I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can basically trace my original interest in cities and transportation to SimCity 2000, which was the only videogame I could ever talk my parents into letting me play. So I spent hours on it, and loved every minute of it. I’ve sort of thought that maybe someday they would let me consult on the SimCity travel demand engine, if they have such a thing.
So pardon a little bit of fanboyism, because the SimCity 5 trailer was released this morning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJx4RZq4Nw4&feature=g-logo&context=G20a40bcFOAAAAAAAAAA
Brilliant! My introduction to this field, you could say, came through Sid Meyer’s Civilization games, and then later EA games like Pharoah, although I was building cities with wooden blocks before that. I didn’t get into SimCity much, and not until later, but it does have some neat features in its transpo simulations. For SimCity 4 there are also several independently programmed add-ons that can help you build more complex systems than the basic package allows, with fancy highway interchanges, at-grade railroad crossings and so forth. I would be interested to see whether these have been integrated into SimCity 5.
Haha! You can tell how much I am not linked to the video game development world. Two corrections to the above: Sid *Meier* developed the Civ series, and Pharoah was by Sierra, not EA.
SimCity was also the reason I became interested in urban design.
SimCity was also my favorite computer game! I had every version of it and it definitely pointed me in the city planning direction.
If only we had to plan for alien monster invasions as part of our curriculum.