SimCity 3k in 4k (2025) | Hacker News Reader

SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)

thran.uk

486 pointsspeckx205 comments

I love this game so much. One of the reasons I started to make a city builder* is because I don't like where the genre is going.

The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia, or "food for imagination" that was a core element since the first SimCity. As a matter of fact, Will Wright used to say that the real simulation runs in the player's minds (or something like that).

Sure, there's something great about Cities Skylines that (at least with very powerful hardware) can look and feel like reality. But at the same time the game engine, in order to make this photorealism of terrain elevations with infinite possible shapes of infrastructure, is so complex that the actual simulation is sloppy, and feels to me like a big downgrade from SC3000.

Traffic, economics, zoning, crime, pollution. are so much practical to simulate (both in the computer, and in our mind models) in this classic isometric style.

* https://microlandia.city

edit: spelling

> I don't like where the genre is going.

Got an opinion on Timberborn? I think it's a great city builder, plus a fluid dynamics simulator where if you guess wrong everyone dies.

Not the same genre (at least for me). Timberborn is more like a colony builder (think Rimworld) than a city builder (SimCity/Cities Skylines). Its the micromanaging vs macromanaging, in a colony builder you are micromanaging what each creature does (such as timberborn or rimworld) while on a city builder you manage the city itself and invididual pawns are alot less important! Plus the survival aspect in that sense doesnt really add up when I'd like to play with the simulation aspects - education, traffic, crime, etc..!

100% agree here. City builders for me eschew individual citizens in favor of group statistics, to oversimplify it.

To me it got boring quite quickly. But maybe so would Sim City at my current age, I can't know.

Timberborn is a good idea, terrible execution, and feels unfinished. At least as a "City builder". It feels closer to a sandbox or "casual" game.

You can build robots to take over work, but the robots use the exact same fuel as the normal beavers (food and water) so the benefit is their lack of need to sleep, but that's just not that great a benefit for how much they cost? Also you have to micromanage them, choosing which buildings use robot labor and the setting is exclusive which makes them a pain in the ass to use. Not a very rewarding endgame system. It really should be automatically preferring robot labor and require zero settings changes.

The research/science section of the game makes itself completely redundant extremely quickly, and then you have no reason to run the science buildings. The progression of it also means you start and it's a serious pain to unlock any new buildings, but after you get your first 1000 science points you can unlock the science building that will generate more science than you ever need really quickly. So the pacing is utterly broken.

The UI has odd choices. Why do I have to go back and forth between different menus for building the tree planting shack, and then a separate menu that lets you set up which tree to plant where? And the "select which tree to plant" menu also plants "Bushes" which for some reason includes "dandelions", which are not at all a bush. Because of this, you cannot see the size of the area the planting shack can reach at the same time you can actually place tree planting plots.

The two "Blocks" you can build, the levee and dirt block, are in different menus than the path and stair building menu, so any nontrivial amount of bridge or scaffolding to get anywhere requires you to go back and forth between those two menus constantly. This sucks, because you need to do this kind of nontrivial building because your beavers cannot build anything that is more than two tiles from a connected path. Your beavers are also dumb enough to trap themselves.

You constantly have to build paths through resource zones, but as far as I can tell, there's no option to allow you to automatically build paths over a resource, so you constantly have to mark resources for destruction manually while expanding.

The "Districts" feature used to be way way worse, because it was required. You could only build within a certain range of each district. It was so terrible they dummied it out, and now districts just kind of exist as this barely useful appendage.

Waterwheels, to extract power from the main point of the game, function on water flow rate in a way that kind of disconnects from gravity potential energy, so half the point of really engineering a big damn or something is gone.

Water soaks into the ground so fast that artificial lakes are useless. I was hoping to build a big one to be able to weather a long, end game drought or badwater, but even a huge one would drain so fast you could maybe last an extra cycle before dying.

IIRC, there used to be a building to revitalize the land around it so you could plant, like a water sprayer, but I guess it was removed? I don't understand why. The maps were not updated, so there are large plains that were meant to be watered for crop growth but now you have to channel rivers through them instead.

Also, it takes absolutely forever to load for zero reason. There's a button to click to see the "wellness" of all your citizens, which freezes the entire game for 10 seconds and that also seems absurd.

Like it's still fun at what it is, and I've played hours lately, but it is bad in weird ways otherwise.

timberborn doesnt have the beavers figuring out for themselves what to do, and operate with agents pulling jobs you the player put on a queue rather than statistics.

its a lot more like dwarf fortress than sim city

you had me at apophenia

Indeed, never heard this word but it’s so useful.

>https://microlandia.city

thanks for sharing that. i'm a big city builder fan, but this one slipped by me. looks cool, and i'll be picking it up!

I think the simulation in Cities Skylines is also quite advanced, or not? The simulation is much more the reason why it requires powerful hardware to run on, much less the graphics.

Can't speak on how demanding the simulation is/was. But on launch Cities Skylines 2 was extremely demanding in respect of its graphics due to very poor optimisation. This PC Gamer article summarises a more technical analysis, which is linked through

https://www.pcgamer.com/a-tech-analysis-of-cities-skylines-2...

I'm the author of said technical analysis! (https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/)

But yes, at launch Cities Skylines 2 was very heavily GPU bound, due to very unoptimized meshes and a poor culling implementation. I haven't profiled it afterwards, but from what I've read they've optimized it enough that on most systems the limiting factor is now the CPU.

Thank you for your analysis! Apologies for not linking to you by name but I thought I'd keep it light and refer to the PC Gamer summary, which does link through to you as well for those who would be interested.

