As civic tech entrepreneur Devin Balkind argues at Gotham Gazette, real world cities have a lot to learn from SimCity in this regard. The metrics of SimCity provide players with clear gauges of urban success: shorten commutes, keep housing accessible, reduce pollution, and your city will thrive. Though the series is overconfident about the capacity of top-down management, its emphasis on data-driven governance is nonetheless refreshing. As longtime fans will know, casually destroying and rebuilding neighborhoods in response to planning metrics is a major element of the SimCity.

From this framework emerges a case for controversial slum clearance and redevelopment programs-fashionable programs at the time of publication in 1969. For Forrester, a city can be broken out into a simple set of variables-population, housing, and industry–and mechanically controlled by planners. The book, reviewed by William Patterson for a 1971 issue of Reason, posits that we can model out cities as inputs and outputs, for the benefit of better policy making. Wright himself has admitted that the SimCity series was heavily inspired by Urban Dynamics, a wonky text by Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer Jay Wright Forrester. After explaining mechanisms like traffic management and municipal finance, the guide casually directs players to read city planning heavyweights like Kevin Lynch and Le Corbusier, an obtuse book on population projection, and the American Planning Association's monthly magazine. SimCity was unique in that it was the first video game to include an instruction manual with a bibliography. With subsequent re-releases on the Super Nintendo in 1991 and Windows in 1992, it became a bestseller. Who would want to play a game you can't beat? After multiple rejections by the major publishers, Wright co-founded his own publishing company, Maxis, in 1987 and found a distributor in Broderbund, best known at the time for edutainment games like Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego? (A quirky fit, as slow early sales would prove.) A trickle of positive coverage in mainstream outlets like The New York Times granted SimCity an early cult following.

The concept initially flummoxed industry leaders. Players were given an undeveloped field, a stack of cash, and a few basic planning tools before being let loose. Would players enjoy the same opportunity, he wondered? Four years later, the result was SimCity, a game that departed from nearly every facet of traditional game structure, exchanging levels for open-ended gameplay and clear objectives for a sandbox. While working on Raid on Bungeling Bay -a game about bombing cities-legendary game designer Will Wright discovered that he had more fun designing cities than destroying them.

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