![]() For Shannon, whose most popular building has been downloaded more than a hundred thousand times, the appeal of the city-building game is enduring. Some entrepreneurial players, including one ex-member of the SimCity team, Bryan Shannon, have begun to design and release downloadable famous buildings, such as Ukraine’s Annunciation Cathedral and the Reichstag. Another allows you to add a sewage-treatment plant, to reduce pollution. One will automatically bulldoze any burned-down or uninhabited buildings in your city. The game has also been supported by a vibrant modding community, whose members have supplemented the work of the eight-person development team by releasing upgrades of their own for others to download freely. The unexpected success of Cities: Skylines has funded a major update, due in September, which adds a day-and-night cycle, along with taxis, prisons, and bicycle lanes. This was not something we planned-it just happened naturally.” “It’s slow-paced, allowing time to explain your plans while creating weird and wonderful things. ![]() “Skylines is an excellent game to stream,” Korppoo said. The game has also, according to its designer, Karoliina Korppoo, benefitted from timing game streaming, whereby a player broadcasts her activity online and comments on it, has become wildly popular. Although Cities: Skylines builds on the template of Wright’s concept, it adds numerous features of its own, including a realistic traffic system that accommodates genuine transportation-planning strategies. Even after this year, when Maxis, the developer of the SimCity sequels, went down in a blaze of server lag, players’ appetite for the imaginary city has remained undiminished. Since 1989, when the luminary game designer Will Wright released the first SimCity, the world’s memory cards and hard drives have grown heavy with virtual concrete and illusory rebar. Another thread is titled, familiarly, “ Metro Line Issues.”)Ĭities: Skylines is not, of course, unique. “ What would be the best way of connecting the highway to my city?” one Reddit user asks, alongside a screen shot of tangled-spaghetti roads. There is a vast community of Cities: Skylines players who regularly share their urban-planning woes in online forums. (This realization won’t be news to many people. Running London, it turns out, can be a bit of a drag. I became a benevolent mayor, loved by the people, until I defaulted on a loan and was forced to take back the free smoke detectors, ban all pets, hike up taxes, and demolish a local hospital. ![]() I lowered taxes, hoping to attract new residents, and borrowed from the banks in order to fund amenities to keep those residents happy. I built schools and fire stations and reinstated the London Eye. (Happily, the game had already informed me that Neo-London would have left-side traffic, as God intended.) The virtual weeks flitted past and the city began to take shape, no longer the haunt of a few birds, shrews, and conifers but a proper metropolis, with discrete residential, commercial, and industrial districts. I laid my first road, a luxurious stretch of tarmac, with a Roman’s rectilinearity. I followed the example of London’s prehistoric settlers, choosing a handsome plot of flat land that was bisected by a flourish of river. Nevertheless, London had to be rebuilt (by Wren, Hawksmoor, and the rest) on the ashes of Farriner’s mistake (an unattended oven), just as, when I loaded up my first game of Cities: Skylines, released in March by the Finnish developer Colossal Order, I planned to rebuild the city on the embers of my resentment. It’s unlikely that, in 1666, the baker Thomas Farriner started the Great Fire because he was fed up with the preposterous rent of the city’s shoebox apartments, the disembowelment of its cultural institutions, or its plague of franchise eateries and foreign oligarchs. ![]() I’m not the first man to believe that he might fix London. An urban-design video game in the tradition of SimCity, Cities: Skylines has developed a devoted following. ![]()
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