Timeless Time- Depictions of History in Strategy Video Games
The search for better depictions of the sweep of history and why it's important
When I was a child, for a while I had a computer in my bedroom. It was a battered old machine, running (as I recall) Windows 95, retrieved I should think by my father from one of his radio rallies and brought to working order. I didn’t have much software for it, the basic office suite, and not much else. Then we went to a school fair, probably a Christmas one, at my brother’s primary school, and I acquired the first three video games I ever owned. They came, as games from the nineties did in great chunky boxes, not the slim DVD cases of later games (or the ethereal downloads of the modern era), but boxes about six inches long, four inches wide and one-and-a-half inches deep. In these boxes, amongst the empty space, there would be a CD case, with the game disc inside, usually some sort of advertising bumph for other things that the developers had made, and a great, thick manual, the likes of which the internet and increased disc capacity has long done away with now.
The first of these three was SimCity 2000, the second of Will Wright’s renowned SimCity series, which seems after the last disastrous release in 2013 to have gone the way of the dodo. As the title might suggest, the game was a city builder in which the player took on the role of an all-powerful mayor and tried to build a working and prosperous city with all the requisite civic infrastructure. Convention had it that you would then destroy your efforts with one of the natural (or unnatural) disasters available at your somewhat god-like mayor’s fingertips, though I have to say this was never something I did. I was a builder, not a destroyer.
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