Sim City

Didn't make much sense to release this on a C64. You're better off trying it on an Amiga which is clearly the minimum hardware to be fair to the graphic requirements of this game. In his book, Will Wright recalls how the publishers turned him down when he showed them the demo of this game... They couldn't understand why someone would want to play a city-building simulator! Thankfully he ignored their stupidity.

This game was made in 1985 by Will Wright under the title "Micropolis" but not released until 1989 (with a name change) after the Amiga release.

That stripped/unfinished feeling you get from playing the game, is quite accurate.
This was never meant for release, this is the version publishers got to gage their interest in publishing the game.

Stripped down version compared to the Amiga, but still good fun. Have to use your imagination a bit instead of having everything spelled out for you.

Raid was where it began... And the C64 got a lazy version. Thanks for nothing.

Where it all began!

I remember cheating my way through the game and filled every square. As far as I remember (It was in the 89 or 90) I was awarded with the golden key of the city. 8/10

Very basic compared to what I saw on my friends Amiga all those years ago. What is there though is very playable and quite good fun. Maybe it could have been better, sure, but it is what it is and beyond getting Speccy/Amiga emulators to play those versions, this will do for filling an odd hour or so here and there.

Gurt, I'm quite with you: If we discuss Commie games here, it doesn't make much sense to compare this version with that. It has to stand on its own, and sice no one dared to challenge this one, Sim City on the Commie may even be a classic.

Sorry, but the speccy is more powerfull at that type of game.

Very, very dated. Inferior to probably every other version, but it was "our" version back then, wasn't it? The only game in the God genre on C64, really (excluding Power Play and things which are technically games of the Gods). It's not horrible. It's just hard to play it after every other version. But look! You get waterways, you get parks (looks like a 2x2 tree), and there's no police/fire to worry about. That's not all bad, is it?

What do you mean, you'd prefer railroads to waterways?

I recall there was a little-known cheat: Press F1 to get your funds set to 4000. No ill consequences unless you have over 4000 funds (because it sets it to 4000!).

Take a look at the ZX Spectrum version and imagine what could have been on the C64. It's clear that Will Wright was building on his old Raid on Bungling Bay code going way back to 1985. He should have started from scratch and updated everything. There's no way the C64 version should be inferior to the Spectrum version. Still, fun game.

Sorry for the mangled English below.
One other thing: the game loved to crash after saving a city - even the original program. I think, not saving a city on the game disk, but on a separate disk, helped to avoid this problem.

The first version of Sim City was released for the Amiga and it required 1 MB of RAM. Later versions for the Atari St, PC (EGA graphics) and C64 were released, even a version for Amigas with 512 Kbyte RAM. I owned an original for the Amiga and the C64, but the latter one seemed to be faulty. Either the disk was faulty or it was a "bad track" or "laser hole" copy protection of the disk. In addition, I had coverd ~2/3s of the map with my city the power supply didn't work properly. Houses would not get any power, even if connected to the power grid. Multiple power plants didn't help. Maybe the C64 was at its limits.

Two words:

Utter Junk.

To answer MOG, I didn't do much programming on the C64/128, but I did mess with custom character sets a bit. IIRC, the cars weren't actually sprites, but ascii characters mapped to a customized set of bitmaps. If you animate the bitmap, it animates all occurences of that character on the screen with very little overhead.

One of those nice little things that made the C64 so great for gaming.

Hey, how in earth do they manage to make all those sprites! Was what I though playing this the first time on the 64... (thinking of the cars/ trafic or ehm, black dots... )
I liked it much, did not care that I played it first at amiga...

great than...

C64 is the last place you would like to play sim city on. Go play oil imperium instead if you are into "these" kinds of games.

As far as I can tell, both the C64, Amiga and PC version released in 1989, and all three versions were developed by Maxis, so I find it strange with these comments about "this version was first" & "no, it was released on this machine first"

As for the PC, EGA had been in business for a while, and in 89 there was both VGA cards and VGA screens. In early 90 there was several games that took advantage of the VGA-mode on the PC.

The C64 version was NOT the original version. It came almost a year after the Amiga version, which WAS in fact th every first computer Sim City was released on..
PeaSea was in those days still a dire boring office machine, with CGA graphics as standard

Slightly OT, but in the version that was downloadable from this site in the early days had a city named "Kalix" on the disk.
Kalix is a small town in northern Sweden, where I live, with about 20 000 citizens... Strange.
Anybody who knows more about why, i. E. Who cracked that version?

I think one thing everyone is failing to remember is that the C64 version was the *original* - the PC version was done later.

The idea of playing this game was more entertaining than actually playing it. I give it credit for starting a gaming revolution and creating a whole new genre, such is the genius of Will Wright, but the C64 version just wasn't all that great. Still, this is where it all started.

As far as conversions go, Sim City was sub-par. It lacks most of the features of other versions. Sound is minimal and rather flat, and graphics are mostly pinched from Will Wright's earlier effort, Raid on Bungeling Bay, hence they look more 1984-85 standard. It's quite playable overall, but it's far surpassed by other versions and sequels, though. Could and should have been better. Give this a miss...

Loved this game - this was my introduction into the Sim City games, and nothing topped it for me until a Sim City came out for Super Nintendo. The graphics were horrible - you build city block and wait for little black squares to grow into - are you ready? - really BIG black squares! Whoa boy! Still I loved this game. It was very satisfying to create your own world. Who doesn't want to play god?

I actually found this game instantly fun, as there was no other game anything like it. This game also teaches you the Basics in managing a City, and becoming quite interesting. SimCity lead the way for more high-quality sequals on PCs and also the very popular - The Sims. Thanks Maxis, for all your entertainment!

This game started a new wave of computer games that still is actual at this point of day. The game it self was nice. Good graphics and fun game-play. The crack was done by The Dominators and that means it worked to a 101% !!!

Oh my God... I didn't think I'd ever see this again! I believe I wasted about two years of my life on this game, more or less. The display was just terrible, but I have always had a thing for playing God. Plus, from an artistic standpoint, it was intensely satisfying to create the layouts of cities and tweak them to perfection as if they were some sort of abstract painting--where plowing down a few hundred blocks of residential buildings, or drowning out the commercial district in favor of a wider river, isn't really hurting anybody.

I'm not sure what you're smoking when you say this version is an "amazing coding job". It doesn't push the C64 to its limits in any way -- if you look at the code, it's only about 16k! Doesn't have nearly as much as any other version does, including the Apple II version. Skip it.

That game is excellent to squeeze every bit of Zooming detail from Traffic to fire on an 8Bit Computer!... This game is fun!!... Score: 9/10

It is one of the best Commodore 64 games I have ever played

SimCity on the C-64 is one of those "happy mistake" games. It's a port that should really never have been tried, yet it turned out so well that its obvious shortcomings are easily forgiven. Surprisingly, Maxis was able to squeeze nearly everything from the PC original into 64K; the most glaring omission is the Scenario mode, and even that is addressed (the original manual gave you "recipies" that simulated the original Scenarios). Graphics, too, are limited (mostly black squares and dots on a grey landscape), but not unpleasing to the eye. Growth charts, pollution indexes, tax rates, and nearly all the bells and whistles are here. For the record, this version of SimCity actually included city water systems before the PC version did! An amazing coding job, given the circumstances.

SimCity, what can you say? A classic. The title that created an empire.