A playthrough of Nintendo's 1991 simulation game for the Super NES, SimCity.

This video shows a full playthrough of both the main game mode and of the scenario stages. There's a lot shown, so here are time stamps for the game's major events:

1:36 Main mode begins (Map 137)
7:23 Reaches "Town" (Pop. 2000)
15:40 Reaches "City" (Pop. 10,000)
1:01:32 Reaches "Capital" (Pop. 50,000)
1:27:59 Reaches "Metropolis" (Pop. 100,000)
4:13:11 Reaches "Megalopolis" (Pop. 500,000)
5:20:26 Reaches ending cutscene (Pop. 600,000)
5:25:15 Unleashing all disasters on a megalopolis

5:34:41 Scenario mode begins,
San Francisco. Earthquake, 1906
5:52:51 Bern. Traffic, 1965
6:09:11 Tokyo. Monster Attack, 1961
6:27:55 Detroit. Crime, 1972
6:49:51 Boston. Nuclear Meltdown, 2010
7:03:58 Rio de Janeiro. Coastal Flooding, 2047
7:36:02 Las Vegas. UFO, 2096

8:09:35 Scenario mode ending

8:09:44 Free City. USA, 1991
-Only shows map with Mario image. Not played.

It took some real magic to get this down to a somewhat acceptable length without losing anything. The video, in its virgin form, was 59 hours and 22 minutes long. That wouldn't fly on YouTube (and who would watch that?!), so while nothing was cut, there are chunks of the video that have been sped up. The first few stages of the main game I let play at regular speed. When I'm not doing much except for collecting taxes and letting things develop, the video is sped up 4x. Later in the game, when it starts becoming more drawn out (the metropolis stage through the end), I keep the video at normal speed when I'm doing something notable or there's an announcement/event going on. Otherwise, the video is sped up to around 25x to move things along. You can tell these spots because there are no sound effects: the audio sounded awful at that speed so I ripped it out and replaced it with recordings of the plain background music.

So, SimCity. Oh man, this is one of my favorites. I'm shocked that I don't see it at least occasionally show up on people's "Top 10" lists. I don't think I've ever heard anyone speak badly of SimCity's SNES adaptation - most people seem to have quite high praise for it, and I'm certainly one of them.

I got this for Christmas of 1991 with my Super NES, along with Mario (obviously) and F-Zero. All three games were favorites in our house and were played regularly for years, but SimCity was the one that got the most mileage. My 9 year old self often stayed up well past my bedtime playing it, a blanket against the bottom of the door so my parents wouldn't see the light from the TV and yell at me! My 5 year old sister loved to turn it on just to build patterns with the buildings, and it even managed to hook my mom! It was the first video game she ever played, and I remember being absolutely shocked the first time I came home from school and saw her sitting at the end of my bed with a controller in her hand and the manual open next to her. She had never shown any interest whatsoever in video games before, and technology *really* wasn't her thing, but something about this game actually motivated her to sit down, read up on it, and then sit there for hours experimenting until she figured it out. Bravo, Nintendo.

I think that that sort of reaction is fairly common for SimCity, though. With SNES SimCity, Nintendo EAD made it as accessible and as user-friendly as possible so that anyone could sit down and get into it - hmm, that sounds an awful lot like the philosophy that still drives their business. The PC version is a classic, but it's a bit a bit less "everyday person" friendly than the SNES game is. This one is loaded with helpful tutorials, Mario and Will Wright cameos, and an endless string of incentive items to keep you playing just a little while longer. The SNES version also really benefited from its attractive graphics and excellent soundtrack. I especially love the Mario ditty that plays when you put down your statue for reaching 500,000, and the monster attack starring a growling Bowser stomping over the city.

Before this playthrough, I'd only ever reached the megalopolis level once before. For years I insisted on doing donut structures so that I could maximize the effects of gifts without realizing how much it reduced the usable real estate. Optimizing my new row strategy, the second time I made a serious attempt at it (the game in this video), I managed to get the final scene! I never even knew there was one - I was just pushing to see if 600k was possible. As far I know, that little cinema is as close to an ending as the game ever gets.

This was a really nostalgic rush for me. I thoroughly enjoyed my return to this unrecognized masterpiece of console software design.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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