When I was a young kid, one of my fave games was SimCity on SNES. I remember I would play the game obsessively. I think I got started on it after I got bored of playing Street Fighters. Not quite sure of how I first heard about the game but I was fascinated by the idea of “simulation gaming”.

As I first started on the game, I didn’t quite get what the game was all about (I think I was 9 years old) but found out that it’s about building zones, transportations and growing in population, so soon enough, I was completely hooked. I played obsessively, all night on it and ofc, my mom couldn’t understand the addiction. One thing, though, was that I would run out of money and would have to wait for annual year to get taxes so I could build more zones. I looked up in my old Nintendo Power magazines (I have the first 12 subscriptions) and found a cheat code to get 20k every time I ran out of money. Delightfully, I built new zones, destroyed not-so-developed zones, put in all trains (which lessened car pollution), built airports, stadiums, and fetched more money till I reached the metropolis level at 500k population. I remember how simple the game was and how neat the panning/zooming was, even for a SNES.

Then, there was a PC revolution, so I got on that, and there was a new game called SimTower. Again, I got hooked on the game and kept adding floors and rooms till I got a 5 stars rating and over 100 floors built. It was beautiful and the graphics was good too. Then, another game, the Sims, came out and I tried it out but didn’t find it as appealing as the other two because it wasn’t progressive (people were even unpredictable in the game too!) to me and it was more of goofing around than learning, I suppose.

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