I’ve always held a fascination with city planning and architecture. My mom still has the drawings of imaginary cities I would make on the back of paper placemats in restaurants and for a brief moment when I was a kid, I wanted to become an architect. I ultimately chose a more chaotic field of study but part of me still loves the order and planning of building a city. I get my city planning jollies by reading the work of Darran Anderson and playing games like Cities: Skyline and Project Highrise.
But what happens when an actual city planner plays the classic SimCity 2000? This past week, Dave Amos, a former city planner and current City Planning Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley uploaded a run of him starting a city from scratch. Using his experience and education, he designed a city that adhered to real-world conventions while also gaming the system to take advantage of the limitation of the 25-year-old game. For example, I never knew that if you placed your power plants at the edge of your map, most of the pollution went out of your city grid and therefore didn’t count against you.
Source: Destructoid Watch a city planner employ eminent domain in SimCity 2000