I love this game so much. One of the reasons I started to make a city builder* is because I don't like where the genre is going.
The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia, or "food for imagination" that was a core element since the first SimCity. As a matter of fact, Will Wright used to say that the real simulation runs in the player's minds (or something like that).
Sure, there's something great about Cities Skylines that (at least with very powerful hardware) can look and feel like reality. But at the same time the game engine, in order to make this photorealism of terrain elevations with infinite possible shapes of infrastructure, is so complex that the actual simulation is sloppy, and feels to me like a big downgrade from SC3000.
Traffic, economics, zoning, crime, pollution. are so much practical to simulate (both in the computer, and in our mind models) in this classic isometric style.
edit: spelling
whoa that game looks very cool— love it. also loved SC3k… the soundtrack was amazing. game was kinda lowkey hard, though. or maybe it was because i was just a kid haha.
thanks for sharing that. i'm a big city builder fan, but this one slipped by me. looks cool, and i'll be picking it up!
> I don't like where the genre is going.
Got an opinion on Timberborn? I think it's a great city builder, plus a fluid dynamics simulator where if you guess wrong everyone dies.
Not the same genre (at least for me). Timberborn is more like a colony builder (think Rimworld) than a city builder (SimCity/Cities Skylines). Its the micromanaging vs macromanaging, in a colony builder you are micromanaging what each creature does (such as timberborn or rimworld) while on a city builder you manage the city itself and invididual pawns are alot less important! Plus the survival aspect in that sense doesnt really add up when I'd like to play with the simulation aspects - education, traffic, crime, etc..!
100% agree here. City builders for me eschew individual citizens in favor of group statistics, to oversimplify it.
Do I have the option to execute the landlords when they try to inflate rent?
I think the simulation in Cities Skylines is also quite advanced, or not? The simulation is much more the reason why it requires powerful hardware to run on, much less the graphics.
You got me , enjoy your 8,99 €
you had me at apophenia
This was one of my favourite games. City simulators took up an enormous amount of my childhood and I still dream about arcologies. When I see a modern development like Brentwood in Canada's BC or some older ones like along the river in Chicago it reminds me of the wonders we can build.
As an aside since it's in the article, what are other cultures' irreverent targets? e.g. Anglo-cultures seem to casually joke about disasters like he does here about 9/11. Somewhat diminished by the fact that he's British, not American, but Americans do it too, and the American-British interaction involves this and Irish Car Bombs taken rather lightly. I find that curious. Do the Quebecois joke about Opération Satanique and the French have likewise a thing they make fun of the Quebecois for? Or is this an Anglo-culture thing? Obviously, I principally read in English so this might be specific to my language.
> and I still dream about arcologies
even after 9/11 and London's Greenfeel Tower fire? The vertical living seems very strained to me after events like that. Sure, they are not common issues, but there's always that thought in the back of my mind of what if.
I feel like at the scale of an arcology, there isn't really much of a meaningful difference between there being a fire blocking your escape in the massive structure vs, say, fire blocking you escape in a mall. You're either completely surrounded by fire or you're not.
The Grenfell fire was caused by petty corruption. Someone involved in its construction used a cheaper flammable cladding material instead of the (slightly!!) more expensive fire resistant version.
It’s very on-brand for places like Russia and China but clearly western countries are not immune to this kind of thing either.
After the fire there were investigations into towers constructed here in Australia. Many used the cheaper flammable cladding material also. Just like with Grenfell, nothing much was done and nobody went to prison.
What does that have to do with the actual idea that being in a tall building could make it difficult to escape. It doesn't matter if the cause of the disaster is cheap building materials or an external force acting on a properly built building.
SC3K had a masterfully executed advisor system that felt both classy and warm. Ditto its music and art.
Unfortunately for SC4, they proceeded to make all the advisors 3D-rendered Sims. For SC2K, well:
https://www.somethingawful.com/news/simcity-advisors/4/
(that was the least offensive page to link; for the canonical experience start at page 1)
> SimCity 3000 is the best SimCity
I disagree! SimCity 2K FTW. :)
Best balance of complexity IMO and ran pretty well on my old Mac. I'd love a retro-futuristic reboot.
Not sure to what extent you're looking for a reboot to be representative of the original, but I've been following the development of this indie spiritual successor for some time: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/
i first played 2000 when it was bundled with my family's windows 95 pc, and was sad to learn that gog/steam sell the inferior dos variant. but, yes, 2000 was just right.
Sim City 3k is my least played Sim City game, but this is inspiring me to take another look. I really like the sweaty micromanagement and bigger scope of 4, but maybe I will prefer 3k's simplicity in my old age.
The picture caption with a 9/11 joke is a little off-putting, but it's at least proof that this isn't AI generated content...
> The picture caption with a 9/11 joke is a little off-putting
9/11 seems to be an important milestone in his life. In the about section of his web page it says this:
Q:/> How old are you?
A:/> I can't remember the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I can remember 9/11.
I always thought of 9/11 as the major event for older millennials. I used to think it was all millennials, but many weren't even in kindergarten when it happened.
Some of us use 9/11 as a milestone event in our lexicon of world changing events.
I must also admit to preferring Sim City 3000 over 4. I don't know if I can handle a 4K user interface without a magnifier, however.
