Unreleased Sim City NES prototype shown on the Internet
Will an 8-bit Godzilla stomp over your town soon?
Sim City is one of those games that managed to get on to just about every platform around at the time it was released -- it was such a popular game that it would be hard to find a system where you couldn't play it on...well, with the exception of quite a big one - the NES, for which a version of Sim City was in development for release in 1991, but never ended up coming out -- we've barely had any proof of the game's existence aside from an appearance in Nintendo Power...until now. It seems as though someone has a copy of it, and it can be seen on a YouTube video right here:
This may not be the best quality YouTube out there -- sure, it's not from a capture card, it's shot in portrait mode and all that...but still, what's on that screen is unmistakably Sim City, and confirmation of the existence of a prototype for such a classic game that's unreleased is certainly exciting so long as you can get past the sound of children talking or whatever (needless to say, plenty of YouTube commenters cannot). One can only hope that this prototype ROM gets dumped at some point, and that this video isn't all we get of it.
It appears as though the original game didn't come out at the time due to the time it was developed in -- by the time 1991 rolled around, the NES was gradually on the way out and it was presumably seen as not cost effective to release Sim City on the NES. Until now it has been quite a hard one to find any info on -- Nintendo Power has always been the only source for it, from a little preview in 1991 to a brief "If only" retrospective in 2006...oh, and this '90s-tastic clip from Video Power!
Ah, the sweater doesn't get much more bodacious than that, and that hair's higher than an arcology. From humble beginnings on the C64 and Macintosh, through the ever more complex versions on the PC and the sequels that followed and the highly accessible versions on the SNES, Sim City sure has had one hell of a history -- and this unreleased NES version and the silly little early '90s video here that goes along with it is one almost-forgotten footnote. But hopefully now we can see a bit more of it if this previously unseen game finds its way onto the Internet. Fingers crossed!
