SimCity 3000 25 Years Later: An LGR Retrospective 

Rivaled only by the fact clint dressed as SC2K on Halloween as a kid

I imagine his parents exasperated downstairs after he has gone to bed, cutting out pictures of women and trying to sneak them onto his wall while he is sleeping.

It does 100% qualify him as the person to make these retrospectives though.

I remember printing a similar promo image from The Sims 2. It look literal ages and I think my mom had me stop the thing before it finished because of the absurd amount of color ink I was 'wasting'.

Who hasn’t released to Mr Wright?

That is very good honestly, video games can be a good medium for teaching

Legend

thats how i got into it too but it was shop class which had a computer lab too. i got hooked on this game lol

W dad W teacher

From Oregon? Or did other states play Oregon trail also

They were his "Pictures of Lily", I'm sure. 😉

Before the late stage capitalism hit

The future isn’t what it used to be.

Cold War was over. Dot Com was booming. Everything seemed fantastic. Then... 9/11. Nothing was ever the same after that.

@@WhatAHorribleNight amen to that sorry any Millennials, you lucked-out

No we weren't.

Too bad Jews derailed our entire civilization

Little did we know...

Absotely golden soundtrack for playing other simulation games.

I feel like getting it on vinyl :D

it's also on spotify, top quality music.

This game's OST still plays occasionally in my head.

I have a Spotify playlist that I made called "Music that Cities are Built From" that has these soundtracks and much more to prevent repetition.

Thanks!

@@LGR Are you going to review (in my opinion) the best of the series simcity 4? i've been waiting patiently....

​@@LGR I agree that these videos are some of the best content. Are you a big fan of the CC Red Alert series? Would love to see some in-depth history on these classic. Thanks for all your work ❤

@@LGR also here for the cozy vibes, i watch your content to relax and go through memory lane! keep it up

100% agree

2000 was the first one I played but it was with 3000 I really enjoyed the game and the music is great. I have a lot more nostalgia for 3000. 1999 was all about Sim City 3000 and C&C Tiberian Sun for me. Peak 2D games. No 3D card needed to play.

The music is great but the game overall feels like an awkward stepping stone between 2000 and 4. It doesn't add enough to justify itself over 2000 the way 4 does, and actively takes away many of the more fun features like the arcologies, and hydroelectric.

​@@wertywerrtyson5529 we are the same person lol

​​@@parrot998But at the same time, having simcity 3000 just be a more refined simcity 2000 was a pretty good choice when you considered the development history. And honestly I perfer simcity 3000 over simcity 2000 when it comes to it's gameplay refinement, and just having it look way better than 2000. It may have removed arcologies but they only existed to get around sim city 2000s extremely limited population numbers, but now you can get over a million people living in a single city without the need of a special building to artificially increase the population. Also removing hydrodams while forcing you to build the expensive power plants early game, weren't that necessary in my opinion (although I wish they could keep flooding from past games) Basically, if you want a more user friendly while also a more complex version of sim city 2000, SC3000 is your friend.

I feel bad for having played this with the music off back in the day. Speaking of, I've always loved the sound design of this game. Highlights for me include: clicking on the power lines (clunk-whirrr-zzt-zzt), putting down the subway stations and hearing the ambience in their view, clicking on abandoned lots (all too common for me, sadly). Lowlights? How about the library?

I think I put more time overall into 2000 and 4, but 3000 definitely had the tightest balance to complexity ratio of any City Sim on the market. And it did so in keeping a utopian sort of focus on the city population itself instead of the sadly overcomplicated real world problems in dealing with traffic (or in exploiting some mechanics to create infinite power and money loops)

Thanks, I'm glad to hear!

🎵 Hello Darkness My Old Friend...

Came to say the same. Damn

You're old. Get over it. Batman is over it.

Yep, we be old gamers

feels like it was just yesterday I played it.

I still have it. 😁 The same copy Grandma bought me for Christmas in 1999. Shame it won't run on modern machines.

👀👀👀

I have the Ultimate version it is my favourite SIM City on the PC... I loved the SNES version, which was nostalgia as a kid more though!

I can never get tired of the jazz; it introduced me to jazz and will always have a special place in my heart - South Bridge and Night Life are my jam

I'll never be able to unhear that. haha

Wait, Portola Middle??

@@drgribbYES!! Almost 20 years ago at this point!

@@Swanfeatha Wait. Liana??? This is Gribble. Graduated EC 08

@@drgribb ALSO YES! I thought it might be you based on the username but didn’t want to assume!! Small world (though not super surprising to find you on an LGR video all things considered)! Hope you’re doing well!