Cities Skylines has pretty decent simulation and it uses quite a bit of raw CPU horsepower, but it only really shines with tonnes of mods (just like SimCity 4 before it).

Realistic traffic is always the bane of these simulators.

its honestly only palatable with dozens of mods, which is disqualifying to me

You got me , enjoy your 8,99 €

whoa that game looks very cool— love it. also loved SC3k… the soundtrack was amazing. game was kinda lowkey hard, though. or maybe it was because i was just a kid haha.

Your simulation sounds incredible!

How big can cities get, though? One of the things I love about Cities Skylines is how massive the land plots are, and the tiny plots of SimCity 2013 was a bigger turnoff than anything else in its disastrous launch.

At this moment, not so big but lately I've done some interesting technical breakthroughs that will enable large maps :D ... or at least a lot larger than SimCity 2013

The real key will be to discover how to run a city simulation such that it doesn't all have to be "active" at the same time (e.g, the opposite of the Factorio simulation).

On Steam Deck, I am having a rough time with the road that the paperclip wants me to place. Holding down the physical A button (of the ABXY group) and wiggling around the left joystick (as well as every other control I can think of), both pressed and not pressed. Sometimes I'll see the green highlight appear, and I can stretch it out into a road path, but when I release A, it just vanishes.

I’m taking a look at that right now. Thanks for flagging this

After today's update, I'm able to build roads. Thank you.

Awesome! I am going to try this when I have some time next week. Fantasizing about how to make a better SimCity 25 years ago is what inspired me to pursue a computer science degree. I got sidetracked by a PhD and never returned to making games. Maybe your version is the one I always wanted!

> The focus on photorealism in modern city builders took away the apophenia

That would be a real challenge to achieve simply because most of us are constantly surrounded by cities, but it is something that we should strive for.

For instance, game designer Fumito Ueda (Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Last Guardian) said that I never wants to visit any old castles or ruins for fear that it would ruin his imagination on how game worlds should be built. It is a fair point, none of his games have had any focus on reality in terms of scale and that is what makes them so special.

Also looking at your game... can I get a copy of Microslop Excellence? ;)

I've commented this many times, but I definitely want to see more isometric grid games like SC3k, RC2 or TTD.

They were less-realistic, yes, but is so pleasant how everything ties together and you can neatly fill out the whole map.

Meanwhile, while I like Cities Skylines or Planet Zoo, it is always incredibly awkward to build roads and paths to the point where I find it frustrating.

it's so frustrating in Cities Skylines without mods, that it's so common difference in height causing so much placement issues

Isometric sims make it easy to build something that looks good. CS & PZ can make things look incredible, but it's a PITA to get there.

The thing is, I’d actually rather play a game that is basically a virtual modeling hobby than a deep city simulation.

I think Cities Skylines scratched that itch for a lot of people.

This looks great, I just bought a copy. While it's downloading I'm perusing the listing, and I'm curious if this supports generating a large image/print of your finished city, like you could in SCURK (SimCity Urban Renewal Kit, which shipped with SC2K).

One thing I particularly loved was printing out very large maps of my city to go on the wall :)

Edit: I like the music a lot, and the little tutorial guy is endearing. One question, how do I move the viewport around? I tried scroll click drag, mouse button drag, arrow keys.

That's a super cool idea. Actually we have an internal thingy to export your city to blender, then we can have nice images like this one: https://microlandia.city/assets/press/keyart/t21.jpeg

Maybe we manage to make something that doesn't need blender (though it probably won't look as cool) or we just stop dev-gatekeeping the function that exports the 3d file. Consider it done for the next point release :)

Beautiful, yes, that's what I am looking for. One question, how do I move the viewport around? I've tried various click drags and arrow keys. Pan/zoom/tilt works great.

Up and down arrow keys will change the tilt. left right to rotate in 90 degree steps. WASD to pan.

(the keys can be changed in control settings)

If you're looking for a free-angle view we don't have it, the game is designed to be looked like a isometric game. Having said that, I'm working on a "photo mode" that frees the camera and lets you choose a lens (with depth of field) and a film but so far it's only for shooting pictures and not for actually playing the game.

Thank you, WASD is what I was looking for. I just want to take a moment and say I find the music very nostalgic, it's great. Can you tell me more about the soundtrack? Is this tracker music?

In other news, I was on track to win re-election and lost. I lost while having the selector for building a structure enabled, and that was stuck on the placing-a-tile, even though I'd lost and the game ended. Very fun game nonetheless!

The compositions are by Pablo Rubio, a long time collaborator. Originally it's inspired in the soundtrack of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. The music is not tracker music but we made the artistic decision to use similar limitations (small number of channels, sample-based instruments) to get the aesthetics of tracker music (actually SNES music but practically the same principles). The soundtrack is still getting expanded. Every month we add a new track to the playlist.

Thanks for the explanation, it hits the mark. Please pass on the compliments to Pablo, the soundtrack does a lot to set the mood. I'm about to start my next city, hopefully I do better in the election :) Thanks for sharing this, I was not expecting to get this sucked in so fast.

Spent a bit of time with it.

Biggest peeve so far: It's very easy to build the 'premium' version of a building (eg police HQ instead of police station) and utterly annihilate your city budget - with no ability to cancel / undo.

"Click on the correct-looking-but-actually-wrong button functionally ends your game" is... not great.

Other than that, I'm really enjoying it.

I see. I'm adding an option to "disable" a building, so you'll be able to suspend a city service due to budget constraints or any other reason.

