User:Keatzee/WIP:Prerelease:SimCity 3000
Development on SimCity 3000 began not as the isometric 2D city builder as we know it today, but as a fully 3D game. After a troubled development and an acquisition by Electronic Arts, the 3D concept was scrapped and development began essentially from scratch in late 1997. Various publications and interviews give us an insight of what this early 3D SimCity looked like.
Contents
Background: SimCopter and Maxis' financial woes
Prior to the development of SimCity 3000, Maxis had been working on two PC games with 3D environments: SimGolf and SimCopter, both rushed out the door near the end of 1996 due to Maxis executives' "ship four games by the end of the year or we shut you down" demand. Though SimGolf was released to middling reviews and poor sales, SimCopter was slightly better received, due in part to the ability to import SimCity 2000 maps and fly around them in 3D.
However, none of the myriad of games released in 1996 made enough money to keep Maxis afloat; in March of 1997, Maxis reported a loss of $1.7 million in 1996, down from a $6.2 million profit in 1995.[2] The company then decided to go all-in on their most valuable property: SimCity. According to Will Wright, it was expected that the new SimCity game would be fully 3D like SimCopter.[3] This proved to be a problem: while SimCopter's city dioramas, being seen from a helicopter's view, could get away with less spectacle, a detailed city simulation needed far more graphics power than any computer at the time could have provided. Most accounts claim that the development team realized the game would not work out, yet Maxis insisted that development of the new SimCity game continue regardless.
3D Era
It isn't clear when development on SimCity 3000 began prior to its official announcement in an April 1997 Maxis newsletter.[4] A September 1997 issue of Computer Games Strategy Plus indicates "18 months of design",[5] placing the start of development sometime around March 1996, though this seems highly unlikely given all the other projects Maxis was working on at the time; this might indicate that development began immediately after SimCopter, using that game as a base. At some point after April 1997, a teaser trailer was released, showing a few in-game screenshots and a brief glimpse of the early UI.
 | To do: Find out where this teaser trailer comes from. Its original resolution is 320x240, so it may have been included with a game as an advertisement, or simply available for direct download over the Internet. Maxis' early website is not well-archived. |
The trailer appears to only show still images with some camera panning and effects to give the illusion of movement. Here are some notable screenshots from the trailer:
The logo featured in the teaser trailer
An image of the rather-unusual UI featured in the trailer. This UI might have been a placeholder design imposed onto a in-game screenshot, as it is absent from later versions of the same images
A cropped image showing an intersection at the "street-view" camera angle
An image showing a zoomed-out view of the same intersection, with the UI in the top-left
The other half of the earlier street-view image, giving a better view of a Sim
Gamecenter Article
The first proper look at the game seems to have been from a CNET Gamecenter article published on June 6th, 1997[6] (coincidentally, one day after it was publicly announced that Maxis would be acquired by Electronic Arts[7][8]). This article paints an ambitious picture of the game with a slew of new features over its predecessors:
- A 3D environment, with everything from buildings, to vehicles, to pedestrians rendered as 3D models
- Multiple camera viewpoints, from birds-eye, to isometric, to first-person street view allowing you to walk around your city
- Variable graphical settings, including model and texture detail, LOD, and a "minimalist" mode that removes all textures and extraneous models like powerlines
- Procedurally-generated building designs using prefab parts
- Variations in building appearance depending on area conditions, such as "grimy and run-down" slum areas
- Variations in pedestrian appearances, including different skin tones, faces, and clothing appropriate to the area of the city
- Pedestrian behaviors, such as vandals spraying graffiti onto the sides of buildings
- Ten different zone types, expanding residential, commercial, and industrial to include government" and natural resources (farms and mines), as well as zones of varying cost
- Advisors who can micromanage various tasks for you, such as laying down power lines
- The ability to modify buildings' properties, such as the number of cops a police station employs, the price of gas at a gas station, or the rent of a neighborhood
The word "ambitious" bears repeating - many of these features wouldn't make it to a SimCity game until many years later. Yet executive producer Steffen Bartschat seemed optimistic about the game's future: with a release date of Summer 1998, the game would see five years of post-launch support with two expansion packs and many add-ons offered through their website, as well as contests and competitions. They even contemplated a "SimArchitect" program that would allow players to create their own buildings (not unlike the Building Architect Tool included with SimCity 3000 Unlimited).
The article provided screenshots from the game, but many of them weren't properly archived, and only a couple full-sized images and a few thumbnails survive. Thankfully, a few of the images appear to have survived in the earlier trailer and later press material. Most notably, the UI from the trailer is missing in these screenshots, indicating that it might have been a placeholder. The image captions for the missing images are provided regardless.
"You'll be taking it to the streets in SimCity 3000."
"SimCity 3000 boasts scores of unique 3D buildings of various shapes and sizes."
"Players will be able to zoom smoothly down to the street level from an overhead view."
"Don't listen to advisers to see how your city is doing; just talk to your man (or woman) on the street."
