SimCity 2000 30 Years Later: An LGR Retrospective 

I don’t think I’ve ever heard something so unshocking as the fact that Clint went trick or treating as the box for SimCity 2000

10 yr old me - “im gonna be Darth Vader for Halloween, I’m gonna be so cool!” Clint at 10 yrs old - *dresses as a copy of SimCity 2000* 35 yr old me - “Clint was the coolest 10 yr old, why wasn’t I that cool?”

Your story of your grandparents being the most technologically distanced being the ones to get you a game hits me right in the feels but also warms my heart, I miss my Grandma, this is the first Christmas without her

Building a city in Sim City and then flying around it, responding to calls in SimCopter, was probably peak childhood for me.

I miss the days when getting just a single game for the year was a massive experience. The game was complete and it would offer countless hours of enjoyment.

That story about your childhood was so precious lol. It was like a nerdier, contemporary version of A Christmas Story 😂

30 years later and this still gives me warm and fuzzy feelings. This and Oregon Trail are some of my first video game memories.

it was ridiculous how fun and immersive Sim city was, owned every one of them, and SimCity 2000, and 4 was mind blowing

"I knew everything about computers! I was 10 years old!" Man that quote resonates with me deep. I was the exact same way in my childhood. Too computer literate for my own good.

The "2000" thing is my favourite thing in retrospect. Back when the year 2000 was the future - and being a child at the time, time passed differently and it seemed like the _distant_ future. Thank you for the nostalgia :)

I was obsessed with this game as a kid. I had so many strategy guides that I would just read through them for fun. I became a master of every scenario and could get the full Arco-city in no-time. When SCURK came out, it became my passion. I was designing buildings left and right. I even made statues of cartoon characters. I still play SC4 - There's a thriving online community for it.

that OG simcity aesthetic / isometric view is so magical

I remember trying to install this in my computer, probably late 1995, only for it not to work. So, my mother had to call long-distance call Maxis support in California so they could make some custom DOS script so it could run on my computer. What a memory!

One of my most played childhood games. That "Zzzt" sound effect is so ingrained in my memory I still hear it when I play modern city builders.

SimCity 2000 and Civilization II were two of my favorite games for my PSOne back in the day. As a kid (and a non-native English speaker), a lot of its more complex details escaped me, but the whole spectacle of building your own city/civilization and watching it grow was mesmerizing. The soundtrack of SC2K is something I treasure to this day as one of the soundtracks from that era that stuck with me. Back then, I didn't have unrestricted access to a PC, so those PS1 ports were my jam!

I got a PS2 for Christmas when I was 9 or so, and my parents got three games with it: Nascar Thunder 2003, a Scooby Doo game, and PS1 SimCity 2000. I had no idea what I was doing, but I loved those games.

Back in high school, i was a pizza delivery driver in Walnut Creek California. I guess Maxis had an office building there and fairly regularly they would have us deliver like 20 large pizzas. The offices were nice stylish similar to their brand graphic design style. They always tipped extremely generously.

16:57 Fun fact for those who don’t know, the SimCity 2000 UFO reappears in Spore as a character you meet when you manage to reach the galactic core. It introduces itself as Steve and gives you the staff of life, which can instantly terraform any planet.

Your Christmas story about wanting Sim2K warms my heart and is one of the most pure things I've heard on RU-vid in recent memory, including your box art costume. I too, wanted Sim2K and couldn't get it, it was through the Scholastic Book Fair and my parents never gave me any money. Now, 20-30 years later, it's abandonware and I've got a machine around 1.4 million times faster than what I had back then. Keep making videos dude, you make us smile.

I still recall playing a scenario involving massive fires in NYC that I solved by using the "lower terrain" tool to just drop every fire I saw into the ocean. By the time I was done, about 3/4 of the map was water, but all the fires were gone!

Clint, you really captured that feeling as a kid of obsessing over a new game and the excitement of finally getting your hands on it. Its just not the same as an adult anymore when I can just log onto Steam and have any game I want with the click of a button. Aaaaah nostalgia.

I knew Clint was obsessed with SimCity but going trick or treating as a SimCity 2000 box is a whole new level of obsession (and I love it!!!!! >

I saw Will Wright at the grocery store a couple months back. It was funny because he seemed so familiar and it took until I left to realize who it was. Apparently he still lives in town. My sister even had the chance to interview him back in high school. Kind of wonder if he'd enjoy someone telling him thanks for all the memories his games gave him as a kid, or if he's at an age where he just wants to be left alone.