I more meant "I had 200m in the bank and accidentally spent 170m of it to start constructing a police HQ".

If you bulldoze a building when it's only 2% of the way through being constructed, you should probably be able to get 98% of the resources spent back - whether housing demand, money, whatever you spent.

Possibly 100% back until you hit 5%, just to allow for those mis-clicks.

Do you have water and ports on the roadmap. I'd love some boats :)

There's plans for: river map, island map, peninsula map, port zone, (with docks and containers), industrial fishing.

All in different stages of development. Can't say for sure when it's gonna be live but it's locked in.

This is fabulous and I'm going to buy a copy to play on my SteamDeck. Will be sure to leave a review after I've put some hours into it!

Incredible. Since you’re the dev, please please please isometric camera.

The camera is very very close to isometric but as you've noticed, it's not an ortographic projection. During early access I decided against it but tbh I can't recall why. I'll go back to the drawing board on this one (or at least allow it to be enabled in settings)

I wish someone would do this for a modern TTD but with railroad tycoon stock market/economy dynamics

Which RT? The first was my first PC game I played, on CGA and keyboard only (5,1,2)

RT2 (which I played on Linux through Loki) was very different.

Although I don't have the same focus, I also came to the same conclusion: the actual game and gameplay itself got worse over the years. Same with civilization and many other games. Modern game designers don't understand this or don't care. But I spoke to some of them, and while I initially thought they understand but don't care, most of them really do not UNDERSTAND the problem domain. In particular younger ones; many of them have not played old games.

This sounds super interesting, but I'd much rather buy it on GOG than on Steam or itch.io. Any chance on releasing it there?

I love GOG and I would publish there in a heartbeat but I never hear back from them :(

May I bother you to expand on why GOG over itch.io?

I also prefer to use GOG whenever I can, but I really don’t know enough about itch.io to judge it. I’m hoping you can help bridge that knowledge gap.

I’m not them, but games from GOG don’t (AFAIK) have any DRM. So you can play them forever without having to log on to Steam etc.

Thanks but note that I wasn't asking for a comparison between GOG and Steam. I know both of those pretty well.

Mainly, so that I don't have my games spread out over too many platforms :)

Looks great. For accuracy, when you build something, occasionally construction should stop half way through. You're then told that costs have doubled, and you'll need to pay again to complete the construction.

I'll buy it if you add crypto payment + a tip.

Looks pretty cool. Reminds me also of Metropolis 1998, which is also going for the isometric style - with a lot more detail, i.e. you can design individual homes and see the lives of "sims" too, something like if SimCity and The Sims were merged.

https://yesboxstudios.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZHI2bCCpl0

It has a demo on Steam now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/ It's quite playable already, and it's a very small 100Mb download.

Your game looks good. A special 'thank you' for porting it (building it?) for macOS.

I know macOS is not considered a gamer platform, but I appreciate enough that he built for macOS too that I purchased a copy!

(Speaking as someone who also owns a Windows 11 RTX 4090/9950X3D gaming monster… sometimes I like gaming on my MBP!)

This was one of my favourite games. City simulators took up an enormous amount of my childhood and I still dream about arcologies. When I see a modern development like Brentwood in Canada's BC or some older ones like along the river in Chicago it reminds me of the wonders we can build.

As an aside since it's in the article, what are other cultures' irreverent targets? e.g. Anglo-cultures seem to casually joke about disasters like he does here about 9/11. Somewhat diminished by the fact that he's British, not American, but Americans do it too, and the American-British interaction involves this and Irish Car Bombs taken rather lightly. I find that curious. Do the Quebecois joke about Opération Satanique and the French have likewise a thing they make fun of the Quebecois for? Or is this an Anglo-culture thing? Obviously, I principally read in English so this might be specific to my language.

> and I still dream about arcologies

even after 9/11 and London's Greenfeel Tower fire? The vertical living seems very strained to me after events like that. Sure, they are not common issues, but there's always that thought in the back of my mind of what if.

The Grenfell fire was caused by petty corruption. Someone involved in its construction used a cheaper flammable cladding material instead of the (slightly!!) more expensive fire resistant version.

It’s very on-brand for places like Russia and China but clearly western countries are not immune to this kind of thing either.

After the fire there were investigations into towers constructed here in Australia. Many used the cheaper flammable cladding material also. Just like with Grenfell, nothing much was done and nobody went to prison.

What does that have to do with the actual idea that being in a tall building could make it difficult to escape. It doesn't matter if the cause of the disaster is cheap building materials or an external force acting on a properly built building.

The material should've behaved like concrete; stopping fire / smoke instead of spreading it.

That way firefighters can take people down the elevators safely etc.

Grenfell was iirc social housing.

A contractor is less likely to fuck around with people who can afford very good lawyers.

I feel like at the scale of an arcology, there isn't really much of a meaningful difference between there being a fire blocking your escape in the massive structure vs, say, fire blocking you escape in a mall. You're either completely surrounded by fire or you're not.

Apartments are safer than single family houses regarding fires.

In 2023, the annual fire fatality rates for single-family homes and older multifamily homes were roughly equivalent at 7.6 and 7.7 deaths per million, respectively. In contrast, according to Pew researchers, the annual fire fatality rate for newer multifamily residences was 1.2 deaths per million.

https://www.multifamilyexecutive.com/apartment-trends/modern...

A single family home built to today's standards will be safer than an apartment built 50 years ago. Of course newer built anything complying with modernized fire safety regulations will be safer than older anything. I feel like your point is missing the mark

A major contributor to this statistic is fire sprinklers. New apartment complex construction for decades has required them but they're virtually nonexistent in single-family homes, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon.

