SimCity 2000 is an entirely new game that continues the SimCity tradition but with more depth, more control over your cities, more complexity, and with some of the best graphics you'll ever see.

The only official book with the inside information you need to get the most from the classic version of SimCity. Here's the celebrated urban planning simulator, SimCity Classic, examined in meticulous detail. The original bestseller SimCity Planning Commission Handbook has been revised and repackaged in keeping with the Maxis release of SimCity Classic, the original SimCity.

Lists the most significant writings on computer games, including works that cover recent advances in gaming and the substantial academic research that goes into devising and improving computer games.

A deep dive into the trailblazing simulation game SimCity, situating it in the history of games, simulation, and computing. Building SimCity explores the history of computer simulation by chronicling one of the most influential simulation games ever made: SimCity. As author Chaim Gingold explains, Will Wright, the visionary designer behind the urban planning game, created SimCity in part to learn about cities, appropriating ideas from traditions in which computers are used as tools for modeling and thinking about the world as a complex system. As such, SimCity is a microcosm of the histories and cultures of computer simulation that engages with questions, themes, and representational techniques that reach back to the earliest computer simulations. Gingold uses SimCity to explore a web of interrelated topics in the history of technology, software, and simulation, taking us far and wide—from the dawn of programmable computers to miniature cities made of construction paper and role-play. An unprecedented history of Maxis, the company founded to bring SimCity to market, the book reveals Maxis’s complex relations with venture capitalists, Nintendo, and the Santa Fe Institute, which shaped the evolution of Will Wright’s career; Maxis’s failure to back The Sims to completion; and the company’s sale to Electronic Arts. A lavishly visual book, Building SimCity boasts a treasure trove of visual matter to help bring its wide-ranging subjects to life, including painstakingly crafted diagrams that explain SimCity’s operation, the Kodachrome photographs taken by Charles Eames of schoolchildren making model cities, and Nintendo’s manga-style “Dr. Wright” character design, just to name a few.

This work springs from the idea that human aspirations for the city tend to overstate the role of rationality in public life. The author explores the part serendipity plays in urban experience.