Same.. I'd rather have it 2x scaling at half-resolution. Vision issues.
Have you played SC4 with NAM?
Probably moves sc4 further away from what he would like. If you're into NAM might as well just play cities skylines with transit mods
SC3K’s art was not “crafted pixel by pixel.” It was rendered from 3DS Max. Maxis released a version of G-Max called the Building Architect Tool that included a template with the same lighting rig that they used for the in-game assets. This tool rendered and exported the various zoom levels and orientations.
Signs that you are old: I saw "in 4k" and thought that it was in 4 kilobytes, not 4k resolution
Or a demoscener.
I was surprised to see SC3k described as isometric like 2k. I recall versions after 2k being "look anywhere" 3D, but I guess I missed some versions. So many games, like Railroad Tycoon post RRT2 and Worms went full 3D and gameplay was never the same.
I actually keep a Basilisk II System 7.5 Mac environment just so that I can play SC2k from time to time ...
A small frustration I have with playing old games is that the GOG/Steam version is always the PC original and the Mac versions almost always had far better sound and music and sometimes graphics.
I feel like that's true for early/mid-90s games where the PC version targeted DOS (+ the varied universe of PC video/sound hardware), and the Mac version could just target the much more uniform Mac platform.
But SimCity 3000 is from 1999, and the PC version was a normal Win9x game. I own (still have the CD) the SimCity 3000 Mac port, and it is not very good. Maxis didn't port it themselves, it was done by Software MacKiev. System requirements were quite high for the time, it was sluggish, often unstable, and the file open/save dialogs reused the Windows-style dialogs which was very awkward.
The soundtrack is great though.
And when you say “PC original”, you really mean “DOS version wrapped in DOXBox”, because it's easier to ship that on both Windows and Mac than patching the Windows version for Windows, and shipping a Wine wrapper for Mac. (Have they ever shipped a Wine wrapper for anything? I don't think so.) What a shame.
I do really wish an application-level classic Mac OS emulator existed. There are lots of great full-system emulators for classic Macs (Basilisk II, SheepShaver, DingusPPC), but no Rosetta-style “make the old application run in the context of a new machine” execution environments. I'll grouse to whoever will listen that all of the best edutainment software of the '90s and early '00s is trapped on PPC Mac OS.
Probably the closest thing I remember existing to this was (in its "modern"-ish form) https://github.com/autc04/executor
Not quite what you're looking for I think but it was a Wine-style reimplementation of MacOS.
I think that is basically exactly what I've been looking for. Thank you!
Marathon Trilogy. Ambrosia SW games. Spectre VR. My childhood was so flavourful. The one downside is that nobody on the playground were talking about the games I had access to.
You can run the Windows 95 version of the game (similar to the Mac version) on modern computers with this patch: https://sc2kfix.net/ . It's definitely disappointing that GOG doesn't distribute that version. Stuff like this is why I have to keep a CD drive around.
Maybe you can play using an emulator. I use VMware to emulate Windows XP to play The Sims and it works great.
You're thinking of simcopter maybe, which follwed 2K and was full 3D.
Diablo 1 in 4k - https://i.imgur.com/4ResbPc.jpeg
Loved SimCity growing up.
Would it be possible to automate porting the windows version into a mac or web version? Like giving a long-running agent the task and some tools to check/play the game on both platforms?
SimCity 4 has a native Mac build, it's on Steam. Most of the modding community uses Windows now though since the .dll hacks became feasible.
At this point you can probably just run it with proton or wine. Why bother porting the whole thing?
Can confirm it runs on Debian with Wine just fine.
Great, and how does that translate if we want to run it 4k in Linux?
I run Arch. I purchased it on Steam last week after the dos.zone site was shared here and dropped the GOG executable in the steamapps directory, and it worked flawlessly with proton.
Nice! I'm going to have to try that now.
Sweeet well done, especially with the audio. I like this patch method much more than the HD Patch I've been using the last few years.
We played SimCity in my shop class at school on olds macs and i like picking it back up every now and then. It still holds up better than most new games.
4K screen resolution, not a 4KB intro.
What A View! Sims Thrilled As Local Landscaping Artist Hosts DIY Expo
I'd love to see to see this game remade and released. I'd buy it in a second.
Another factor was that although both SimCity 3k and SimCity 4 both had a maximum of 256x256 tiles for their cities, the scale was different.
A SimCity 3000 tile edge was equivalent to 64m, whereas in SimCity 4 it was 16m. The scale of the city in SimCity 3000 was bigger as a result.
Hoping to test this principle of largest possible map sizes out soon.
what would be really cool is a first person world generated from simcity maps and you can walk around and go inside buildings etc
I hope GOG makes this all an easy to install mod/patch.
Replace the executable, even on a Steam copy.
There's more than just the widescreen patch. It would be really nice if they automated configuring and installing the other tweaks to make it really playable.
claude --dangerously-skip-permissions -p "get this all installed https://www.thran.uk/writ/hdid/2025/12/simcity-3k-in-4k.html"
Man, I played the fuck out of this game in my teens, it's in my top 5 best games ever made.
Obnoxious author. Refusing to 'pay twice' for a game they care enough about to go through all this trouble + deeply obnoxious bit about Windows 11 at the end of of the post.