Cities are everywhere. Billions of us live in them, and many of us think we could do a better job than the planners. But for the past 26 years dating back to the original SimCity, we've mostly been proving that idea false.
We've traveled through time and space to build on alien worlds, in ancient civilizations, and in parallel universes—laying down roads, zoning land, playing god, and cheating our way to success in a vain attempt to construct a virtual utopia. And now, here, I'm going to take you on a whirlwind tour through the history of the city-building genre—from its antecedents to the hot new thing.
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It's strange to consider how healthy the market is for city-building games today, given how squalid it was just a few years ago. Besides the flawed SimCity 2013 edition and the exemplary Cities: Skylines, we have the Anno, Settlers, and Tropico series trucking along nicely. And today, the majority of older games discussed in this article are available on digital distribution service GOG.
There's also Banished (2014), a clever (and dark) survival-themed twist on the old Settlers format that requires you to not only build a great town, isolated in the middle of nowhere, but also keep your people alive long enough to make it so. Steampunk city builder Clockwork Empires is on Steam early access and appears set to be another strong addition to the genre, and further afield Dwarf Fortress (in public alpha since 2006) continues to be a brilliant but nigh-impenetrable city builder cum roguelike that is always, endlessly in development and apparently still decades away from the version 1.0 that normally denotes a "finished" game.
On mobile, city builders have adapted easily to free-to-play conventions, with SimCity Buildit going gangbusters, while lesser-known alternatives such as Virtual City and Townsmen are also thriving.
Meanwhile another game in development, Block'hood, which will have you building a city upward from a small base almost like a tree, shows there could be a rich future in city builders that experiment with ideas closer to the fringes of contemporary urban planning.
But similarly to how the originals meshed with reality, the city builders of tomorrow will likely be all about exploring the future of real-world city design. After all, city builders were always—right from the very beginning—about building a utopia, and our best hope of one day achieving a perfect built environment is to practice in simulations first.