Moonbase

1990, SimCity's been out for a year and I'm convinced city-building is the peak of the genre. Then someone hands me a floppy disk with Moonbase and suddenly I'm building a base on the Moon. Logical progression.

Moonbase by Wesson International is a building simulator where you construct and manage a lunar base. No story, no villain — just you, the Moon's surface, and a set of modules you need to fit together sensibly. The base's survival depends on energy, oxygen supply, and making sure things don't just collapse. Solid ambition for its time.

Playability is where the game starts to stumble. The interface is sparse to the point of pain — you can't rotate buildings, it's hard to figure out what each structure actually does, and the game doles out information stingily. Early Maxis titles suffered from similar opacity, but they at least put more care into making sure players had a fighting chance. Here you learn a lot through trial-and-error-restart. The graphics fit the era — monochrome or four-color environments, minimal animation, nothing that would take your breath away in 1990, but functional.

We remember Moonbase as a rarity that headed in the right direction and got a bit lost along the way. A lunar simulator was practically a one-of-a-kind idea back then, and the concept itself was solid. But the game never brought the user experience to a point where players could fully focus on building instead of wrestling with the interface. It aged exactly as expected — mechanically it survives, comfort-wise it doesn't.

Today it'll mainly appeal to genre collectors and those who enjoy digging through building simulator history before the genre really took shape. As a historical artifact it's interesting. As an afternoon of fun — only if you've got patience and nostalgia for an era when tutorials were a luxury and you actually read the manual.