The building game SimCity ran moderately on PC, but it is one of the most successful titles on the Super Nintendo. A book now tells the story behind the port.
Which game is it about? SimCity is a series of economic simulation games from the company Maxis, founded in 1987 by Will Wright and Jeff Braun. The first part was released in 1989 for the Commodore, followed by releases for gaming consoles.
The book Building SimCity, which will be released in June 2024, tells how the port of SimCity to Nintendo’s Super Entertainment System came about – and the story could be straight out of a movie.
The backstories of well-known game classics are sometimes more adventurous than one would think:
That’s how it went down in the wild 80s
That’s how the deal came about: According to author Chaim Gingold, it all started in the summer of 1989 with a call from Nintendo: Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of legendary series like Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Pikmin, wanted to bring SimCity to the Nintendo console.
It is said that Miyamoto envisioned a game in which players could create their own world – and found it in SimCity. The very next day, studio co-founder Jeff Braun flew to Nintendo’s U.S. headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
There, he met with the chairman of Nintendo of America, Howard Lincoln, and president Minoru Arakawa – and that’s where the cinematic offer came: Lincoln is said to have offered Maxis a royalty of $1 per unit sold of SimCity. And if Braun signed on the spot, he would receive “a check on top of that – a signing bonus of $1 million.” In today’s terms, that would be over $2.5 million.
Braun agreed, and a few months later, he and Will Wright traveled to Kyoto, where they were reportedly “welcomed like family members and treated like royalty,” according to Gingold’s book.
Wright, the studio co-founder and designer of SimCity, supposedly spent a week with Miyamoto to develop ideas for the console adaptation. In the evenings, Miyamoto is said to have taken the Americans out – what would an 80s business movie be without a montage of wild parties?
The visit is also said to have led to the creation of “Dr. Wright,” a green-haired character who assists the player in the Nintendo version of SimCity. According to Gingold, Nintendo recognized the value of a good character and found one in Will Wright.
The game designer apparently shone with “disturbingly extensive expertise” and “a taste for the absurd.” Other well-known figures from pop culture also have their origins in real people: 17 years after the legendary WoW episode, we finally know who the MMORPG nerd from South Park is
