25 years later, SimCity 3000 still has the juice

EA recently added a bunch of its older PC games to Steam, a nice gesture by a company not really known for doing many nice things. Nestled in-between both Dungeon Keepers, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and basically every single Command and Conquer was SimCity 3000, the third entry in the once gargantuan city building series originally released in 1999.

Yes, I know the game has been available on GOG for ages, but as a Steam-sicko who prefers to have all of his games tied to a single application (all my eggs are very happy in my one basket, thank you very much) I was thrilled to see it make an appearance. Doubly so that it was priced at less than £3.

The Steam version of SimCity 3000 is nothing particularly special, to be honest. It’s functionally the same as the game’s “Unlimited” 2000 rerelease, which bundled in a handful of extra features such as a scenario mode, additional building designs and an FMV intro video (wow!). It also removed the title music track Sim Broadway, a genuine crime that has not been resolved since. It runs fine on Windows 11 (albeit at a native 4:3 resolution, which can be easily resolved with a mod but, you know, not ideal) with the exception of a really irritating memory leak issue that causes the game to chug after about an hour and a half of play.

Like everything else included within this larger game dump, EA has done the bare minimum here. This is the exact same version that has been available on GOG since 2016, for better or for worse. Although, it may actually be worse, seeing as EA has misspelled the game’s title on the storefront (there is no gap between “Sim” and “City”, and there never has been) alongside uploading all of its screenshots in 16:9, making them look all stretched out and ugly.

Still, minor gripes aside, I’ve had an absolute blast revisiting the game over the last few days. Despite numerous sequels, spiritual successors and direct competitors that have surfaced over the last 25 years, SimCity 3000 remains one of the best city builders ever made. It is absolutely divine, and has barely aged a day.

I’ve been struggling to remember exactly when my relationship with SC3K began. Seeing as I was only 6 when the game originally launched, my best guess was that I had picked it up second hand at some point in the mid 2000s. It was only as I began to write this very paragraph that I thought to check my original physical copy to see if I could find any clues, only to discover a faded receipt dated November 8th 2003. I genuinely yelped out loud when I found this because I have finally reached that point in my 30s where any previously unearthed link to my childhood feels precious and rare.

In 2003 I was 11 years old. Games for my recently received GameCube remained expensive, and so I spent my limited pocket money on whatever pre-owned PC games I could find at my local GAME, Grainger Games or Gamestation. I tended to gravitate towards simulation and management games, influenced heavily by a childhood spent playing Dungeon Keeper, Theme Hospital and Theme Park with my Dad.

Although I have distinct memories of noodling around with the original SimCity as a very young kid on an aging Compaq we used to keep on the floor (I have no idea why we had a second computer that was kept at ground level, and have never questioned it before now tbh) I never went on to play its sequel. I don’t think I’d even heard of SC3K, for that matter, until I presumably saw it sitting on a shelf for £4.99.

I consider very few games to be “life changing”, but SimCity 3000 absolutely was for me. If I close my eyes and think about playing games in the early 2000s, I see colourful skyscrapers and hear the snapping snare of straight-ahead Jazz. I was obsessed, and would spend hours building enormous cities despite never truly understanding how the simulation underpinning the game actually worked (hence the print out of cheats I had tucked inside the game box). I enjoyed SimCity 3000 more as a creative tool – a drawing application – rather than a management challenge, getting as much satisfaction out of covering every pixel with concrete as I did transforming it all to ash thanks to its extensive disasters menu.

Four years later I would replace SC3K with its successor, the excellent SimCity 4, the first city builder I ever played “properly” and a game I revisited monthly until Cities Skylines came along in 2015. By the time 3000 made its way to GOG, I had no reason to return. Why would I, other than for a simple nostalgia hit? What could it offer that modern iterations couldn’t?

Well, as it turns out, quite a lot! 25 years later, SimCity 3000 is still a best in class city builder that’s worth checking out today.

Compared to the groaning behemoth that is the original Cities Skylines with all of its various DLCs, SC3K almost feels quaint in its old school simplicity. This is back-to-basics city building. Zones must be placed to satisfy residential, commercial and industrial demands. Power plants provide electricity. Water pumps, uh, pump water. Schools and hospitals keep sims healthy and educated. Fire fighters and police keep them safe. Parks and stadiums keep them happy. Roads and rail get them to where they need to go. You get it. It’s a city builder.

Outside of a few special items that are unlocked via shady deals with other cities or as rewards for doing good work, that’s basically everything. City growth is dependent on a careful balance of all of the above, gradually expanding over time in a way that keeps your bank balance in the black and your sims happy enough to stick around.

The result is a pleasant sense of pace that never feels particularly challenging or stressful. While problems do occur (fires, riots, traffic jams) they feel small and easily resolved. Even larger systemic issues, like public transport efficiency or healthcare, can be sorted through little more than careful building placement. By virtue of there being less to worry about, SimCity 3000 lets you focus on building new areas and tweaking existing ones. You know, the fun bits. The game doesn’t feel old, so much as considered and tightly designed, a companion piece to today’s more feature rich and complex titles.

