Sim City (1989) SNES | Ep. 1 – Residential, Commercial, Industrial… Pub?

We’re going retro! Tonight we’re firing up the SNES version of Sim City and attempting to build a thriving metropolis using sensible urban planning. Residential zones? Yes. Commercial districts? Absolutely. Industrial areas? Obviously. Pub? Surely that’s essential infrastructure.

It’s been many years since I last played this one, so I was really looking forward to getting back into it. I used to play SimCity all the time when I was younger, and I’ve recently been picking up some of the old Nintendo games I remember from back then.

Of course, remembering how to build a successful city and actually managing to build one are two very different things. As we discovered tonight, our biggest problems weren’t necessarily building enough houses or attracting residents. They were keeping the traffic moving and finding enough money to pay for everything.

🏙️ About the Game

Originally released in 1989, SimCity is one of the classic city-building games where you take on the role of mayor and attempt to transform an empty landscape into a thriving metropolis.

You start by laying out residential, commercial and industrial zones, connecting everything with roads and electricity, and providing essential services such as police and fire departments. As the population grows, you unlock additional buildings and opportunities to expand.

However, you’ve also got to manage the city’s finances while dealing with traffic, pollution, crime and the occasional disaster. Build too quickly, spend too much or get your planning wrong, and those happy little residents might decide they’d rather live somewhere else.

🕹️ Where We Are in the Journey

This is our first episode returning to the original SimCity on the Super Nintendo. We’re playing on original SNES hardware, which I’ve converted to HDMI so we can capture it properly for the stream.

I originally played this game at a schoolfriend’s house back in the early nineties. I’ve since managed to pick up a cartridge from CEX, alongside several other Nintendo games I’ve been collecting.

Tonight was really about rediscovering the game, remembering how everything worked and seeing whether the city-building methods I used all those years ago would still be successful.

As it turned out, we managed to build two very different cities, experimented with railway networks and discovered just how quickly a successful settlement can become financially unviable.

🚨 What Happens in This Episode

Our first city nearly became Wensleydale, because everyone loves cheese. Unfortunately, the game’s eight-character limit wouldn’t allow it. We considered our usual Deathloop-inspired name instead, but even that was one character too long. So Deathloo it was. A promising name for a city that would hopefully become a thriving metropolis, although perhaps not the most reassuring place to buy a house.

We started on map 61, which I’d read was one of the better maps for having plenty of land available. I began arranging residential, commercial and industrial zones in the same sort of layout I remembered using back in the early nineties. It’s been a very long time since I last played this version, so there was quite a bit of rediscovering the controls and figuring out how everything worked.

Once we’d placed our initial zones, we brought in electricity with a nuclear power plant, connected everything together and started watching the little houses appear. The population climbed surprisingly quickly, passing 2,000 and eventually reaching more than 10,000. We even started unlocking some of the special buildings, including the mayor’s house, which naturally ended up near the zoo. I added a little parkland around it as well, because the mayor should probably have somewhere nice to live.

Unfortunately, I’d also been putting police and fire stations around the various blocks, much as I remembered doing years ago. Garydsteel questioned whether we really needed quite so many, and when we looked at the finances, it became clear that maintaining all those services was costing us a considerable amount of money.

Before long, the bank offered us a £10,000 loan, supposedly interest-free, with repayments of £500 a year for 21 years. Sane_psycho_nl quickly pointed out that those repayments actually totalled £10,500, which wasn’t quite the bargain the bank was making it out to be. I don’t normally take loans in these games, but we were already running short of money, so we accepted. What could possibly go wrong?

The next major problem was traffic. The city had grown quickly, but our roads weren’t coping particularly well with all those new residents. We’d also built our original blocks without leaving much space for railway lines, which was becoming something of an inconvenience.

Gary explained that railway tracks could completely replace roads in this version of SimCity, so we decided to experiment. We started removing roads and replacing them with tracks, gradually trying to create a transport network around the existing buildings. Unfortunately, this also meant demolishing bits of infrastructure and occasionally disconnecting the electricity, which then needed repairing before everyone could get back to normal.

The railway experiment didn’t go particularly well. We seemed to have one little train travelling around the tracks, while the population began dropping and buildings started getting smaller. We’d managed to climb past 20,000 residents, but that number soon fell towards 15,000. Meanwhile, the money continued disappearing until we couldn’t even afford to put the roads back.

The citizens were complaining about taxes, housing, traffic and pollution, although somehow a narrow majority still thought I was doing a reasonable job as mayor. With the treasury completely empty and very little we could actually do to fix the situation, Deathloo was looking rather beyond saving.