California has mandated it for new construction for over a decade now. Of course old stock doesn't really ever turn over in California so it's entirely possible that we will never reach a point where a majority of SFH in California have sprinklers, but it's certainly possible to change for new homes.

that's actually not true at all. today's homes flash up in a matter of minutes, where as older homes can take nearly a half hour. today's homes are designed to minimize the chance of danger, but in situations like a fire, once they happen they are more dangerous today than they were in the past.

Does that change with the growing market share of 5 over 1 wooden mixed used buildings?

The arcologies are such a perfect example of what these games did well

> like Brentwood in Canada's BC... it reminds me of the wonders we can build.

But still can't make a fountain that doesn't destroy the grout on the tiles next to it :P

SC3K had a masterfully executed advisor system that felt both classy and warm. Ditto its music and art.

Unfortunately for SC4, they proceeded to make all the advisors 3D-rendered Sims. For SC2K, well:

https://www.somethingawful.com/news/simcity-advisors/4/

(that was the least offensive page to link; for the canonical experience start at page 1)

These are all amazing. Thank you.

Wait, are those from Sim City 2000, released in 1993? One of them references Google Maps, first available under that name somewhere around 2004?

Also Wazzup? was later. And the dialog looks different in screenshots you find online but then again there have probably been quite a few releases. Still, I would say those images are not real or maybe from some modded version.

I have a very vague memory of being able to name streets, so this might be that.

These were likely made with Foone's Death Generator. https://deathgenerator.com/#sc2k

I vaguely remember 2 different releases of 3k with different advisors. I liked the cartoony ones better.

These aren’t actually from the game…

Correct. The advisor portraits are real, though.

YOU CAN'T CUT BACK ON FUNDING! YOU WILL REGRET THIS!!

Reticulating splines

SC3K’s art was not “crafted pixel by pixel.” It was rendered from 3DS Max. Maxis released a version of G-Max called the Building Architect Tool that included a template with the same lighting rig that they used for the in-game assets. This tool rendered and exported the various zoom levels and orientations.

You're describing SimCity 4, not SimCity 3000. The SC3k tool is not entirely 2D, but it does mostly behave like one (with emulated voxels instead of pixels).

And while I cannot confirm what Maxis was doing internally, I am quite sure no-one was using 3DS Max for rendering game assets in the 90s considering it had just been released and well into the 2000s it was still humongously slow.

quite sure = confidently wrong

Though they are absolutely right that I confused SC4’s BAT with SC3K’s.

The art looks very rendered, with pixel cleanup in something like photoshop. I was using 3ds Max on my norma PC circa 2001-2002. Game studios should definitely have had 3d studio in the mid to late 90s on their actual workstations if they were Windows based (or lightwave). Crucially, The Sims (3ds max) released quite close in time and we know 4k was also 3dsmax, so I think it’s fairly safe to say Maxis was a 3ds shop in this era. It was ubiquitous in pc gaming of the era.

In the 2000s SC4 was already using 3DS Max, but here we are talking about a game that started development in 97. And they already had 3D games before it...

In SC3k sprites you can also clearly see two different grid sizes, so at the very least the retouching and some props are "pixel art".

> SimCity 3000 is the best SimCity

I disagree! SimCity 2K FTW. :)

Best balance of complexity IMO and ran pretty well on my old Mac. I'd love a retro-futuristic reboot.

Not sure to what extent you're looking for a reboot to be representative of the original, but I've been following the development of this indie spiritual successor for some time: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/

This looks fantastic.

I worry that its scope might be a bit wide.

From planning region-wide infrastructure (the thing I love about city builders/OpenTTD) right down to deciding how many wardrobes someone needs. How well can it do those things and everything inbetween?

But, I'll definitely be giving it a go. Thanks for posting the link.

i first played 2000 when it was bundled with my family's windows 95 pc, and was sad to learn that gog/steam sell the inferior dos variant. but, yes, 2000 was just right.

I think that's because it's easier to package a DOSbox program than a Win16 program (it had Win32 edition, but supposedly the installer itself was Win16). According to pcgamingwiki, there's a patch to convert the GOG DOS edition to the Win32 edition.

I was replaying SC2K(dos) recently and it is much harder than I expected. Usually these city games are fairly easy chill affairs. On a 1900 hard(max bond) start the only way I found to succeed(marked when I payed off all bonds) was to pause(to avoid early bond repayment losses), use all your money to setup the perfect layout for the next 40 years. Then wait in debt(can't build anything) for 40 years while hopefully your city profit grows past the bond interest amount and you are able to slowly claw yourself out of the red. Then immediately start saving for the replacement power plant as your original one will explode soon. I was not making a comfortable profit until about 1960. And this was after many failed cities, can't fix anything when you can't build anything.

Couldn't you do external connections to sell power and water? I vaguely remember this being the best strat in the beginning. Or maybe that was just in 3k.

SC4K - The original binaries run at 1080p on modern hardware with excellent performance and gameplay with a few command line tweaks.

With respect to SC3K being great still, I would run it but I haven't been able to get some performance issues ironed out.

Worst might be SC2K for N64.

Neat concept would a game to import cities into a GTA-like engine.

Sim City 3k is my least played Sim City game, but this is inspiring me to take another look. I really like the sweaty micromanagement and bigger scope of 4, but maybe I will prefer 3k's simplicity in my old age.

The picture caption with a 9/11 joke is a little off-putting, but it's at least proof that this isn't AI generated content...

