MicropolisJS: original Sim City clone in the browser

[beschizza]

Originally published at: MicropolisJS: original Sim City clone in the browser | Boing Boing

…

[belovedvillain]

Goodbye productivity, it was nice to know you, kind of.

[Stripes]

I still remember my first contact with the original Sim City. I had gotten a job at MP Games Labs a former subsidiary of Microprose that was housed in the back of the Microprose offices. It was basically the CoinOp arm of Microprose, except Microprose wanted to IPO and the investors thought CoinOp was dining and wanted them to scrap that “division” (it had 2 programmers full time, a full time PM, a full time artist, and outsourced sound work to Microprose and no longer had any hardware people - and it hired myself and a UofMD class mate as jr programmers). It had no HR staff, that too was outsourced to Microprose.

We had the same benefits package as Microprose employees, including being able to buy any Micropose PC game for $5 (discounts for NES games, and other systems existed but I can’t remember what they were decades later).

I bought a bunch of games on Friday, Sim City was one of them. I tried a few after I got home. I remember I had dinner and then tried Sim City for the first time to see what it was about and how it was and planned on playing my first real game Saturday.

During my first play I started getting thirsty for some reason, but figured I would go refill my water “soon”. Then really thirsty. Then it got light outside, and I realized it was Saturday morning. I filled my water and kept playing…

[GratuitousFish]

Yeah. I’m done, too. This is going to de-rail most of the day, I’m sure.

[Jorpho]

I can remember 'round about 20 years ago when Maxis had a free Java version of SimCity on their website to promote SimCity 3000. The lack of cheats was a little disappointing, even though it could import cities from the old DOS and Windows versions.

I might have hoped that the Micropolis source code would have led to some wacky and inventive derivatives – I think it traces its roots back to an X11 version with some sort of multiplayer support. But I guess people have better things to do.