Motor City

Year 1994, I'm sitting at my 486 and trying to understand why the automobile company I'd been building for the last two hours just went bankrupt. Motor City from Austrian studio Max Design gave me a lesson in capitalism faster than any textbook example.

The game seats you in the chair of an industrial magnate and lets you experience the rise of the automobile industry — from the first primitive vehicles of the late nineteenth century to the modern era. It's not a racing simulator, as the name might suggest. It's an economic and management simulator where the conflict isn't a rival on the track, but the market, competition, and your own inability to properly plan production capacity.

The entire operation rests on your shoulders: building and expanding production facilities, managing research and development of new models, administration, finances, and ultimately the sales itself. The mechanics are sophisticated for their time — it's not enough to just manufacture more and more cars, you have to respond to demand, invest in the right technologies at the right time, and avoid over-investing in inventory that nobody wants. The game doesn't give you much room for error, and when you do mess up, it usually shows up with a delay that hurts all the more.

Max Design released this game as one of the last under their own label, and you can tell by the ambition. Motor City doesn't try to be accessible to everyone — it's a title for players who had the patience to read manuals and didn't mind spending an hour setting up the production line. The interface is functional, the graphics solidly represent Central European business software of that era, and the music and sound design haven't improved in thirty years. What hasn't aged poorly, though, is the depth of the system itself — it forces you to think constantly.

Nowadays, few people play Motor City on a whim. It suits players who like management games with real historical backgrounds, don't shy away from micromanagement, and don't mind the game not extending a helping hand with tutorials. If you've played through Patrician or understood Railroad Tycoon on a deeper level, this is a logical excursion into less explored corners of the genre. The automobile industry as a simulator theme was unusual back then — and we still don't have it overflowing today.