Maxis’ former “serious games” division (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Maxis’ former “serious games” division (2020)

arstechnica.com

149 pointsRedoubts19 comments

And, like clockwork, just a few weeks after this article’s publication in mid-2020, a floppy diskette of SimRefinery was found and the game was provided to Ars Technica for further discussion [1].

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/06/a-lost-maxis-sim-game...

I wrote the very long expository comment in that article (when it came out). I really think that many industrial processes would make surprisingly good (or bad) video games – it's a novel training method at the very least, and I think Sim Refinery was way ahead of its time. There's a fine line between "fun" and "simulation" for many of these things.

You're quite right that Ars Technica appears to just package articles from HN and Reddit at times though...

I love looking back at Sim City and thinking, "damn - no 'pandemic' catastrophe!" and feeling that this is one reason why my generation is so ill-equipped to deal with present day.

But if there was a Godzilla monster, we'd be fine.

There's a lot of truth to this.

This is how machine learning works.

As a kid I always struggled with Sim City because I couldn't make sense of the zoning. Only as an adult I eventually learned that the problem was that Germany (where I'm from) approaches zoning very differently from the US.

Ha! Too true.

It is very flawed. In the US mindset, so long as there was a freeway between commercial and residential, you are good.

I would enjoy, "Sim livable Small City"

Don Hopkins has written up a wealth of information about SimRefinery on HN before, and it's all terribly interesting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425368

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425542

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24163430

Should this link be replaced with the original source? Ars Technica linked to the original blog post in the first paragraph, and the rest of the article summarizes the original source. Here's the blog post in question: https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/

I really liked the very generous introduction.

I used to play this game on iphone years back that was the most realistic simulation of how the modern bulk shipping industry worked. Looking through screenshots of SimRefinery you can't help but think there was inspiration drawn from it.

I work as a charterer doing quite literally the same thing this game portrays. It always amazed me how well these guys nailed it.

https://www.portsofcall.de/

One of my favorite Sim games, SimTower, started life as an elevator management and scheduling simulation and had a game bolted on afterwards.

Looks like it was taken down from the archive. :(

https://archive.org/details/simrefinery

https://archive.org/details/sim-refinery

Thank you!

I swear it didn't show up in the results when i searched for it yesterday (but the manuals did).

Anyone has more information on Simpower? I even tried getting in touch with ESRI to no avail.

Loving those double-res Sim City 2000 sprites from SimHealth :) Beautiful.

This needs a [2020] in the title as significant new information has been unearthed as a consequence of this article as mentioned in other comments in this thread.

Year added above. Thanks!

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