SimEarth: The Living Planet

Genre:

Strategy

Year:

1990

Developer:

Maxis Software

Publisher:

Ocean Software

Perspective:

Top-down

Theme:

Educational, Nature

Releases:

DOS (1990), Macintosh (1990), Windows 3.x (1990), SNES (1991), Amiga (1992)

Also known as:

SimEarth: Der lebende Planet, Sim Earth, シムアース, 模擬地球

The year 1990 was a very productive year for the game company Maxis. One of games released in 1990 was a great simulator SimEarth: The Living Planet - a life simulation game. The game follow the well known pattern of Sim games from those times, but this time you will not lead city or farm, but an entire planet. You have a relatively simple (haha) goal: to guide inhabitants of your planet from single-celled roots to an advanced civilization that goes to space. You can be a leader of planet Earth, or you can also choose other planets (Mars, Venus, Aquarium, some randomly generated planet, etc.). In SimEarth, the player can vary a planet's atmosphere, temperature, landmasses, etc., then place various forms of life on the planet and watch them evolve. On you path, you must overcome a number of threats (pollution, disease, hunger, war and global warming) and make sure the inhabitants of your planet will survive. There are also eight scenarios that do have goals, the first three (Aquarium, Cambrian Earth, and Modern-day Earth) involving managing the evolution and development of Earth in different stages, the next four (Mars, Venus, Ice Planet, and Dune) involving terraforming other planets to support life, and the final scenario (Earth 2XXX) involving rescuing life and civilization on a future Earth from self-replicating robots and nuclear warfare and giving the player the option of causing a great flood to help achieve this goal.