As a child, I was blessed with an abundance of computing machinery with which I could while away rainy days. One of the games that seemed capable of c

SimCity - by Bradford Morgan White - Abort, Retry, Fail

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2022-09-26 20:00:16

As a child, I was blessed with an abundance of computing machinery with which I could while away rainy days. One of the games that seemed capable of consuming day after day was SimCity. Rain, storms, tornadoes, snow, and ice were all common where I grew up. This wasn’t just a casual rain, but rather more like buckets of water falling upon you for days in a row. Sometimes, I’d brave whatever the weather was just to get outside, but more often… the sweet sounds of the PC starting up, and then the glorious Adlib sounds of SimCity. A tall glass of chocolate milk, maybe a few cookies, and the whole day would disappear in an electronic world that was mine to create. To the mind of a child, SimCity was magical. I could create any metropolis and imagine myself living there, and I could then live through a movie with tornados, fires, and monsters! A computer running SimCity coupled a child’s mind was a near limitless wonderland that had a side-effect of teaching basic planning and budgeting skills.

For me, the only downside was that the MS-DOS machine was the family computer. In my bedroom, I had an Atari 800XL. SimCity was released for the ST but not the 800XL, and therefore if my parents had to use the computer for some legitimate purpose, I was out of luck. As such waiting… perhaps impatiently… was a common feature of SimCity for me. Never fear! My near addict-like behavior regarding SimCity was fueled by planning city changes and expansions on notebook paper; drawing out the zoning squares, the streets, the train, and so on in pencil.