I randomly got this video recommended. The sheer passion you exhibit for SimCity 2K is so wholesome I had to listen to the entire thing. Good job

There isn't a RU-vid channel I can relate more than LGR! Listening to Clint talk about his childhood brings so many memories of my own growing up here in Mexico City, fills me with nostalgia. This channel is my happy place.

Really cool episode! It’s like an LGR origin story.

This has unlocked a deep memory for me. In the early 2000s, I seem to recall getting an chocolate egg for easter that came with a CD rom copy of SimCity 2000 (or possible the OG SimCity, hard to remember all these years later). Does anyone remember this? This was in the UK and I think they did other CD rom game + easter egg combos.

The hours my brothers and I spent playing both SimCity 2000 and 3000. They were staples of my childhood.

Reading through guidebooks before getting the game was such a 90s thing. I knew how to play through the entire Joan of Arc campaign from AOE 2 and Pokemon Red long before I finally got them.

Holy crap I was just as obsessed with Spore as a kid! I lived, breathed and dreamed of spore 24/7, and growing up into my teens the spore community became my largest social circle. Many a school day was skipped because I was to stubbornly focused on perfecting every detail on my creatures. There's just something special in Maxis' games that cultivated child-like wonder (and maybe a dash of autism) unlike anyone else. The day Maxis Emeryville closed was such a devastating event to 14yr old me :,)

I also was a kid in the 90s. I got SimCity for Christmas 1995. I played that game, along with Sim tower damn near all the time. Moreover, we played it in the computer lab at junior high.

I forgot how depressing the music was for the most part in this beloved game of my childhood. Then SC3k completely blew everyone away with Thomas Newman-style tracks, jazz, and light uplifting electronica to accompany your building. SC4's EpiCenter, deserves a special mention as what I imagine to be the culmination of the mini-genre.

It is really hard to express in words how much of an insanely massive update 2000 felt like compared to the original.

This video is exactly why I've loved this channel for so long. You make so many of us feel like we weren't alone in our incredible nerdy-ness and passion for this stuff. Your list of "hints" you left in order to get this for a holiday gift is SO familiar to many of us. I used to draw the logo for certain games and leave them on my dads desk or the fridge or even on the bathroom door LOL. I would draw the logo and a list of where the game was available. At one point there were several drawings around my house that had the Kings Quest V logo followed by the words "available now at Babbages, Software, Etc and probably Meijer" haha.

I can still remember one of my earliest, if not 'the' earliest, memories of using a PC was playing the original Sim City and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego on my primary school's original Apple Macintosh back in the day. I was obsessed!

Clint, you make a legacy of your own with things like these. Great package and very thorough just as the subject deserves. Hopefully RU-vid is here another 30 years and we can watch it again. 🙂

It's been 30 YEARS?! Way to make me feel old. I have so many stories of the thousands of hours I put into sc2000. I used to have SCURK as well, and it was the coolest thing to be able to design your own buildings and we had fan pages with custom made buildings back then. People made the WTC, Chrysler building, you name it. Pure magic.

My father died 5 years ago today. I am on RU-vid trying not to be sad, and this video was timed with absolute perfection. It is a good memory. He was obsessed with this game. He used the editor and the color-changing spots to animate a man walking his dog, a carousel and a ferris wheel. If I recall, he replaced the power plants with those items. I wish I still had that old hard drive so that I could go back and look at his Sim City artwork. It was phenomenal.

Fantastic, this kind of video is my favourite on your channel and an absolute joy. The nostalgia is unreal! Some of your finest work sir.

Really cool video man. Your love story for Sim City is truly heartwarming. I’m subbing. Merry Christmas!

Clint's story about being mentally scarred on Christmas day has inspired me. Can't wait to do that to my own kids.

It's absolutely amazing what they could fit on two floppy disks back then! Entire worlds. Why does my phone's "torch" app take 78MB of space?! - I love the enthusiasm here for the game! I was exactly the same with Elite II: Frontier, when it came out in 1993. The box was stuffed with dreams, even if the hardware struggled a bit! 😀

If SC2K wasn't the first game I played, it was the first game I ever really got into. You nailed everything on your video. Dealing with DOS, the detailed books at book stores, and the spin offs it produced. I think you're the first person I've seen to even mention SimCopter, which I played the shit out of that one too. Great video, quite a throwback.