"You might want a bird's-eye view when placing buildings and establishing your city." (zoomedout.jpg)
"SimCity 3000 has multiple layers of simulation. Now, you can micromanage individual business firms and city services." (zoom50.jpg)
"Expect an assortment of cool new vehicles and special items in SimCity 3000 thanks to its 3D make-over." (choppers.jpg; assumed to be the right image from a magazine with the same screenshots)
"To improve performance, SimCity 3000 automatically removes textures from its buildings as you zoom in and out." (zoom75.jpg;)
"The SimCity 3000 team is including all the items and structures from SimCity 2000 so that SimCity veterans can import their favorite cities." (only thumbnail archived)
"Downtown, your sims will be suits. In the 'hood, vandals might be spraying graffiti on the wall."
E3 1997
| To do: Insert the video LGR found in his new SimCity 3000 video into the article |
(E3 clip: https://youtu.be/SAob7hm0sP0?t=473)
Two weeks after the reveal in the Gamecenter article, Maxis showed the game off at E3 1997, held in Atlanta from June 19-21. As the purchase by Electronic Arts was only announced weeks prior and not yet finalized, Maxis' appears to have had a small solo booth somewhere out of the way, rather than alongside other EA acquisitions like Bullfrog. While a playable demo of SimCopter 64 was on display (which was later released by archivists in 2022), there seem to be no available photographs or video footage of SimCity 3000's display beyond an extremely brief glimpse in a recording of SimCopter 64. In a September 1997 article in Computer Games Strategy Plus, journalist Steve Bauman claims to have played the game at E3, indicating that a playable demo was probably on display at the convention.
In a year packed full of major releases, it appears that Maxis' booth failed to gather any hype for SimCity 3000; there appears to be almost zero coverage of the game's E3 appearance in any contemporary publications. In a 1999 overview of Maxis' history, Geoff Keighley goes so far as to call SimCity 3000's display at E3 "an experience still regarded as an embarrassment". In the Computer Games Strategy Plus article, Bauman notes that the decision to create a 3D game "is bound to generate controversy" and worries fans of the series may feel Maxis "succumbed to style over substance".
Computer Games Strategy Plus describes the game in a very similar way to Gamecenter, but in more detail. In particular, executive producer Steffen Bartschat explains some of the techniques Maxis planned to obtain stable performance on almost any machine. When panning or zooming the camera, the game would switch to a low-detail mode where textures and extraneous detail would not be rendered. This would adapt to the capabilities of the user's machine; on low-end systems, only roads and rooftops would be rendered. Then, once the camera stops, the game would iteratively add more detail to the scene, rendering textures, swapping to higher-polygon models, and adding extra models like power lines, cars, and pedestrians. The goal was to get a stable 10-15fps at any time.
This strategy is known today as "level of detail", or LOD for short. This might be the first example of LOD being used in a video game, as earlier 3D games tended to simply hide 3D models that were further away.[9]
The article also expands on how the Sims would behave at the "street-view level". Sims wouldn't behave "randomly", explains Bartschat, but their actions would be linked to what is happening in the city. Sims could be seen lined up outside businesses of high demand, or getting mugged when crime is high in the area. You could click on any one of them to see what is on their mind.
Meanwhile, on the "city level", the game would deal with the economics of a city on both a macro- and micro- scale. The player would be able to place buildings like gas stations individually and control their prices on an individual level; place too many gas stations near each other, and market share issues would cause them to suffer. Had the game managed to pull these mechanics off, this would have resulted in an unprecedented level of micromanagement, even by modern standards. To help casual players, Maxis planned to have intelligent advisors who could handle these things for the player if they preferred, dubbed "City Service Agents". They would work either automatically without user input, prompt the player before making any changes, or could be turned off entirely.
A handful of images are shown in the article, a few of which appear to be from a later build than the one shown in the Gamecenter article and might represent the demo shown at E3 1997.
Pre-E3 Build
These screenshots, identical versions of which were shown in the Gamecenter article, are probably from an older, pre-E3 build of the game.
Maxis seemed quite proud of this street level screenshot
A fully zoomed-out view of a city
A 75% zoomed-out view of a city
A 50% zoomed-out view of a city
A 25% zoomed-out view of a city
An image of some boats, showing how model quality reduces at a distance
An image of the helicopter models. Note how the nose of the helicopter becomes rounder closer to the viewer
E3 Build
These screenshots are from a city called "e3demo1" and feature a much different UI from the trailer, as well as grass and trees. The UI features a minimap (with buttons labeled 1-6 on the side, probably to change what the minimap represents), the date (the year 2381, probably because the save file had been open and running throughout the convention), the city name, the population, a news ticker, and several buttons. The UI seems quite similar to the one in the final, 2D version of the game, and even some of the icons are the same.
These images have been slightly smoothed to remove artifacts from the scanning process, making the UI a little more legible.
A view of a residential building from the street-view level
The extensive drop-down menu for selecting which zone/building to place
A building at low quality
The same building at high quality. The game could switch between low- and high-quality versions of buildings adaptively to balance the performance
Post-E3 development
In August 1997, SEC filings revealed that Electronic Arts did not expect SimCity 3000 to be complete in time for its planned release for the 1997 holiday season, nor by the end of EA's fiscal year on March 31st, 1998.[10]
2D Era
Restarting from scratch
todo
