Sim City began life as an Apple II tool

By Brenna Hillier

Will Wright has said his classic Sim City series evolved from a tool for placing assets into games.

Giving a post-mortem on Commodore 64 and NES classic Raid on Bungeling Bay, as reported by Gamasutra, Wright said city builder Sim City had its genesis in a simple game making tool called Wedit, which allowed the creator to scroll around and site characters created in another application.

“Wedit eventually evolved into Sim City,” he said. “I was scrolling around the world and having a lot of fun with it.”

Raid on Bungeling Bay was Wright’s first game, a helicopter combat title, and sold 800,000 units on NES.

The game was developed on the Apple II but ported to the C64 to help it stand out from the pack.

“I thought I’ll just buy one of these new computers, make a game on that, and level the playing field,” Wright explained.