> The picture caption with a 9/11 joke is a little off-putting

9/11 seems to be an important milestone in his life. In the about section of his web page it says this:

Q:/> How old are you?

A:/> I can't remember the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I can remember 9/11.

I always thought of 9/11 as the major event for older millennials. I used to think it was all millennials, but many weren't even in kindergarten when it happened.

Honestly my personal millennial generation cut-off is the "remember before 9/11 world" vs "don't before remember 9/11 world" group of kids.

Some of us use 9/11 as a milestone event in our lexicon of world changing events.

I must also admit to preferring Sim City 3000 over 4. I don't know if I can handle a 4K user interface without a magnifier, however.

Have you played SC4 with NAM?

Probably moves sc4 further away from what he would like. If you're into NAM might as well just play cities skylines with transit mods

Same.. I'd rather have it 2x scaling at half-resolution. Vision issues.

My favorite SimCity game by far. The aesthetics are flawless.

I was so happy to score the physical “Music From SimCity 3000” soundtrack CD at the Alemany Flea Market fifteen or so years ago: https://www.discogs.com/release/794952-Jerry-Martin-Music-Fr...

> Some of the music from the original release is missing from an .ini file, even though it is present in Unlimited.

Article neglects to mention that the tracks which are included in Unlimited are lower-bitrate and monophonic compared to the same songs in stereo from the 1.0 release. Copy the same-name files from the original CD instead :)

Unlimited is sad because data-mining shows that it was almost multiplayer à la SC2k Network Edition: https://tcrf.net/SimCity_3000_Unlimited/Unused_Multiplayer_T...

I really love Jerry Martin's music. He did the iconic music in the Sims too, collaborating with Marc Ruso and Kirk Casey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Martin_(composer)

https://www.last.fm/music/Marc+Russo

https://soundcloud.com/kirk-casey

Here are his web sites with more:

https://boombamboom.com/

“The Streets” 70’s Car Chase Music (reminds me of the Austin Powers theme Soul Bosa Nova by Quincy Jones):

https://jerrymartinmusic.com/music-70s-car-chase-1/

“Batucada” Bossa Nova:

https://jerrymartinmusic.com/music-bossa-nova-3/

“New Beginnings” This one is definitely in the 4 million plus club for plays on youtube:

https://jerrymartinmusic.com/music-sims-1-build-1/

“Let’s Go Shopping” Happy 50’s Shopping Music:

https://jerrymartinmusic.com/music-shopping-1/

Jerry Martin – Music From SimCity 3000:

https://www.discogs.com/release/794952-Jerry-Martin-Music-Fr...

Simcity 4 Soundtrack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSv37HwwojU

SimCasino (Early Access) - Soundtrack Sessions Complete:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOm9SSXyQ_g

How The Sims Made New-Age Jazz Piano the Soundtrack of Our Lives:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LpVUi9TQ8U

>The Sims soundtrack is an iconic piece of video game music, and the build mode's minimalist new age jazz piano songs are undoubtedly among it's most famous tracks. We spoke to Jerry Martin, the composer of the soundtrack, to find out how and why new age jazz piano became the sound of The Sims.

The Sims Soundtrack CHEATED. Here's how:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJMds3jT7c8

The Untold Story of 'The Sims,' Your First Favorite Jazz Record:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-untold-story-of-the-sims...

Music in The Sims:

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Music_in_The_Sims

Interview with SimCasino Composer Jerry Martin! A Master of Simulation Game Music:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1158420/view/4689895...

SimCity Micropolis Tile Sets Space Inventory Cellular Automata To Jerry Martin's Chill Resolve:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI

Good shout on grabbing from the original CD. The mono and lower bitrate is almost always install-footprint maths. Stereo CD audio is ~10MB per minute. Halve the channels, drop the bitrate, the soundtrack fits in a few MB. Worth the swap if you've still got the disc.

I was surprised to see SC3k described as isometric like 2k. I recall versions after 2k being "look anywhere" 3D, but I guess I missed some versions. So many games, like Railroad Tycoon post RRT2 and Worms went full 3D and gameplay was never the same.

I actually keep a Basilisk II System 7.5 Mac environment just so that I can play SC2k from time to time ...

A small frustration I have with playing old games is that the GOG/Steam version is always the PC original and the Mac versions almost always had far better sound and music and sometimes graphics.

Maybe you can play using an emulator. I use VMware to emulate Windows XP to play The Sims and it works great.

And when you say “PC original”, you really mean “DOS version wrapped in DOXBox”, because it's easier to ship that on both Windows and Mac than patching the Windows version for Windows, and shipping a Wine wrapper for Mac. (Have they ever shipped a Wine wrapper for anything? I don't think so.) What a shame.

I do really wish an application-level classic Mac OS emulator existed. There are lots of great full-system emulators for classic Macs (Basilisk II, SheepShaver, DingusPPC), but no Rosetta-style “make the old application run in the context of a new machine” execution environments. I'll grouse to whoever will listen that all of the best edutainment software of the '90s and early '00s is trapped on PPC Mac OS.

Probably the closest thing I remember existing to this was (in its "modern"-ish form) https://github.com/autc04/executor

Not quite what you're looking for I think but it was a Wine-style reimplementation of MacOS.

I think that is basically exactly what I've been looking for. Thank you!

Marathon Trilogy. Ambrosia SW games. Spectre VR. My childhood was so flavourful. The one downside is that nobody on the playground were talking about the games I had access to.

I loved Marathon and we even had enough Macs in our lab to have a few lan parties. Wonderful memories.

