Gamers of a certain age probably remember that Nintendo worked with Maxis to port a version of the seminal SimCity to the brand-new SNES in 1991. What most gamers probably don’t realize is that an NES version of the game was developed at the same time and cancelled just before its planned release.
That version of the game was considered lost for decades until two prototype cartridges surfaced in the collecting community last year. One of those prototypes has now been obtained and preserved by the Video Game History Foundation’s (VGHF’s) Frank Cifaldi, who demonstrated the emulated ROM publicly for the first time at MAGFest last weekend.
I’m a SimCity 2000 person myself, but the original SimCity is a classic, and I love that they finally managed to preserve it.
As someone who grew up with the NES and loved SimCity, this is a nice thing to happen! It looks a bit rougher than expected, but maybe if they had got it to completion it would have been optimized and running better.
I remember this SimCity version for NES being announced back in the day, I read it in a computer magazine during 1990 or ’91… I was pretty excited about the NES version because I already had a (pirated) copy of SimCity in my 286 but I got an Hercules monitor and the game was all in b/n (with pretty good res though)… btw playing it in the TV at full color was like a dream to me.
Finally my dad bought me a VGA monitor and I completely forgot about the NES version of SimCity though XD
This is fun to see. I’m a SimCity fan (I was playing the original yesterday, thanks to DOSbox) and, while simple, the game is still fun.
while I enjoyed action titles (and their colours, animations, and music) on the consoles of our neighbours, I think such strategy games where more enjoyed on higher res screens with mouse and such
It’s all a matter of properly adapting the UI to TV & joypad… (for example, nested scrollable menus instead of pointer & buttons) Japanese tactics/strategy/adventure games are doing fine on consoles in their home (in fact, Japan might be the only place left where adventure games are still popular; though they are somewhat different from what we in the ~west know as adventure games)
Indeed, more thought needs to be put into the interface when dealing with games that traditionally use a keyboard and mouse setup, but that doesn’t mean it can’t (or shouldn’t) be done. Nintendo in particular tend to be very good at making sure the user interface in the games they make and licence are top notch.
The SNES version of Sim City is one of the finest versions there is, and it’s perfectly playable on a standard SNES controller.
NES RULES ¤ ##¤%&#¤&&%#&%#&%¤