SOOOO many good memories of this game. And the joys of 90s tech!! Great video

SimCity 2000 and Roller Coaster Tycoon were two of my most played games in the 90s. Soooo much nostalgia!

I highly enjoyed using money cheats right at the beginning and laying out an entire city grid while paused, then unpausing and watching it fill up organically. The challenge was planning for all the utilities and services ahead of time, and then finding out how efficient the layout worked.

OMG! This whole video is precious! My fave retrospective of yours so far! :D

Great video, sparked some memories from way back when, thanks!

Sim Copter is still one of my absolutely favorite games of that era, and the game really deserved a proper remake. And the Sim City 2000 intro music still pops out in my head almost daily.

I loved SimCity 2000 as a kid despite never knowing what I was doing. I remember being weirdly obsessed the newspapers the game generated and would always read every new one in full. I still have fond memories of coming home from school and rushing to the computer to play it and Roller Coaster Tycoon.

When I saw your drawing at 2:30, I was terribly surprised and thought, "Where did this guy get my children's drawings?" Because when I was 7-9 years old, my parents took me to the countryside for the summer to visit my grandparents. They did not have a computer, so I was terribly homesick for my favorite games. I drew their interfaces on paper, just like you, although I am from a completely different cultural background and lived thousands of miles away. Then I got a big notebook for drawing and let my imagination run wild. I came up with new buildings for SimCity and new mechanics. At that time, neither the SC3000 nor the SC4 had been released, but I accidentally came up with some of the ideas that appeared in those games later. My main treasure is a miraculously preserved floppy disk from 1999 on which my SimCity 2000 city was recorded. I took it to school to show my friends what I had created. Now, every year or so, I return to this savegame and start developing my city in a new way, starting from the same point, trying out different options. Thank you so much for this video and for the rush of nostalgia that I experienced. SimCity 2000 is still my favourite part of the series. After all, Will Wright created a masterpiece that will be remembered forever, and you created a worthy tribute to it.

New here and holy crap am I ready for a binge watch! I saw you already covered Empire Earth, G-Nome (which I was amazed someone remembered that game and I hope they remake/remaster - cause I was obsessed with this game), and Sim City 2000 (all games i fondly remember - and laughed when you said you too had/have a Packard Bell PC and recall the struggle)! I hope to stumble across a Midtown Madness 2 (I remember downloading cars people made and feeling so accomplished if the download worked and the car performed and was as cool as it looked), Streets of Sim City, Deadlock (AMAZING intergalactic conquest game that I think was forgotten ), Lord of the Realm 2, some Command and Conquer , Deadly Dozen (WW2 shooter game with historically relevant places), and this rare Chex Quest cereal space fantasy game I remember getting from a Chex cereal box (no joke - and when we got “prizes” from cereal boxes).

I refuse to believe that I was 20 when this game came out. Nope. I can't be that dang old. On a related note, listening to the music unlocks some very old emotions of fun times playing that game.

This game shaped my childhood, it will forever be #1 on my list. The memories clicking away at SC2K are still so vivid. Adding SimCopter and Streets a few years later... pure magic. That being said, 30 years later I just learned about Maxis Man! What?!

Hearing that theme song makes my heart jump. What a beautiful video this is! Kudos!!!

Fantastic video! I doubt you remember, but I reached out to you for help in getting an old PC up and running. This game was one of the major motivations behind the project! And yes, we got it working and it's been an absolute blast. Little did I know you were in the midst of your move when I first reached out to you but you were thoughtful and gave a very helpful response. I hope my inquiry wasn't of great inconvenience to you. I never gave you an update for fear of being too intrusive with my correspondence. But thank you again for that help and for this great video! Love your stuff! (For the record, I was born in the late 90s so much of your stuff is more of a history lesson to me than it is a trip down memory lane, but SimCity 2000 Special Edition was a game I grew up on.)

This man has a way with words. His storytelling never disappoints!

Sim City 2000 and Transport Tycoon were two games that basically defined my childhood.

when i first read it a couple years ago on a binge of old maxis manuals, i found it so cute that the simcity 2000 manual's bibliography has that section on related reading for kids, with stuff like the lorax, books on local governments and architecture, and a guide on how to read maps all listed. i've always thought it was a very sweet way to include the younger fans who might've wanted to learn more about cities and governments because of the game :)

Like you, I too got my first taste of sc2k at a friends house. I was absolutely obsessed with it in the mid-90s going so far as to draw cities in my school notebooks (while in class, of course), and obsess over it with friends. For what seemed like forever it was all i wanted to play and talk about. To this day, the box art, music, and sounds strikes an old childhood cord deep within my mind and it always takes me back.

