What inspired SimCity?

This page exists because the inspiration is on the record, in Will Wright's own words. In the full interview Tristan Donovan conducted for his history Replay, published by Game Developer, Wright described making his first game, Raid on Bungeling Bay, on the Commodore 64. Building the game required building tools first, among them a program that let him scroll around the world and place tiles to build the islands and roads. His verdict on that tool: "I had more fun with that actually than flying the helicopter around, and that's what eventually evolved into SimCity."

He told the same story to The Onion A.V. Club, and insisted it was no glib line: "No, that's quite true." After Bungeling Bay was finished, he kept playing with the editor. He wanted to add traffic and see the world come alive and grow more dynamic, and that is what got him reading about urban planning theories, urban dynamics and simulation. The editor became a test bed: read a theory, code it up, and experiment on what he called his guinea-pig city. A dry subject in books, he said, became fascinating once he had a little city to experiment on.

The theory had a name. Researching books on urban dynamics and traffic, Wright told Donovan, he came across the work of Jay Forrester, "kind of the father of system dynamics," and one of the first people to simulate a city on a computer. Forrester's model had no map, only numbers: population level, number of jobs, a spreadsheet model. Wright took that approach and applied the cellular automata ideas he had taught himself programming with, starting from John Conway's Game of Life, and got emergent dynamics Forrester's model was not producing. Simple rules interacting to produce complex, unexpected behavior became, in Wright's words, a huge inspiration and a major design approach for all his games.

And asked whether any video game influenced SimCity, Wright answered: not really. The influence was the Macintosh. "Probably the biggest inspiration for SimCity was MacPaint," he said: a palette of tools, a canvas, grab a tool and draw with it. That was the underlying architecture. The recipe, in his own telling, is a shooter game's discarded editor, an MIT professor's numbers-only city, a mathematics game of simple rules, and a paint program's tool palette.