Sounds like common sense, but a lot of people have a hard time grasping this without lapsing into either incredulity, or mysticism (even though it should be common knowledge by now that the only reason we have an oxygenated atmosphere is because life itself made it, and is maintaining it as such. This has nothing to do with the planet being “alive”, but postulates that all Earth systems – its biosphere, atmosphere, hydropsphere, lithosphere, etc – are all interconnected, and affect one another. SimEarth was more of a true simulation, than a game, meant to show the general public the core concepts behind the badly-named “Gaia Theory”. This is exactly the kind of thing that Spore was lacking – any kind of granularity, any kind of feeling of simulation, to give its superficiality some weight and impact. I would love to see a real Sim Earth remake or sequel done with contemporary technology and design philosophy, but maintaining the same in-depth sandbox quality. A game where fiddling with the atmospheric composition of a planet allows you to tweak the evolutionary prospects of a variety of eukaryotes is probably not what the gamer demographic at the time was looking for. None of my buttons would allow me to retreat from the blank blue above the menu. I would imagine the instruction booklet was helpful for this game, though, to some extent.īut about six button presses from turning on the game, I got stuck on a blue screen. Not only that, but game design at the time was not supportive of in-depth tutorials or explicit gameplay explanations of any kind. Most games in this genre and this era end up being pretty impossible to decipher – the constraints of low-resolution screen real estate, low memory, and control mechanism make it very tough to create a strategy or management game that is at all intuitive, or a tutorial that is at all effective. It turns out that on this platform, it is inscrutable. And if nuclear blasts destroy the highest technology level, you get a bonus civilization – machine life! This is a game where sentient molluscs can battle carnivorous plants for supremacy. All of this depends on a finite budget of energy units you have available for fiddling with the planet, as deity or spacefaring progenitor race or whatever. You can even produce, through manipulation of evolution, a sentient civilization which develops technology – and if it becomes dependent on nuclear power, it can annihilate itself in nuclear war if fuel becomes scarce. You can place devices that change the planet’s development, like oxygen generators or monoliths. You could control atmospheric gases with percentages down to three decimal places, the rate of continental drift, reproduction and mutation rates, and so on. But based on Wikipedia and other internet sources, it was certainly interesting. Apparently, it is supposed to look like this.īefore today, I had never actually played Sim Earth.