SimCity 4 - On this day

The SimCity game series has been the king of the city-building genre for years and has enjoyed great interest from fans over the past decade. The fourth installment of that series came out exactly 19 years ago, exclusively on PC, and was the first 3D game in the main series if we don’t count SimCity 64 for Nintendo’s console of the same number.

This part offered players more interaction with neighboring cities, but also individual city residents through MySim mode. We were able to create our character and follow his life in the city. The mayor was offered more freedom because for the first time the budget could be determined for certain facilities, ie buildings, and services, so it was possible to determine how much money goes to the police, health, education, etc.

Additional entertainment was created by the so-called God Mode, in which players could shape the ground according to their wishes and release various types of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, and fires, as well as some unnatural disasters such as alien invasions, robot attacks and the like.

SimCity 4 garnered very good reviews and achieved a solid sales result. For many, the biggest obstacle to this game, however, was its hardware complexity. At first, everything would work properly, but as soon as the city grew to over twenty thousand inhabitants, the game would start to slow down. At the time, the following was listed under the minimum configuration: Pentium III, 128 MB of RAM, and 16 MB of graphics.

Soon after its release, SimCity 4 received several official and unofficial tools that could be used to modify the appearance of buildings. Nine months after the game came out, there was an expansion called Rush Hour, focused on traffic. It was supposed to be the first of several expansions in a row, but it turned out to be the only and last. 

The creator of the series Will Wright tried to simplify the formula of the series through new games, and it was on this track were the later SimCity Societies from 2007 and SimCity from 2013. After these disappointing sequels, fans of these games began looking for new solutions from 2015. are them in the game Cities: Skylines.