And the Ambrosia folks were giants! So many great games - Maelstrom, Ambrosia and the EV saga! There was such a thriving ecosystem of plugins for EV!

It definitely touched others because the original Marathon still exists as Aleph One, and Endless Sky does a great job of capturing the essence of the Escape Velocity games!

Almost forgot the OG Bungie hit Pathways Into Darkness! I keep that on my Basilisk env too for the occasional hit of nostalgia.

PiD is probably my favourite game of the FPS-Text-Based-Horror-Adventure-RPG genre.

Naev is a good choice for Eacape Velocity fans looking for a modern game. Naev has a lot of depth and polish, very well crafted.

You can run the Windows 95 version of the game (similar to the Mac version) on modern computers with this patch: https://sc2kfix.net/ . It's definitely disappointing that GOG doesn't distribute that version. Stuff like this is why I have to keep a CD drive around.

I feel like that's true for early/mid-90s games where the PC version targeted DOS (+ the varied universe of PC video/sound hardware), and the Mac version could just target the much more uniform Mac platform.

But SimCity 3000 is from 1999, and the PC version was a normal Win9x game. I own (still have the CD) the SimCity 3000 Mac port, and it is not very good. Maxis didn't port it themselves, it was done by Software MacKiev. System requirements were quite high for the time, it was sluggish, often unstable, and the file open/save dialogs reused the Windows-style dialogs which was very awkward.

The soundtrack is great though.

You're thinking of simcopter maybe, which follwed 2K and was full 3D.

> I was surprised to see SC3k described as isometric like 2k. I recall versions after 2k being "look anywhere" 3D

You recall wrong.

The only 3D SimCity game was the one released in 2013 that was simply titled "SimCity" but is frequently called "SimCity 2013" to differentiate it from the original classic.

2K, 3K, and SimCity 4 were all 2D games.

I believe 3k and 4 used 3D assets "in the editors" but the actual created tiles were 2D.

In 3k you could rotate the camera to 3 (or 4?) different angles, but each was fixed isometric rendered. Meaning they did all assets in the game at multiple angles.

I'm very confident that you could do the same in 2k.

(Looks like this screenshot confirms it, those two blue arrows rotated the view: https://pressakey.com/gamepix/101/simcity3.jpg)

What a strange person, from the same author: https://www.thran.uk/writ/yarn/2025/03/road-rage-maxxing-or-... I don't understand how you can feel morally superior by blocking the overtaking lane and letting people through if they're respectful enough.

Well, I can

I think it's some type of personality disorder.

I agree. Someone should have this dangerous man sectioned.

Real people are complex and hold a wide palette of skills, opinions, habits, biases, etc. Just enjoy the good and disregard the bad.

There is a huge difference between "people are complex" and actively advertising your antisocial and frankly dangerous actions online, and being proud of them.

If he wants me to disregard them, he shouldn't be writing blog posts about them.

While I understand the sentiment and generally agree with it, I find it weird that you completely gloss over the fact that it is reactive antisocial mirroring behavior.

The blogging person is definitely making stuff worse, but they're just amplifying. The source of the problem is to be found elsewhere.

A surprising amount of comments in here seem to completely disregard that for some reason.

> his is allegedly for better compatibility for streaming, but since I'm not an egotist who needs every second of his life broadcast to an audience, we will switch it to true fullscreen.

Ahh of course, every streamer streams every second and is egotistical. What a moron

Hey, if you make your money from playing to an audience, you can take a little joke ;)

Not only that this is so dangerous. Back off, and let the idiots idiot.

That said, probably don't want to discuss other weird posts for each HN submission!

Tailgating in a massive SUV is not disrespectful, it's dangerous to other person. Why encourage this behavior by immediately letting them through?

something else dangerous: purposefully trying to incite a road rage incident.

in the wise words of reddit: ESH (everyone sucks here)

The graveyards are filled with people who had the right-of-way, who died knowing they were in the right.

And even if it's a slow speed accident, who cares about being right if you get a disability in the process? It is safer to let them through so they don't plow into you when you have to suddenly stop.

The only reason to LARP as a highway cop is just ego.

Sure, you can hide and worry about protecting yourself in an ever more dangerous world, or join people like him and me and take a stand against bad behavior. If enough people do it, it will make a difference.

> you can hide and worry about protecting yourself in an ever more dangerous world

This is a childish mindset. It would be worth taking a defensive driving course if you haven't done so, it may be helpful.

> join people like him and me and take a stand against bad behavior

Ironically, impeding faster traffic by camping the passing lane is also illegal in several states (yes, even if you're going the speed limit).

No it won't. You're not "taking a stand". This isn't a bar fight. You're mistaking responsible defensiveness for cowardice, and passive-aggressiveness for civil courage.

There is zero chance they'll recognise your dominance, let alone moral superiority, and walk away changed from a teaching moment. They're not even seeing you as a person. They only see your car as one more obstacle among so many other "idiots", and it's quite probable you're provoking only more reckless behaviour.

I wrote if enough people do it. Of course, it would make a difference, then.

I suppose the middle ground is to just continue what you were doing with a slight negative factor of idk 0.8x speed.

Don't let the people win, but also do not suddenly assume powers you do not actually have.

Essentially, plausible deniability but on the road. You might really just be a slow passing slow lane changing driver.

___

The goal is to reintroduce friction into everyday life to nudge people into being less antisocial and/or make them slightly suffer for being that.

The goal is not to become a vigilante.

One brings a stable society, the other just a different flavor of the same chaos that came before.

You don't know why they are tailgating or in a rush. For all anyone knows, they could have a passenger in a medical emergency.