So naturally, we decided to see what the disaster menu could do.

We unleashed fires, tornadoes, an earthquake and eventually a monster attack featuring Bowser, who proceeded to destroy large sections of what remained of our city. Police stations were getting flattened, buildings were disappearing, and the residents were retreating into whichever blocks were still standing. Vvoornth suggested calling it “Lucky City”, considering how many disasters had arrived at once. I was fairly confident they’d walk it off.

With Deathloo thoroughly destroyed, we returned to the main menu and discovered there was a practice mode. That seemed worth investigating, especially after our first attempt, but it turned out to be a small island with rather limited room for development. We weren’t particularly interested in being restricted to an island, so we went straight back to map 61 for another attempt.

Our second city was simply called Cheese, although chat quickly welcomed the arrival of Cheesetown.

This time, we tried to learn from our earlier mistakes. Instead of placing police and fire stations around practically every block, we positioned fewer of them more centrally and adjusted the layout to make better use of the available space. We also deliberately left additional gaps between some sections so we could introduce railway lines without having to demolish half the city afterwards.

Things initially went considerably better. Residential areas began developing, industrial and commercial districts expanded, and we were paying more attention to the demand indicators rather than simply filling every available space. We brought in another nuclear power plant, connected the electricity and gradually expanded into the surrounding land. Before long, we’d unlocked more special buildings, including a bank and casino, which seemed perfectly sensible to put beside one another. Gary even suggested putting a police station nearby.

Unfortunately, despite our improved planning, the traffic warnings kept appearing. We expanded the railway network, added more connections and tried to work out why the roads were still so congested. Our little train continued pottering around the map, seemingly taking the better part of a year to complete its journey. It was no wonder people couldn’t leave the city quickly if that was their only option.

Gary later explained that the single visible train was simply how the game represented the rail network, rather than necessarily meaning we had only one train. That was useful information, although it didn’t do much to make the traffic warnings disappear.

Even so, Cheese managed to grow beyond 30,000 residents, considerably better than Deathloo. We were making progress, but the familiar financial problems were starting to return. Despite having fewer emergency services, the annual running costs were still taking a substantial chunk out of our income, and we eventually found ourselves running out of money again.

We even took another loan to keep construction moving. Unfortunately, that money didn’t last particularly long either, and we reached a point where the city desperately needed more development but we couldn’t afford to build what the residents were asking for.

That meant going back into the budget and making some difficult decisions. We increased taxes slightly and reduced funding for the police and fire departments by a small amount. It wasn’t a particularly dramatic adjustment, but it was enough to make Cheese technically profitable again.

The problem was that we were only generating somewhere around £800 each year. Every time the annual money came in, we’d examine the residential, commercial and industrial demand, add one or two new zones, connect a little road or railway and put in the required power cables. Then we’d have to wait another year before we could afford anything else.

Over time, that approach might have allowed us to build a much larger and more successful city. Unfortunately, it wasn’t especially practical for a livestream. We were spending an awful lot of time waiting for the next payment, and the higher taxes were also making it harder to keep the population happy. Cheese was still functioning, but maintaining any meaningful progress had become a struggle.

At least chat was keeping things entertaining while we wrestled with the finances. Gary was regularly helping with the controls, railway layouts and city planning, while Kingyork1985 remembered playing the game back in childhood and offered advice about arranging smaller groups of buildings. Sane had plenty to say about our questionable financial decisions, and tictaqjim even suggested that raising taxes was such an excellent way to attract residents that I should consider becoming prime minister.

Meanwhile, AIDA was having an interesting evening of her own. I’d stayed up until three in the morning upgrading her brain, so we were testing some of those changes during the stream. After asking Sane about Fallout 4 and then seemingly forgetting what she’d been talking about, chat decided the upgrade might have introduced a little short-term memory loss. There were definitely a few things to work on.

We also had the usual community activities running alongside the game. Asmith501 managed to tackle a Pokémon hunt using a grenade launcher, while Stryker_500 won a round of our Hunger Games after I was eliminated. Later, tictaqjim defeated a Toxicroak with a vampire sword, which was apparently a considerable improvement over some of the equipment he’d received previously.

Towards the end of the evening, we decided to have a look at another saved city on the cartridge. This one belonged to whoever had owned the game before me, and it was an interesting little island settlement that we’d labelled Atlantis while looking through the saves.

