Slashdot Mirror
The History of City-Building Games (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: If you ask most gamers, the first city-building game they played was SimCity, or some sequel thereof. Though SimCity ended up defining the genre for years, it was far from the first. This article goes through the history of city-building games. It began before man first landed on the moon: "While extremely limited in its simulation, Doug Dyment's The Sumer Game was the first computer game to concern itself with matters of city building and management. He coded The Sumer Game in 1968 on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8 minicomputer, using the FOCAL programming language. David H. Ahl ported it to BASIC a few years later retitled as Hamurabi (with the second 'm' dropped in order to fit an eight-character naming limit). The Sumer Game, or Hamurabi, put you in charge of the ancient city-state of Sumer. You couldn't build anything, but you could buy and sell land, plant seeds, and feed (or starve) your people. The goal was to grow your economy so that your city could expand and support a larger population, but rats and the plague stood in your way. And if you were truly a terrible leader your people would rebel, casting you off from the throne."
I agree. Heck, Sumer wasn't a city; it was a coalition of city-states. And the game focused primarily on the "state" part, rather than the city. You are the emperor. You're ruling your people. Whether those people were all gathered together into one city, or spread across a wider region wasn't really relevant to the game. You could just as easily have been, say, a count in medieval times, ruling your county. In fact, one of the main elements of the game was deciding how much of your grain to plant, which isn't exactly an activity associated with cities.
I'd say that this game was closer to being the origin of empire-building games like Civ than to city-building games like Sim City.
When you're nasty or rude to people, don't expect them to be any nicer to you. Not too long ago, you posted, "fuck you and your whole country too," which is part of a long line of uncivil posts.
The OP and the reply to him make valid points. Part of Simcity is managing how resources (e.g., fire departments, police stations, hospitals, schools) are distributed to maximize their value to your city. It's also important to manage traffic to keep property values high. That's absent from other games that focus on building empires, where the focus is on distribution of resources and other relevant tactics to maximize empire growth. They're related, sure, but there's still a pretty big difference between Civilitation and Simcity. It's not being pedantic; it's a valid point!
yea nitpicky things like "THE HISTORY OF CITY BUILDING GAMES" then states "You couldn't build anything, but you could ..."
Jeezus
Heres my history of FPS games, "Tennis for Two", while not first person ...