Unreleased NES SimCity Gets Preserved, Publicly Released

Huh. Very interesting. I played the SNES version.

Wow, this looks like it was REALLY close to a release. Too bad it never made it to the store shelves, but it's cool to see it finally be preserved and enjoyed.

My main question is: Can you summon Bowser in the NES version?

God, Sim City. I remember eating pizza and playing that every Friday night at my friends house back in the mid 90's. That poor controller was sooooo greasy. Loved that 1 million dollar code!

I really feel for the devs of this one. It's such a shame that games can get so close to completion and never be released. This would have been an NES classic for sure. I would have played it.

@Gravitron Yes. Sort of. Its a generic kaiju here. It's near the end of the video if you want to see.

I can only imagine how cumbersome this must be on the NES. Love that they released it to the public though!

Wow. Games like these really doesn't look good on the NES.

We'll need this preservation more and more with the digital future.

It's fine that they uploaded it to an archive, but they really shouldn't be distributing it. That part is illegal and is just asking for Nintendo to give them a C&D.

Dang, and it's completely playable?

I'm probably one of a select few who has never played SimCity. The closest equivalent that I've ever played to it was the kid-friendly SimTown back in my early elementary school days.

@Gravitron 17:00 in the vid.

Wonder what made them scrap the release?

Glad he did the right thing and dumped the ROM. Preservation is important.

I recognize this series from Brawl and for being one of the few games to be permanently delisted from the Virtual Console pretty early on.

In before- ThAtS iLlEgAl! NoW nInTeNdO hAs To SuE tO kEeP tHeIr CoPyRiGhT!

@shaneoh You can't say that on Nintendo Life. ;p

This is legal right? I mean if I downloaded the ROM.

@NIN10DOXD
And yet I keep saying it

@AlienX Yeah! I remember the time when it was delisted. Coincidentially, Sim City was the first Virtual Console release I ever bought.

This unreleased NES game is fascinating. Watching the gameplay, it definitely looks related to the eventual SNES game. Thanks for the preservation!

I always get confused here. I remember the SimCity from the NES characters cropping up as trophies in Smash, but is this the same SimCity as the EA/Will Wright series?

@RadioHedgeFund The trademark includes Maxis, so yes, apparently. Although it should be noted that Maxis was independent from EA at the time of this game being made.

@Kirby-in-Kirkby The NES was in decline and 16-bit was all the rage. This was axed pretty much for the same reason Star Fox 2 was canned just before production moved to Star Fox 64.

Today I learned there is a 100% complete version of Wing Commander II for the Super Nintendo. But since it finished development late 1994, the market had already moved on and it was never published. Who knows how many more games were lost to this generational jumps...

This is cool, but I liked the snes version.

I would have loved this as a kid. I eventually bought a complete copy of the SNES game for $1.99 from Disc Replay back in 2010 and I really didn't care for the game. I mean, I enjoyed playing it on a friend's PC, but by the time I bought Sim City, I found The Sims far more enjoyable.

@Shiryu You're no doubt right but it was still a great shame.

Imagine if Maxis had been a developer for Nintendo instead of those see-you-in-Tennessees at EA.

I was such a diehard fan of The Sims, but I noticed the franchise going down the toilet midway through The Sims 2's lifespan (as more and more anti-consumer practices were being employed, as if 18 add-on packs weren't enough of a revenue stream). Now, with The Sims 4 expansions not even being offered on disc anymore (?!) which is utterly inexcusable considering how small they are, The Sims is now well and truly dead to me.

Thank God for the lack of (impenetrable) DRM of the original Sims 1 and 2 disc releases. At least I can continue to play those some 18 years after release, back when it had some semblance of quality, completeness, and integrity.

I like all this random old stuff getting out there. While the SNES version of this game is obviously the same thing but better, it would still be cool to have an official release of this NES version just as a historical thing. If they dropped this on NSO, I'd probably play it, haha!

@BulbasaurusRex Probably unlikely since it's an unfinished port of a game they mostly don't own the copyright to. (the only own the NES/SNES ports, as well as their unique content like Dr. Wright, but not the original game)

Was just playing SimCity for the SNES hours before seeing this article. Too bad you couldn't see the zoning due to aging.

@KingMike ...but this IS the NES port they developed themselves. As you said, Nintendo owns the product itself and all its source code, so why wouldn't they be able to put in a claim?

@BulbasaurusRex
because the name of Sim City and Maxis are an EA copyright, therefore, Nintendo can not publish the game, the only way would be to change the name and change some things so that this game does not conflict with EA or in another case, that Nintendo ask EA to license to publish the game

This NES version looks like the foundation for the SNES version as they are so similar. Great times that I wanted to relive one generation later on the Nintendo 64.
Unfortunately both Sim City games for the Nintendo 64, Sim City 64 and Sim City 2000 were never released outside of Japan.

@SakuraHaruka Just to clarify your point, Nintendo can of course publish the game again. The NES and SNES conversions were 1st party efforts and Nintendo holds the copyright to both.

They issue is that they'd have to resecure the necessary licenses to the Sim City trademark and copyright, just as they did 25+ years ago and again during the Wii Virtual Console years.

And it only took over a year for Frank to upload this, a game that was donated to him by someone else which he seems to have personally used in order to promote his new website! Barring any potential legal troubles (which seems unlikely, considering the other prototypes he's released on his old website), it would have been far better for him to release this game when it was given to him, last year, rather than parading around the country with it and writing this conceited piece about the whole matter. Outside of the possibility of him delaying this game's release for selfish, self-promoting reasons, the least Frank could've done was to give the anxious public waiting to play this at least a vague reason why it was taking him so long to upload it.

Nevertheless, I'm very glad it's finally released, but I expected much more from this man, as he's done some other great work in the past.

@Gauchorino I think it's because Frank wants to get the game out with a proper retrospective on the game itself. I don't think he wants to be just like "here's a ROM, go." I think he wants to emphasize it as a historical artifact and some appreciation what went into creation of the games and their cancelations, rather than simply uploading a game to the Internet. Even when he was updating Lost Levels, it was clear he wanted to put the story behind the game first (taking time to find appropriate game developers, etc. to speak with), with enabling us to play the game a second.

NintendoLife + illegal ROM sharing = LOVE

@KingMike I'm sure that's true, and there's nothing wrong with that, really. The big issue and the big difference between his Lost Levels write-ups and this one in particular, however, is that this highly-anticipated prototype being found was known about months before he obtained it, and yet he gave no indication about why he was delaying its release (for over a year). It's almost like he has been (nearly) baselessly trying to make this whole thing revolve around promoting his new website, The Video Game History Foundation. Because of these points, I think it would have been far better for him to release it publicly before writing his retrospective, which I suspect, due to lack of information on the prototype, would still have been widely read and enjoyed despite the lack of the "coincidal release" factor that he eventually went with.

@SakuraHaruka It doesn't matter that they can't publish the game right at this moment. They still own the source code for this version of the game, so nobody else has the right to publish it, either.

Besides, this just means that EA is also just as capable of handing out a C&D.

Just this site supporting hackers and pirates as usual. Sigh.

/s

Edit: omg I was joking but people are actually arguing about this lol

Fair play to him, this needs to be done for more of the obscure games out there.

This is not illegal unless he makes money from it.