(PC) SimCity 3000

We posted the video a few weeks back of a city from SimCity 3000 called Magnasanti which topped out 6 million residents – the total max you can get within the game’s original limit.  Viceland tracked down the creator – Vincent Ocasla – for a special interview on the matter.  I can’t believe that it took him 3 years to pull off…that’s dedication!

There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness–suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle–this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.

Why did it take a year-and-a-half just to complete the theory behind Magnasanti?
During the planning stage of the city I was also busy constructing other large-scale cities, which laid out much of the theory for Magnasanti. New ways of doing things were not yet developed until experiments were done within the game to verify ideas, and notes had to be taken down in conjunction with each new experiment, as well as devising new experiments to find out if there were better ways of solving the problem. Building cities and doing in-game experiments to obtain the results desired takes time. Additionally, I had other things to do, and only worked on it in my spare time, so it was a gradual development, not something I was working on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

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Nothing too exciting, but Ocean Quigley – former EA worker, posted some information about the boxart design he created for SimCity 3000.  The image he provides makes for an excellent wallpaper!

This was the interior box-art for SimCity 3000. We way overbuilt that geometry for how large it would ever appear in game, so it held up to print resolution just fine.

I’m particularly proud of the launch arco on the left; it’s a little white suburban house complete with a picket fence and a tricycle in the yard, all enclosed in Buck Rogers style rocket ship.

Oh, and the Battersea power plant from Animals came out nicely too.

Never did get the unlimited version of SimCity 3000 – rather just the regular edition (is this intro in the regular version, I don’t recall it ever being there).  Anyhow, I think it may actually be new to me.  It’s pretty amazing to see how technology has evolved over the years

After reading the comments on the video, this is also shown on the screen of the Drive-In in SimCity 4.  I love small details like this!