Obscuritory

From my vague recollections of the original article, it was actually a sub-division of Maxis that wrote the B2B simulations like SimRefinery. They separated from Maxis and became Thinking Tools, and eventually went public, bringing on a new CEO that took the company into insolvency but not without making all the employees hate the company:

'At the end of 1998, Phillip Whalen gathered the staff together for a final meeting.

'Well, I wanted to bring you all together,” Wibbens remembered him announcing. “The good news is that you’ll be able to spend more time with your families this holiday.”44

'“They couldn’t even pay severance,” Skidmore said, frustrated. Whalen told the staff to take home their office equipment instead. “That’s your severance.”9 It was the last insult, the ignoble end to the company at the hands of growth capitalism.

'The employees of Thinking Tools did take some their work home, and they burned it. After they were let go, they got together for a bonfire, taking some of their project files, their pink slips, whatever papers they had around, and letting the past burn away.'

https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/

Edit: Why the downvote? I'm basically quoting the original article.

For those who wondered like me who this software was built for, the answer is in the full article:

> The operators at the refinery sometimes had trouble getting a big picture for what was happening at the plant beyond their particular area of focus. “The whole goal if this was to teach operators that they are part of a bigger system,” Skidmore said. “Their concern at the time was that operators tended to be very focused on their one plant, and their one thing they do, and so [they] weren’t keeping in mind that what they do affected other parts of the plant. So they wanted a training tool that allowed operators to manipulate inputs and outputs of the various pieces of the refinery process to see how they impact.”

> The non-technical staff at the Richmond refinery needed to know how it worked too. The people in human resources and accounting weren’t chemical engineers, but it would help their work to see how the different areas of the plant were networked together, how one department affected another department.

https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/

Sun City is absolutely not an appropriate tool for modeling societal policy.

One of the original authors, Will Wright, gave an interview many years ago expressing his horror when he found out that city planners were doing precisely what you suggest.

Quote:

“I think if we tried to make it realistic, we would be doing something that we wouldn’t want to do,” Wright said in an interview in 1999.

But that didn’t stop companies from believing Maxis could design realistic simulations.

Will Wright didn’t believe that was even possible.

“Many people come to us and say, ‘You should do the professional version,'” he continued.

“That really scares me because I know how pathetic the simulations are, really, compared to reality.

The last thing I want people to come away with is that we’re on the verge of being able to simulate the way that a city really develops, because we’re not.”

https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/

I will ask him! It would be great to have the original Mac versions. There are some other weird versions like 3DO and Sega Saturn, but I'm afraid they may be lost in the sands to time. I'm collaborating with some game archivists (like Phil Salvador, who wrote the article about SimRefinery that led to its recovery, and his Video Game History Foundation), and Olde Sküül game developers Rebecca Heineman, who can help preserve the original sources, and even recover the original tools and SDKs and get them to build, so people can study and build and renovate the original sources.

https://gamehistory.org/source/

https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/

https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-recovered/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Heineman

Not really a game, but:

> After the success of SimCity, Maxis received numerous requests from various companies to develop simulations for their industries. After rejecting many requests from other companies, the team eventually agreed to make a prototype of SimRefinery for Chevron:

[SimRefinery was] a simulation of their refinery operation, for orienting people in the company as to how a refinery works. It wasn't so much for the engineers as it was for the accountants and managers who walked through this refinery every day and didn't know what these pipes were carrying. — Will Wright

https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimRefinery

It still sees active development, they keep adding new engines regularly. One of the engine I'm excited about is Macromedia Director [1] which they added initial support for in 2.5.0. That's a big endeavour though so will take time until they add everything needed for full compatibilities with a lot of games.

They've also just added support for some of the Dynamix games like Willy Beamish and Heart of China[2] which I absolutely loved as a kid (despite their rather rough edges)

[1] https://obscuritory.com/essay/macromedia-director-in-scummvm/ [2] https://www.filfre.net/2018/05/the-dynamic-interactive-narratives-of-dynamix/