SIMCITY 5 UPDATES SERIES

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don't think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships? Those covered a lot of different territory and were really enlightening to me.

There were videos on water problems, oil problems, the food industry, manufacturing, sewage systems, and on and on - all sorts of things.

SIMCITY 5 UPDATES SERIES

That opened up a whole series of documentaries that I would watch almost every night after dinner. There is just so much good stuff there, and Netflix is good at suggesting things. Then I also really got into Netflix streaming documentaries. My inspiration wasn't really drawn from urban planning books it was more from deconstructing the existing world. I'd bring up San Francisco and measure the parks and the streets, and then I'd go to my home town and measure it, to figure out how it differed and so on. When I first started out, I used that a lot to investigate different cities. Google has a tool in there that you can use to measure out how big things are. I found it to be an extremely powerful way to understand the differences between cities and small towns in different regions. Those were really good as a reference, but I found, personally, that the thing I was most attracted to was using Google Earth and Google Street View to go anywhere in the world and look down on real cities. Stone Librande: From working on SimCity games in the past, we already have a library here with a lot of city planning books. Nicola Twilley: I thought I'd start by asking what sorts of sources you used to get ideas for SimCity, whether it be reading books, interviewing urban experts, or visiting different cities? We spoke to him both in person and by telephone, and our conversation appears below. We emerged three hours later, blinking and dazed, into the gleaming white and purple lights of Times Square, and were immediately struck by the abstractions required to translate such a complex, dynamic environment into a coherent game structure, and the assumptions and values embedded in that translation.ДЇortunately, the game's lead designer, Stone Librande, was happy to talk with us further about his research and decision-making process, as well as some of the ways in which real-world players have already surprised him. In March 2013, the first new iteration of SimCity in a decade was launched, amid a flurry of critical praise mingled with fan disappointment at Electronic Arts' 'always-online' digital rights management policy and repeated server failures.ДЄ few weeks before the launch, Venue had the opportunity to play the new SimCity at its Manhattan premiere, during which time we feverishly laid out curving roads and parks, drilled for oil while installing a token wind turbine, and tried to ignore our city's residents' - known as Sims - complaints as their homes burned before we could afford to build a fire station. Indeed, if we are to believe the hype, the city has become our species' greatest triumph.ДЄ shot from photographer Michael Wolf's extraordinary Architecture of Density series, newly available in hardcover. Once a byword for boring, city planning is now a hot topic, claimed by technology companies, economists, so-called ' Supermayors,' and cultural institutions alike as the key to humanity's future. In the nearly quarter-century since designer Will Wright launched the iconic urban planning computer game, SimCity, not only has the world's population become majoritatively urban for the first time in human history, but interest in cities and their design has gone mainstream. Screenshot of our own SimCity (called, for reasons that made sense at the time, We Are The Champignons) after three hours of game play.

Simcity 5 updates