@Swanfeatha Oh man, what a small world haha! Those special gig opportunities with the Tower of Power folks, or playing the Warfield, or Yoshi's, or what-have-you really made a big impression and were important and formative for me too. Apparently they knocked down the old Guitar Center on San Pablo and replaced it with a luxury apartment building called... The Credence -- I hate it lol. I'm convinced there's another universe where I moved to New Orleans and became a full-time musician though. 😅 So cool to see you on an LGR vid (coincidentally, I now live not too far from where Clint's based). Hope you're doing well too.

Definitely kept it! Such a bigass book!

Game publishers also kind of doubled as book publishers with how packed those old manuals were.

I'm more of console player so that giant brick of a manual got my attention lol

I loved game manuals, ah, a beautiful era long gone.

YES! I was waiting for someone to mention this. I absolutely love and guide and have read it cover to cover too so many times! It is so fascinating and informative. Maxis manuals....I wish they kept making them...they were the best!

I will let you know brb.

maybe if we make it to Mars...

Ah, the year 3000! Where holographic historians narrate tales of pixelated pasts and AI archaeologists dig up ancient floppy disks labeled "SimCity 3000." Imagine the excitement as they uncover relics of our primitive simulations, marveling at our attempts to play god with virtual cities. But who will create the video "SimCity 3000, 1000 years later"? Will it be human historians, cyborg cinephiles, or perhaps a sentient AI with a quirky sense of humor? Picture this: a holographic AI host, decked out in a top hat and monocle, narrating the rise and fall of our simulated civilizations with a blend of scholarly insight and sarcastic wit.

If we democratized the tech industry we can insure this by voting to allocate resources to preserving all media.

The cynical part of me says that a game called SimCity 3000 in the year 3000 will be a simulation of what “cities” used to look like before the great climate disaster/world war/biological destruction, or whatever thing we do to ourselves lol

I used to play SC3KU on a Pentium 100. 😅 It was slow as molasses and crashed sometimes, but I still played the heck out of it.

I still play it... and yep the OST is a gem (but the SC4 ost is a very very close second).

SimCity 4 is a great game with a great soundtrack.

Damn old as me

SWAT 3 goated Commandos 1&2 goated

Same

That's exactly what he said in the video!

@@YesterGearPCii Yeah, I obviously didn't wait to comment. But unlike other people who don't wait for the end of the video before commenting, I was totally right.

I always go back to 2k and 3k. I have never touched SimCity 4.

@@gyppygirl2021 SC4 is almost perfection, great simulation, but too fiddly in some aspects and the segmented regions that allow you to make HUGE cities are not that friendly. BUT... Custom buildings... Mods... Day/night cycle... SC4 has tons more to offer.

2K for me. There was something about the simulation in this one that I didn't like as much for some reason. I remember being quite frustrated with this game.

@@Strideo1 I feel like 3k has more of a learning curve... I only recently figured out how to play it.

@@Strideo1 SC3K (and If I remember correctly SC3KU is worse) can be hard!!! I recall starting using SC3KU coming from SC3 and What... the...?????????

I appreciate it, thanks for watching!

The scrapped 3D version looked like a completely different low-budget game.

Thank you, and yeah this was a thrill to go back to and become immersed in once again :)

I found a sealed copy of Sim City 3000 Korea last year (2023). It is a jewel case with a thin sleeve. The text is localized in hangeul - and there is a prominent EA logo and EA hologram on the front.

@momytik I wish I can get SC3K Korea hard copy disk as well. At least I still have an official Korean copy of SC3K original though.

It was called Sim City 3000 Deutschland here. I only know the full version with Europe and Asian building sets but one of my favorites was the building editor. You could build anything yourself and import it into the game. And that while being 2D and running on lowend PCs.

There’s the Sim City 3000 Revival Project that aims to modernize the game in some ways.

Knowing EA, I’m not expecting them to officially remaster old games, but the things you listed would be awesome to add.

@@Norweeg Is it on GitHub?

I'm curious to know his thoughts on Sim City for SNES

A lot of maxis games ported to SNES were so much better than the PC counterparts. Sim Ant, Sim City, and Sim Earth stand out today and I still play em. SC2k on SNES was a missed mark, though. Terribly slow.

Yea I liked Sim City 4 especially it has those mods like Pizza Hut, the Coca Cola building in America, Pepsi Can Water tower and more iconic buildings

It also had the music, also I liked the look of all the buildings. It's surprisingly playable on the controller for what you'd expect would be bad. It even had an entertaining manual of its own with that green hair caricature of Wright.

Some kids have a rough start in life