SimCity Goes Open Source

The Sim series has gained incredible popularity over the years. From Sim City and Sim City 2000 to The Sims and others. The concept of Sim City is simple, build and run a city. While the game has fascinated many, now the open source community has something new to tinker with – the original Sim City’s (named Micropolis due to trademark issues) source code has been released out in the wild

The news came from a blog entry by Bil Simser who says that he had been “bugging” the creator since November about the project. The news has since traveled around.

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing commented, “This was precipitated by the inclusion of SimCity on the One Laptop Per Child XO machines, but no reason the kids should have all the fun. Can’t wait to see the SimCity hacks that emerge now”

“There’s been changes to the original system like a new splash screen, some UI feedback from QA, etc. The plane crash disaster has been removed as a result of 9/11.” Explained Bil, “What is initially released under GPL is the Linux version based on TCL/Tk, adapted for the OLPC (but not yet natively ported to the Sugar user interface and Python), which will also run on any Linux/X11 platform.”

Bil further explained, “It was originally written in C and of course is old (created before 1983 which is ancient in Internet time). Don spent a lot of time cleaning the code up (including ANSIfying it, reformatting it, optimizing, and bullet-proofing it) as best he could.”

Don Hopkins, the developer of SimCity/Micropolis commented, among other things, “The original version of SimCity was developed by Maxis on the C64, and ported to various platforms, including the Macintosh. Maxis licensed the Macintosh SimCity source code to DUX software, to port to Unix. [...]Other differently named projects can be forked from the Micropolis source code, as long as they’re not called SimCity.”

Official SimCity website.

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