The first Sim spin-off game remains one of the most ambitious. SimEarth put players in charge of an entire planet, enabling them to alter the atmosphere, climate, size of the landmasses and the like, place lifeforms on the surface of the world and watch them evolve and thrive. The meta goal of the game was to evolve your lifeforms to sentience and the development of advanced civilization. Although it was possible to directly effect the evolution of a world by placing 2001- style monoliths to increase the intelligence of animals, or oxygen generators that make it easier for life to survive, SimEarth was more about the macro than the micro, finding out how changing the rate of continental shift and accelerating the rate of mutation could lead to sentient life, rather than directly prodding a creature into smarts. Like SimCity, SimEarth also featured disasters that could randomly upend the game. In keeping with the rest of the game, these disasters had lasting effects on lifeforms - volcanoes increased the amount of dust in the air so lowered the global temperature, plagues could kill off swathes of the population but increase generational mutation.
The concise way in which SimEarth demonstrated how environmental factors could influence evolution made it popular in the education community, with a number of Australian schools using it as a science tool. In much the same manner, SimAnt (1991), SimLife (1992) and SimFarm (1993) were adopted by schools as object lessons in insect colonies, and the effects of environmental factors on the development of life.
SimAnt put players in charge of a black ant colony in a suburban backyard. Players controlled one ant at a time, exploring, leaving pheromone trails to attract other ants, collecting food, digging tunnels and attacking enemy red ants, spiders and antlions. As well as being yet another critically and commercially successful game, SimAnt is also an important landmark in the evolution of Maxis as a studio for one major reason - creating SimAnt inspired Will Wright to develop one of the most successful game series of all time - The Sims.
SimLife and SimFarm covered the same idea in two very different ways. SimLife challenged players to manipulate the genetics of plants and animals to help them thrive in a variety of environments on Earth or on user created worlds; essentially a close study of genetics in action. SimFarm also worked around the concept of manipulating life to get it to thrive in different environments, but unlike SimLife and its host of wacky animals and alien worlds, SimFarm stuck to realism, charging players with maintaining and growing an active farm in a number of different real world locations and climates. SimFarm was pre-emptively targeted at both consumers and teachers - the game was packaged with a teaching guide and student handouts.
In 1993, Maxis also developed SimRefinery, the company's only foray into corporate training tools. Based on SimCity, SimRefinery emulated a Chevron Corporation oil refinery and was used as an orientation tool for new Chevron workers. The game put them in charge of a Chevron refinery and taught them about supply and demand, financial factors in successful pipeline distribution, possible refinery disasters and more. SimRefinery was never made available to the public.
SimCopter (1995) and Streets of SimCity (1997), a helicopter flight sim and car combat game respectively, had little to do with other Sim branded games aside from the fact that players could directly import their cities from SimCity 2000 and move around them in full 3D. In a similar vein, SimGolf (1996) and Sid Meier's SimGolf (2002), the latter a co-creation of Will Wright and Sid Meier for Firaxis games, allowed players to create their dream golf course and then play it.
In only a few years in the mid-90s, Maxis also created or released numerous other Sim titles, including the incredibly difficult US health system simulator, SimHealth (1994), the massively unsuccessful environmentally themed construction and management "software toy" SimIsle: Missions in the Rainforest (1995) and SimTown (1995), SimPark (1996) and SimTunes (1996), three educational Sim titles aimed at young children.
http://www.simcity.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_(2013_video_game)
