In Sim City, you pick a landscape, choose a name for your city, then proceed to play as Mayor, making budget, zoning, city planning, resource allocation, and a multitude of other decisions that may make, or break, your city. This includes deciding what kind of power (Nuclear or Coal?), where to put roads and railroads, where your residents can live, commute, work, or play (generally), and also the financial budget.

What made this game attractive was it was basically an open-ended sandbox one could develop their own towns, cities, and worlds in. Whether that was recreating the city you live in, or creating your own city. There was also a terrain editor for DOS for it that you could use to edit/create new types of terrain for Sim City so you could be as creative as you want to be.

Sometime in my travels of playing Sim City I learned of it's extremely wide minimum system requirements. See, on the current collection I have, Sim City is on the Tandy 1000A, GEM 286, Creeping Net 486 (DOS & Win31 & Win9x), All of the laptops - and on all of them it runs great. However, I discovered, even a high speed (12MHz) 286 was fast enough to really game the system by building a city really fast (using my 8x6x4 rule - meaning 8 industrial, 6 residential, 4 commercial - in that ratio), then get a good growth pattern going with disasters disabled and auto budget on - then make sure Turbo was on, and let the computer just rack up $$$$$ over night. I'd wake up in the morning with 1.5 Million Dollars to work with! It was awesome. I use this trick a lot. I know, I know, it's basically cheating using a 486 DX4 to rack up the national Debt in fundage to build a sprawling metropolis. But sometimes it's fun just to build with no limits you see.