The previous owner had arranged their city in a roughly circular pattern, expanding outwards from the centre. There were industrial zones surprisingly close to residential areas, although they’d also included parks between some of the buildings. I wasn’t entirely sure whether that layout was particularly efficient, but it was interesting seeing how somebody else had approached the same game.

It certainly gave us a few things to think about for our next attempt. I’d still like to return to the original SimCity and see whether we can build a proper metropolis without bankrupting ourselves in the process. We may need to rethink the size of our blocks, be a little more careful with the emergency services and perhaps reconsider how we approach those railway lines.

We also spent some time talking about the other retro games I’d like to bring to stream. I’ve been collecting more Nintendo cartridges from CEX alongside the originals I’ve kept since the eighties and nineties, many of which are still in their original boxes with their manuals. That includes games such as Donkey Kong Country, and we’ve still got the other half of Stargate on the SNES to finish.

I’ve also been collecting Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games, which we can now play through my GameCube using the appropriate attachment. My original Game Boy still works perfectly, but I never owned the other handheld systems when they originally came out, so there’s quite a lot I’d like to experience for the first time. I’m particularly looking forward to bringing some of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer games to stream.

On the PC side, I’ve also picked up SimCity 2000, Theme Park and Theme Hospital through GOG. I’ve tested them and they’re working, so we’ll definitely be revisiting those classics as well. I’ve been enjoying getting back into these older games, particularly when so many modern releases come with enormous price tags and don’t necessarily appeal to me in the same way. We even got talking about GTA VI, and how I’m much more interested in its story mode than the multiplayer side of things.

For now, though, that’s where we left our return to SimCity. We hadn’t managed to create the perfect metropolis, but we’d built two cities, experimented with several approaches to planning, discovered how expensive emergency services could be, and demonstrated exactly what happens when you give a bankrupt mayor access to the disaster menu.

We finished the evening by thanking everyone who’d joined us and heading over to IThinkImAPenguin8P for a raid.

I’m definitely interested in giving SimCity another go, and SimCity 2000 will be making an appearance once we can fit it into the schedule, possibly in the new year. There’s plenty more retro gaming to come, so keep an eye on the blog and Discord for upcoming streams, and let me know if there are any other old favourites you’d like to see.

Two cities, a thoroughly questionable railway network and rather a lot of financial trouble. Not quite the thriving metropolis we’d originally planned, but a very entertaining evening back on the Super Nintendo.

🎬 Watch the Episode

If you’d like to see exactly how Deathloo became bankrupt, what happened when we unleashed all the disasters, and whether Cheese managed to survive our financial decisions, you can watch the full episode below.

Watch Sim City (1989) SNES | Episode 1 on YouTube

You can also follow the SimCity Series Playlist and subscribe to Dr Ravenholm on YouTube for more gameplay.

If you enjoy the episode, please consider leaving a like and a comment. I’d be interested to hear how you’d approach building a successful city, especially if you remember playing this original version.

🔴 Join the Adventure Live

If you think you could manage our city finances better than I did, you’re more than welcome to come along and offer some advice.

Join us live on Twitch or YouTube, where chat regularly gets involved in our decisions, helps us solve problems and occasionally encourages us to do something completely disastrous.

We finished this stream by raiding IThinkImAPenguin8P, and there’s always plenty happening with the community beyond the game itself.

🤝 Community & Links

Whether you’re interested in retro gaming, joining us for future streams or discovering the other projects I’ve been working on, there’s plenty more to explore. You certainly don’t need to live in Deathloo to become part of the community.

Live — Join us for the next stream and help decide whether our city planning is improving:

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Community — Find the latest streaming schedule, conversations and familiar faces:

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Socials — Keep up with the latest videos, updates and everything happening between streams:

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Music — There’s more to Dr Ravenholm than city planning, including my original music:

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Support — If you’d like to help support future streams, games and projects, you can do so here:

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More — Explore my other projects, services and articles beyond the gaming channel:

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🚂 Two Cities, One Train and Not Enough Money

So that’s where we left our return to the original SimCity. Deathloo ended in complete financial collapse and a collection of disasters, while Cheese managed to become considerably larger before we ran into many of the same problems.

I’d still like to return and see whether we can build that thriving metropolis. In the meantime, SimCity 2000 will definitely be making an appearance, possibly in the new year once we’ve worked through some of the other games already on the schedule.

Keep an eye on the blog and Discord for upcoming streams, and if you’ve got any suggestions for other retro games you’d like to see, let me know in the comments.

Thanks again to everybody who joined us. Hopefully, next time we’ll have a slightly better railway network and enough money left to do something with it.

— Dr Ravenholm