Or how about you get the heck out of the fast lane when someone is approaching you going faster? Tailgating is an acceptable and common way to tell someone to gtfo of the way. That is common courtesy in most states in the U.S.

No, it’s not. Please stop driving and leave it to the adults.

That's completely wrong. Tailgating is prohibited in all 50 states. Driving fast while too close behind another vehicle is a major cause of serious accidents. This is real basic stuff that every driver is expected to know.

Trying to normalize tailgating, as you are doing, also tells us something about your attitude. Do you generally try to intimidate others into doing what you want, or only when driving?

Because it’s safer to do so. If accidents only ever hurt the driver responsible, that wouldn’t be such a big deal - but you’re a fool if you think that’s how the real world works.

Because the author is the one breaking the law, the right lane is for passing, not for cruising.

Off topic rage bait harassment has top comment? Why?

I think Chelsea tractors belong in Chelsea, certainly not here in the country where they are completely unsuitable given the size

However he lost me at

> I was cruising in the fast lane, minding my own business

There is no fast lane in the U.K (including NI). There are overtaking lanes. If you are in this lane it’s because you are overtaking slower moving traffic in inside lanes.

If you aren’t, then you need to be losing your license

And to those who cruise in the middle lane at 60.

If they’re overtaking lorries doing 56 in the inside then that’s fine.

There's a small caveat to this, technically in the UK the police are allowed to speed if they are heading to an emergency, they don't need livery on their cars or even sirens

So if you're in the outer lane and the person behind you wants to go faster than you and get past, get out of their way.

It's safer anyway, and also you don't know who they are or where they're going.

You keep left unless overtaking. If an unmarked police car is behind you then that doesn’t matter, you still only sit in lane 2/3/4 when overtaking slower traffic in lanes to the left.

There are a few exceptions of course - when lanes are diverging for example (so 12 going off one way and 34 going another).

Funny, I'm reading this as very dry, tongue-in-cheek humour.

According to Denis Leary, he would be an "asshole". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrgpZ0fUixs

Signs that you are old: I saw "in 4k" and thought that it was in 4 kilobytes, not 4k resolution

Or a demoscener.

Diablo 1 in 4k - https://i.imgur.com/4ResbPc.jpeg

Back when SimCity 2000 was released, younger me somehow found a phone number for Maxis and actually called them to rave about it. At some point in the message, I very confidently told them to make “SimCity 3000.”

When SimCity 3000 came out, I couldn't help but wonder if I inspired them. "Remember that kid was really stoked about 3000."

I'm pretty sure the phone number was just printed on the manual back then... Many games back then had a phone number printed in the manual.

Loved SimCity growing up.

Would it be possible to automate porting the windows version into a mac or web version? Like giving a long-running agent the task and some tools to check/play the game on both platforms?

At this point you can probably just run it with proton or wine. Why bother porting the whole thing?

Can confirm it runs on Debian with Wine just fine.

For fun and customization. This guy used Claude to decompile and recreate an old mac game: https://www.tiktok.com/@philsmy/video/7644482888544636180

SimCity 4 has a native Mac build, it's on Steam. Most of the modding community uses Windows now though since the .dll hacks became feasible.

SimCity 4 not only has a native Mac build, but it has an applesilicon one (I believe you have to enable a beta flag somewhere).

Pretty impressive for a game released in 2003.

Oh my goodness SC4 is 23 years old. I'll go be old in the corner.

What A View! Sims Thrilled As Local Landscaping Artist Hosts DIY Expo

Great, and how does that translate if we want to run it 4k in Linux?

I run Arch. I purchased it on Steam last week after the dos.zone site was shared here and dropped the GOG executable in the steamapps directory, and it worked flawlessly with proton.

Nice! I'm going to have to try that now.

Sweeet well done, especially with the audio. I like this patch method much more than the HD Patch I've been using the last few years.

We played SimCity in my shop class at school on olds macs and i like picking it back up every now and then. It still holds up better than most new games.

I liked the SimCity franchise. However had, while the graphics improved a lot, the first SimCity is still my favourite, largely because the actual gameplay was quite simple and efficient to use. I always found this strange, because the graphics got better but the actual gameplay itself got worse. I also noticed this even more so with civilization; playing the first part is super-fast and super-easy; later parts required so much more computational calculations, there was more lag, and more annoying UI animations (not all were annoying, but when I want to make a move, I want to make a move, not wait until unit xyz has to do a break for smoking for the next 10 minutes).

> I will not pay for the same game twice.

I firmly disagree with that point. If the game is well-made and enjoyable, the developer probably deserves some extra cash thrown their way. Games remain one of the best bang-for-your-buck when it comes to entertainment anyways. ($50 can get you DAYS of enjoyment, compared to going to a movie theater, theme park, or other paid attractions)

So yes, go ahead and purchase an enjoyable game multiple times if it's a good game. I certainly have!

The copies of Stardew Valley are not free but you can just buy them on every device you have I have 436 copies of Stardew Valley.

I agree that games are excellent value, particularly compared to the 90s when they cost a LOT more than they do today. However, I think the point is a wider one: even if games were priced more 'fairly', should you be able to buy a game and then have, effectively, perpetual ownership of it?

Another factor was that although both SimCity 3k and SimCity 4 both had a maximum of 256x256 tiles for their cities, the scale was different.

A SimCity 3000 tile edge was equivalent to 64m, whereas in SimCity 4 it was 16m. The scale of the city in SimCity 3000 was bigger as a result.

