The NES SimCity Reemerges
A lost NES SimCity game, which made its first appearance at an electronics show back in 1991, is now available as a ROM. Frank Cifaldi, the founder of the Video Game History Foundation, discussed the game in-depth in a recent blog post and described its beginnings as a collaboration between SimCity designer Will Wright and Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto. Although the pair planned to release the game for both NES and SNES, only the latter system received it in 1991.
Last year, two cartridges of the NES SimCity prototype appeared at a Seattle used game shop, one of which Cifaldi and the Video Game History Foundation got a hold of. The ROM is available for download here, and you can take a look at Cifaldi’s aforementioned blog post for an overview of the differences between the NES and SNES versions of the game.
Merry Christmas everyone, let’s talk about SimCity on the NES. Today we published the results of about a year of research on this unreleased Nintendo work, and uploaded relevant files – including the game – to the Internet Archive. You should take a look! https://t.co/HmvWYy3sXy pic.twitter.com/yhm6OJvqaw
— Frank Cifaldi (@frankcifaldi) December 25, 2018
The NES SimCity contains numerous features that ended up in later versions of the game, including the option of bank loans to help during stressful financial times.