One of my favorite games on the Commodore 64 was Raid on Bungeling Bay, in which you fly a helicopter around a 360-scrolling island map, knocking out enemy war factories. The map was surprisingly detailed and interactive for an early action game, with supply ships moving around helping to build defenses; you could destroy the six factories in any order, but each time you zapped one, the rest would tech up and get tougher. Very open for the time.

Anyway, the dev found that he enjoyed designing the map and its interactions more than he did actually playing the game, so he decided that his next game would be all about building a map. He called it SimCity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropolis_Corporation

"Dollhouse" also went through a lot of names before settling on its more marketable and obvious-in-retrospect name "The Sims".

After convincing EA to relicense the free original source code of SimCity under GPL3, I renamed the open source version "Micropolis" so as to avoid using the trademark "SimCity" (which would have contractually require getting EA's QA department to test and approve every change, which was not an easy task the first time (they'd never QA'ed a Linux game before, so I had to handhold them through running it under VMWare), a difficult task which I didn't want to repeat).

OLPC/EA SimCity Contract:

https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf

>General Software Requirements: OLPC agrees that the OLPC SimCity will not be approved by EA for distribution under Section 2.2 of this Agreement, until the OLPC SimCity meets the following general software requirements:

>1. EA’s QA team is unable to crash the game in sixteen (16) man-hours of play-time.

>2. EA’s QA team is unable to find images/language that is deemed inappropriate to achieve an “E” rating by the ESRB standard.

>3. No use of any EA Trademarks that would reflect negatively upon the established reputation of EA.

>4. Add copyright/license information to each source file to reflect the proper licensing.

It was based on the original Mac version of SimCity that I first ported to NeWS/HyperLook then to X11/TCL/Tk and made to support multiplayer (which I had to disable for the OLPC version, due to X11's broken security model):

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/SimCity.README

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperLook-SimCity....

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/simcity-announcement...

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-For-X11.gif

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Indigo.gif

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-NCD.gif

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/simcity/SimCity-Sun.gif

Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold. Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27...

>[71] The Unix and then open sourced versions have undergone multiple iterations. The OLPC version is based on the original open sourced version, which is written in C for X11 with TCL/Tk. Hopkins introduced some optimizations and, I believe, some bugs in this version (the tile animation system). Hopkins would go on to rewrite Micropolis in C++, cleaning up and organizing the code. Java and JavaScript translations now exist, too.

>There were a couple of notable stipulations. First, that EA’s quality assurance (QA) test and approve any release titled “SimCity.” For this reason, Hopkins renamed the project “Micropolis,” an earlier working title for SimCity. Second, as a post-9/11 consideration, EA requested that the airplane crash disaster be removed from the game. Regard for publicity, both negative and positive, must have driven these stipulations as well as the decision to move forward with the project.

>SimCity began life as Wright’s private toy, and went on to be continually recast as commercial software (Maxis), serious simulation (Sun), and educational plaything (OLPC). It’s polymorphic quality allowed it to be perceived and used by diverse agents, who turned it towards satisfying their own particular agendas and contexts. This interpretive versatility, which can productively be understood through Sutton-Smith’s notion of play’s ambiguity, is crucial to SimCity’s evocativeness, and ultimately led to its availability as free open source software.

Open Source Micropolis, based on the original SimCity Classic from Maxis, by Will Wright:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis

Micropolis: Constructionist Educational Open Source SimCity:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...