These LGR retrospectives are a thing of beauty

Oh the joys of having proper Instruction manuals.... I can completely relate to how much you pored over the manual here, for me it was Tiberian Sun - Couldn't tell you how many times I read that, fantacising about the different units and lore and just enjoying reading all the options available.... Kids these days just don't know what they're missing!!!

glad I can share this 30th year aniversary with you. really great video. brings back many memories. π .

oh wow, you brought back so many wonderful memories. Great video!

I LOVE SimCity2000. When I grew up we only had an older PC and I only could play “older” games. It was around 2000-2001. When I finished my high school and didn’t knew what I wanted to do in my life, my then-girlfriend asked me what I adored the most in my childhood. It was SimCity2000. So I studied Architecture and Urban Planing. Playing this game now is always making me giggle about how a 4mb ram game affected my life and the choice to be an architect! Btw. I love your videos ❤

This was my first SimCity game! Will never forget the music and being terrified as a kid of that UFO that made a very human-sounding “zzzt!” when it blew stuff up

SC 2000 changed my perspective about games. At first I was so RPG, fighting or platform games, then when I first played SC 2000 in Snes I started to search about the entire franchise and I found amazing titles in other platforms! Still today I play city simulators and I always remember about Sim City 2000 legacy. Thank you!

I owe a great deal of my childhood gaming experiences to Maxis. My first computer wasn't until Windows 98, so SC2k worked pretty much out of the box without any video card issues. I think that and Sim Ant were my first two Maxis titles I got as a kid, and from there, I got quite a few more. It blew my mind that I could build a city in Sim City 2000, and then fly it in Sim Copter and cause carange in it in Streets of Sim City. It's a little impressive many of them still run on modern versions of Windows with minimal modification as well. Still have The Sims and a couple others installed and running on my modern machine installed from CD. I remember later on importing Sims families into Sim City 4 with the rush hour expansion and driving them around was also lots of fun. It was probably the last great Maxis game crossover, which pretty much started with Sim City 2000. Great recap! Brought back many memories!

As much as I loved Classic and spent hours with it, 2000 was such a total improvement over it in every way, that playing Classic was just never the same again.

The 10 year old birthday pic is beyond adorable, we are all LGR.

I had a lot of fun with SC2k as a kid, but my favourite was 3000. I just loved the jazz soundtrack and the cartoony aesthetic of the advisors. It felt like it had a stronger identity.

Ahh, SimCity 2000! This game, along with Civ2, were my go-to obsessions. I would spend hours in the editors designing my own buildings and (in Civ2) units to create my own fantasy worlds. I made wild-west, sci-fi space and underwater themed scenarios. I actually think I spent more time in the editors than I did actually playing the games! I learned a lot about computers, editing software and especially pixel art from those two top-tier amazing games. Excellent video LGR!

This was the game that made me loved city builders from when I was kid to today.

Hearing your childhood stories of obsession with Sim City is very relatable. Thanks for sharing, Clint! My friend and I created our own paper board game version of Sim City at our after school care place. My friends last name was Sime so we called it Sime City lol. It basically had no rules and was just a chance for us to draw our favourite buildings and stick them to a map while we waited to get to go home and play the real thing.

I got this game on my psOne. The game or disk was broken or something, because it didn't matter what I did, no buildings would construct. Once I left the game running through the night and the only thing I got was a random crane on a residential zone. I was so exited I woke up my family to show them. Never saw anything like that again until simcity 3000 and I loved every second

Being a literal boxed copy of SimCity 2000 for Halloween is excellent in its own right, but genuinely doing it as a "subtle hint" is the cherry on top. 😂👌

Seeing how his love for city builders we all know manifested as a kid is so endearing. Clint is a treasure!

