Project History and Background
In the beginning (1989), Will Wright did bring forth onto the earth Sim City. And lo, it was good. Sim City is a game for the PC in which the player acts as mayor of a virtual city (growing its population, building its infrastructure, and tending to its citizens' needs), what is commonly called a "city builder." It was not, strictly speaking, the first city builder game, but it is widely recognized as the founding entry of the genre. It was a radical departure from most games of the time, with open-ended, non-competitive gameplay and endless replayability. Many, (including me) were hooked, and spent many hours constructing elaborate urban landscapes.
Sim City was followed by Sim City 2000, which built on and improved the concepts of the original, and was equally compelling: a 2.5D isometric view replaced the original top-down paradigm, the landscape moved into 3 dimensions with tile elevation, and the simulation was deepened with new options and variations. The next iteration, Sim City 3000, followed the same pattern, refining and improving the classic formula. Sim City 3000 was notable for switching to 3D rendering, although it still used a fixed viewpoint to spare the graphics cards of the day.
Naturally, the success of the Sim City series spawned a lot of imitators, some of them great games in their own right: The Caesar series, for example, took the ideas of Sim City and applied them to the Roman Empire, spawning a whole sub-genre of ancient world city builders. Tropico brought the concept to the Caribbean and mixed it with a fun and subversive political game. But the Sim City series was always the touchstone and hallmark of the city building genre.
At the beginning of 2003, Wright's company, Maxis (now owned by EA), released Sim City 4. Sim City 4 continued the trend of the previous titles towards increased complexity and detail. It introduced new and revolutionary features like region play (which allowed players to construct several cities next to one another,) and an incredibly complex simulation engine. Despite being initially plagued with bugs, and taxing CPUs to their limit, fans hailed it as the best Sim City yet. Later that year, EA released an expansion for Sim City 4 called Rush Hour, which further improved the simulation and added new transportation options.
A notable feature of Sim City 4 was its capacity for modifications and additions. With the Rush Hour expansion, EA released tools for modders to add their own custom content. As a result, a number of web sites sprang up where fans could share their custom creations. Over time some of these sites amassed a huge amount of custom content, which greatly expanded the core game.
Naturally, when EA announced a new Sim City game in 2007, it generated a great deal of excitement among fans of the series. But as information began to surface about "Sim City Societies" (the fact that they weren't calling it "Sim City 5" was the first sign of trouble) fans of Sim City 4 started to worry that EA was planning to severely water down the Sim City experience. Comments from Will Wright and from others at EA indicated that the new game would focus on "casual" players, claiming that with Sim City 4 the series had become too complicated for the average player. Why EA made this decision is anyone's guess: it's possible that, after the runaway success of The Sims, EA was rushing to cash in further on the growing casual market, despite Sim City 4's continued popularity. Whatever the reason, the result was an almost universally acknowledged train wreck; Societies was laughably simplistic in comparison to it's predecessor, and fans of Sim City 4 largely boycotted it. Nor did the casual market that EA had hoped to capture show much interest in the title; Societies suffered atrocious sales, even, in 2007, being outsold by its own 4-year-old predecessor.
After the Societies fiasco, fans of the series were understandably pessimistic about the prospect of a proper successor to Sim City 4; indeed, EA, with the exception of re-releases of classic Sim City games and light games for mobile devices, has shown no interest in reviving Sim City at all to date. In this atmosphere, a discussion began at Simtropolis (by this time firmly established as the largest of the Sim City fan sites) about the possibility of bypassing game companies altogether and creating a fan-made, open source city-builder: this project, eventually dubbed "Simtropolis 1000" attracted a great deal of attention, but was never able to resolve any action out of the myriad points of view in the discussion. Nevertheless, the possibilty of an open source Sim City continued to intrigue many fans, and a number of independent projects sprang up towards this goal.
Around the same time, another development was on the horizon: representatives of a French game studio called Monte Cristo began soliciting the Simtropolis message boards for fan input into a project tentatively known as "Cities Unlimited," which they indicated would be a next-generation city-builder game. Monte Cristo was already known for their moderately successful City Life series, and the timing of this project was fortuitous: disappointment with Societies was at its height, and many fans of the series saw this as a chance to take part in the making of a game that would be everything Societies was not. The Cities Unlimited message board attracted a large outpouring of ideas, input, and feedback from the community, and expectations for the game (ultimately dubbed Cities XL) were high.
However, by the time the game began its public beta test, many fans were growing disillusioned with its direction; Cities XL was initially envisioned as having an optional online component, but as time went on the developers announced that the game would mainly be an MMO, complete with paid subscriptions, although it would retain the single-player mode. When it was finally released, many felt that it was incomplete: The game had a decent simulation for some areas (such as transport networks) but was lacking any kind of growth simulation for lots (once placed, buildings would not evolve in response to conditions); and features such as mass transit systems, which had been present in every Sim City since the very first one, were noticeably absent (although the company promised that they would be added later). However, it soon came out that further content and expansions would be limited to subscribers of the MMO (called the "Planet Offer"). These and other issues generated a negative backlash against Cities XL and Monte Cristo, which proved deeply divisive in the fan community.
A major cause of the arguments going on at Simtropolis and elsewhere was uncertainty about the future of the city-building genre; some members felt it was imperative that the community support Cities XL despite its flaws, as there appeared to be no alternative forthcoming from EA or anyone else. Others felt let down by Cities XL and upset with Monte Cristo, and refused to have anything to do with the game or the MMO, at least in its current state. It was against this backdrop that I began writing a blog at Simtropolis called "The Next Generation" to expand on an idea for a third course of action: I speculated that we could combine the creative input and financial clout of the Sim City fanbase with an open source initiative to create a full-featured, professional game that would still have the advantages of an open source release. Furthermore, by keeping the game firmly in control of the fan community from the beginning, I believed we could avoid repeating the disappointments of the Cities XL release.
As the blog grew longer and the idea began to take shape, I decided that it would be worthwhile to start a full-fledged project, and over the next couple months I built this website, which was launched on January 14th, 2010, exactly seven years after the launch of Sim City 4.
For more information about the project, you might want to start with the original post from my blog, check out our FAQ page, or look at our Articles section. Also, please feel free to contact us at any time if you have any other questions!