management and environmental aspects of traffic. I liked the idea of actually planning public transport with lines, stations, numbers of vehicles etc.pp..
Well, you probably also ought to try OpenTTD. I can't abide the interface, though.
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Likewise, I just haven't enjoyed trying to grok the interface. Needs more drill-down, thus less GUI salad. But I haven't looked at it in a while.
What the first couple of Simcity games had was a concept that didn't outrun their UX
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OpenTTD's interface is absolutely marvellous, it's like a proto-Win95 within itself.
Oh yeah, windows 95. That's the operating system where I had to memorize a bunch of shell commands because the GUI was so incomplete. I can see why you'd draw that comparison, but not why you'd find it to be favorable.
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OpenTTD's interface is absolutely marvellous, it's like a proto-Win95 within itself.
Oh yeah, windows 95. That's the operating system where I had to memorize a bunch of shell commands because the GUI was so incomplete. I can see why you'd draw that comparison, but not why you'd find it to be favorable.
The great thing about Windows 95 was that it wasn't Windows 3.1, in the same way that the great thing about Windows 3.1 was that it wasn't MS-DOS 5.0, and that the great thing about MS-DOS 5.0 was that it wasn't MS-DOS 4.0, and...
At around Windows ME, Microsoft obviously got bored with this idea.
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and that the great thing about MS-DOS 5.0 was that it wasn't MS-DOS 4.0, and...
AFAICT MS-DOS could have stopped at 3.3, DOS 7 "The bootloader for Windows 95" aside. That was the last release whose version I cared about. DOS 5 was bloatware. Man, it makes me chuckle just to type that, but it's true.
I managed a space station in 1980 (Score:2)
Crush, Crumble, and Chomp (Score:3)
The Atari 800 version (Score:2)
Caesar III was "Burn, baby, burn!" (Score:2)
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