I cannot give a succinct reason for why this video is one of my favourites of yours, and I do not think there is a metric I can quantify this for you to benefit from, so this is not constructive criticism. Nonetheless, I watched this about 10 times since it's release, and I think it's two reasons: 1) the animations in simcity 2k along with it's super simple soundtrack (yet I imagine take a lot of creativity and experience to make a good soundtrack like this) makes me happy learning about it 2) You sound genuinely happy making this video. You have a algorithmic way of speaking like everyone does over many videos, so it's easy to see in the audio takes that you were constantly reminded you actually enjoy to the core, talking about and playing this game. Cities Skylines 2 is out, but I'm going to try simcity 2k because damn, you've inspired. What a great homage.

crazy how good this game still looks; that's some gorgeous pixel art! something about that style of graphics really resonates with my imagination, more so than more modern 3D city builders obsessively looking at magazines and documentation about a game you really wanted but couldn't get hits too close to home haha...that was my life for much of the 90s and early 2000s too 😅

Holy crap, hearing Clint's SC2000 story unlocked a core memory in my brain. I remember being absolutely OBSESSED with the demo versions of MDK and Little Big Adventure 2 I had on one shareware CD as a little kid. Replayed these countless times, and while I was able to easily track down a copy of MDK, I spent literal years searching for LBA2. These two are still one of my childhood favourites and games I cherish to this day.

I forgot Jerry Martin did this soundtrack. The Sims 1 is one of my favourite soundtracks of all time - the guy is truly a legend, and a phenomenal musician.

My late grandmother got me the Special Edition as a Christmas gift in 1998. I was hooked, still have it today.

That recounting of your Christmas of '96 definitely brought a nostalgic smile to my face

I absolutely love 90s Maxis. To this day I still can't listen to the intro for the original Sim City without getting emotional

Simcity 2000 was the first PC game I was obsessed with. I remember not understanding how zones worked and was content just building roads and ploppable buildings and calling the result my city. It wasn't until I was bought a copy to play at home (SimCity 2000 Special Edition) that I built a city proper. I was hooked from that point on. A few years later, I was bought Simcity 3000 and couldn't get it to work. I too spent my childhood reading that manual cover to cover. Same with Simcity 4. Getting those games to run was a core memory I forgot until watching this video. Thanks for the fond memories. :D

I fricking love your nostalgia trip. Thank you for going to all the trouble to tell us your history with the game :)

This hits right in the feels. Few years before release my aunt married a man who owned a computer store that sold Mac. We ended up with an LC 575 and I played this game to DEATH!

The story about your love for the game is so fantastic. With all the strategy guides you have digested, I would love to see you do a "let's play SimCity 2000", even though I know that's not really your thing here on RU-vid. But I would love a video like that as a christmas gift ;)

What a wonderful childhood story. It reminds me of me, when I was about the same age and wanted to play games so badly but did not own a PC. I used to buy PC games magazines and oogle at the games I could not play.

I have watched you since your sims 3 reviews and you have always been one of my fav RU-vidrs

4:27 actually gave me tears in my eyes, hehe.. What a great present and suprise when you thought all hope was lost.. I`m born in 1979 and SimCity classic (and 2000) was a huge part of my childhood and time consume. Thank you for this great video! I gotta go, have to play SimCity 😉

It's always a great day for some SimCity 2000 retrospective from LGR!

Finally, a SimCity 2000 Retrospective Video for over 30 years when this game came out. Amazing job Clint!

This was THE GAME for me as a child! All the things you mentioned I did as well; like making drawings or planning maps of your cities in notebooks, hogging the neighbor friend's PC because of not having a compatible PC or the game, and just the full raw and amazing experience I too had with the game for so much time as a child! I loved this video! Thank you!

The 'wait until the very last gift to give the kid what they've had their heart set on' Christmas move happens ONCE. Parents learn their lesson and every subsequent year they shove the good stuff right up front so the kid is happy the rest of the day.

My face is numb from smiling the whole time :) What a nice wholesome blast from the past! Times were a lot easier back then :)

Man, I loved this game so much back in the day. My family played it an awful lot. I'm sure my brothers and I got into many fights over whose turn it was. Our 30-year-old neighbor, who seemed so old then, used to come over and play it, and we'd eventually have to gently tell him to leave when It was time for all of us to go to bed (we were middle school/high school age). Great video!

Lovely flashback. Sim City 2000 was the first serious game we had, I remember borrowing it from my school teacher when I was about 10 years old, to copy the floppy disks at home.

I love that you highlighted the power line building sound. It was vivid in my mind when I started this LGR episode. So many hours of gaming well into the morning hours. Just topped by Civilization.

I listen to the Sim City 2000 soundtrack often while working at my computer. I'm 39 years old, but I used to play this a lot when I was in middle school and high school.