Simulation games

Retro simulation games were the software that justified buying a better computer. They modelled something — a city, a rail network, an airframe — and then handed you the controls without much explanation. Maxis and Will Wright started the civilian branch with SimCity, a game with no win condition, no enemies and a zoning model that turns out to be more compelling than most opponents.

Two kinds of accuracy

One branch cared about systems. Chris Sawyer wrote Transport Tycoon almost entirely in assembler, and its supply, demand and vehicle economy still reward players who plan routes decades later. The other branch cared about instruments: cockpit sims arrived with fold-out keyboard overlays, hundred-page manuals and a checklist before takeoff. MicroProse ran that side of the market, and F-19 Stealth Fighter shows the house style — radar cross-section, mission planning and campaign scoring wrapped around a flight model tuned to be flyable rather than merely correct. What united both branches was the assumption that reading the manual was part of playing, and that a simulation could be enjoyed as a hobby rather than beaten.

The catalogue holds the original releases with their original interfaces, keyboard maps included. Titles marked as playable open directly in the browser through an emulator that loads inside the page — no installation, no plugin, no registration and nothing to download. Complex sims will still want the manual, so treat the first flight or the first city as the tutorial it was meant to be.

Sims that trade the runway for a launch pad have a page of their own: space games covers the cockpits of Wing Commander and Elite along with the traders, the 4X empires and the rest of the galaxy-sized genre.