Hoping to test this principle of largest possible map sizes out soon.

4K screen resolution, not a 4KB intro.

I also love this game. I was so hoping someone had managed to port this to WASM.

I'm surprised a bunch of tech professionals are totally fine with downloading random .dll's and patching executables. How do you know this is safe?

Windows on Hyper-V, on Proxmox, air gapped, wearing an aluminum foil cap.

So many hours, this was my SimCity experience and I still can hear the jazz.

This and Rollercoaster Tycoon and Doom II was my jam.

> Risky biscuits: building 1WTC and 2WTC but no hospitals or fire stations. I like to tease fate.

Too soon, too soon..

I'd love to see to see this game remade and released. I'd buy it in a second.

There's something wonderful about this kind of PC game preservation

Anyone know if there're any free simcity ones on Android?

This sounds super interesting, but I'd buy it on GOG

I hope GOG makes this all an easy to install mod/patch.

Replace the executable, even on a Steam copy.

There's more than just the widescreen patch. It would be really nice if they automated configuring and installing the other tweaks to make it really playable.

claude --dangerously-skip-permissions -p "get this all installed https://www.thran.uk/writ/hdid/2025/12/simcity-3k-in-4k.html"

Call to Vinnie and build the mythical SIM Castle...

what would be really cool is a first person world generated from simcity maps and you can walk around and go inside buildings etc

It would be nice if they remade Simcopter or Streets of SimCity yeah

Is there a Linux guide

Will Wright handed the original Maxis SimCity 3000 team a great design for the next SimCity (which I think they should have called SimCity 2001 instead of SimCity 3000, to more realistically set expectations).

But they ignored him, and went off on a tangent trying to design their own ultimate totally general purpose virtual reality (and we know how well Second Life has done ;), without much thought to what was actually possible, playable, or fun on current computers.

They gave some demos of the 3D prototype to reporters, then Maxis ran out of money because it was nowhere near shipping, then EA bought us, then fired the people who were out of control, and Luc Barthelet announced to the reporters that SimCity 3000 wouldn't be 3D, but it would be 2D and beautiful.

Here is a little nugget I saved from that time: Guru's infamous SimCity 3000 design document, from when the 3D design was really going off the rails:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rnvzKdJp9tyEJwEGxsIjoHnT...

Ocean Quigley says that Guru was really sincere and believed what he said (and was not just on mushrooms).

I have to admit, that if that's true, then that Guru dude was 15 years ahead of his time, and not just a crackpot! But he should have mentioned something about the fact that it would take 15 years to develop those ideas into a shipping product!

- Peak hubris / scope explosion:

“It is possible to bridge the chasm of expectations and technology in the forthcoming year in a realistic and economical manner.”

“The Real Time Render mode shall define a visual paradigm hitherto unseen in any game or product.”

“Hence attempting to assault the cliff of expectations of the visual paradigm by means of the linear ladder fails.”

“There is a whole think tank of concepts and ideas which shall be explored and implemented…”

- Hardware reality fighting back:

“Needless to even state this is impossible performance for a delivery Pentium 75 within one year.”

“Terrifying thought. Cut the flexibility we say ! Let’s govern the flexibility I say.”

“That’s a tall order, admittedly, but then, this is an ambitious project !”

- Glorious jargon poetry:

“The semi-digested spatial data is nothing more than just that.”

“This data simultaneously suffers further transformation…”

“The motion window is always stabilized and will ‘fly’.”

“The Snapshot Port — a.k.a. The Portrait of Reality”

“causation of an event singularity for the common reference of the simulator and the visual computing system”

- The “there / that / do this” interface:

“Once ‘that’ has been identified to be able to ‘do’ ‘this’ to ‘that’…”

“The user can merely point ‘there’: and place a building. The user can point to ‘that’ building and delete it.”

“A single pencil beam shot back into the scene from the point of the mouse…”

- Biology metaphor goes full Spore:

“The species of the virtual world… shall be encoded for spatial representation as chromosomes…”

“The species itself shall be represented in its completeness as a self descriptive cell.”

“Needless to add… if transfer RNA were metaphorically the lifts of the building…”

“The other facet… is the ability to create more species by crossbreeding and mutation of species.”

- Buildings become existential -- this is the crown jewel:

  “The behavioral transformation over time has a standard pattern

   Now I’m a cylinder and Now I’m an egg
   Now I’m smooth & shiny and Now I’m not
   Now I am mottled and Now I’m not
   Now I feel mottled and Now I do not
   Now I’m here and Now I’m over there
   something or the other blah blah”

- Las Vegas shark tent cinematic universe:

“Once the Simulator and the VC shell agree that there is a building called Big Joe’s Shark Tent…”

“yes I have neon lights, I have thirty bulbs all having high level scripts…”

“aaah OK ! you got it ! the script is queued, bye”

- Voxel fever dreams:

“This throws up the possibilities of bulldozers actually bulldozing soil. And Mining community towns actually mining inside a silver mine !!!!”

“Voxel space animation methods can actually cause earthquakes.”

“The display of a building or a city block being engulfed by splitting seams of the earth is not an impossible target…”

- Favorite one-liner:

“Modelessness is messy.”

Uhh... in 4k glory. This is one of my top games ever. Just bought the book "BUILDING SIMCITY" from MIT Press and I have it next to me to keep me company.

Genius!

Man, I played the fuck out of this game in my teens, it's in my top 5 best games ever made.

Obnoxious author. Refusing to 'pay twice' for a game they care enough about to go through all this trouble + deeply obnoxious bit about Windows 11 at the end of of the post.

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