It helps that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, too. City builders have always carried a sense of fun, but SC3K really nails the tone. The news ticker that pairs useful management advice with jokes about kitty kibble and broccoli remains unmatched, and the mocking comments made by your various advisors give a nice bit of character to what are effectively tooltips (it helps, too, that their caricature-styled portraits give them the appearance of newspaper opinion columnists, which feels distinctly late 90s in a way I’m not smart enough to articulate).

To be honest, the look of this thing is still where most of its appeal lies for me. No other city builder looks quite like SimCity 3000, a game that purposefully eschewed 3D graphics in favour of a traditional isometric viewpoint and 2D buildings. It’s an idealised vision of a metropolis that’s exaggerated but never cartoonish. Belching smoke stacks and abandoned apartment blocks look comfortable nestled between gleaming skyscrapers and charming suburban homes. It’s a true feat of urban illustration, to create a game that depicts all aspects of city life in a way that feels cohesive and bright.

I actually think we lost something in the genre’s transition to 3D. Don’t get me wrong, I love zooming into a street and tilting the camera to observe my city from the viewpoint of a pedestrian as much as the next mayor, but there’s a rigid simplicity to this overhead view that encourages focus on the management task at hand. Maxis did experiment with making SC3K the series’ first mainline 3D outing (to the extent that the game’s announcement trailer used 3D screenshots) but decided to stick with 2D right up to 2007’s abysmal SimCity Societies*.

In 3D, it’s difficult to simulate a city with a population of hundreds and thousands of people. Careful decisions have to be made about what to render, compromising visual fidelity and the complexity of the underlying simulation for more on-screen objects. By blending 2D cities with a smattering of 3D cars and trains, both SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 deliver a balanced experience that feels like the best of both worlds.

I’d love to see a modern city builder take this approach, allowing players to create sprawling metropolis’ (metropoli?) that accurately simulates traffic and citizens without sacrificing performance. A city builder with artistic flair! Maybe SimCity itself would be a good candidate for this approach, seeing as the series has been left dormant since 2013? Who knows. I’ve given EA credit for making one good decision, but I doubt they’ll make two in the same year.

Where SimCity 3000 has aged is in the simulation itself, which feels a touch sluggish. Zones would remain undeveloped for months unless I cranked the game up to max speed, causing them to explode into life, my sims throwing buildings up and tearing them back down like an ant colony eating an orange. I assume this is due to the hardware limitations the game was built to accommodate, so it’s not exactly a deal breaker.

Harder to overlook, however, is its nebulous approach to concepts such as traffic, education and healthcare. Traffic is a constant problem, your sims grumbling about congestion despite the abundance of mass transit options available to them. It didn’t matter if a city block offered bus, train and subway links, sims would still abandon their buildings citing “poor transportation to other zones” as their reason for fleeing. With limited road options available, it was tough to figure out what the little bastards would consider to be adequate transportation to other zones. Irritating!

Healthcare and education didn’t cause the same level of whinging, to be fair. Instead, it seemingly gave my advisors acute memory loss, causing them to flip flop between shouting “this service is in crisis!” and “we are providing a better form of this service than anywhere else in the entire country!”. Hard to make a judgement call when it’s unclear if your sims are the dumbest human beings on the planet or if your city is populated with Mensa members who just hate buses.

Of course, any post about SimCity 3000 wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the music. SC3K has, potentially, the best soundtrack of all time. Composed by Jerry Martin (as well as frequent contributors Marc Russo and Anna Karney, who also worked with Martin on The Sims) the game features 15 tracks that sound like a city. A mix of new-age jazz and industrial synth portray a concrete jungle bathed in sunlight, Sunday drives through inner city blocks and groaning industrial units draining power from overhead wires.

It’s an emotional soundscape, and stuck with me long after the game itself fell to the wayside. Throughout school, university, previous jobs and even now, Martin’s tracks have scored my life for the past 25 years.

I think that sums up my whole relationship with SimCity 3000, in a sense. This game is so important to me, so influential to my life and my personal tastes, that it’s hard not to say anything positive about it. Revisiting this game in 2024 has been an absolute pleasure, but I do think (ignoring my personal history for a moment) that despite its age and its minor flaws, there’s still something special to discover here. For less than a sandwich, it’s worth checking out, even if just for an hour.

If you’re looking for a more elaborate retrospective, the ever excellent LGR released a brilliant deep dive into the game to celebrate its 25th anniversary earlier this year.

Right, well. I intended to make this short and snappy, but, I guess I had more to say about this game than I realised. I don’t want every post to be a 12 minute long read. Still, I’ve really been enjoying this opportunity to chew on a thought for a bit, even if the outcome is 2000 words about a game that’s a quarter of a century old. Either way: thanks for reading!

*Yes, I know SimCity 64 was technically the first 3D entry in the series but that was developed by Kirby boffins HAL Laboratory and not Maxis so *fart sounds*.

Any spelling mistakes, grammatical errors or badly phrased sentences in this post are all intentional. Cheers.