Maxis has only been making SimCity and The Sims for a while now, but they used to make a lot of different simulation games.
Maxis used to make a lot of software, but now it’s mostly known for the Will Wright games SimCity and The Sims. Since 2014, when the last SimCity game came out, Maxis has only worked on The Sims games and add-ons. Even though the studio won’t make games as crazy as SimAnt again, some of their old games are still fun to play.
Since the first SimCity game came out in 1989, Maxis has been known for its simulation games. During the 1990s, Maxis was best known for their Sim series. Year after year, they put out games like SimEarth and SimLife. Most of these games are like SimCity, but they focus on bigger systems. In a strange way, Maxis will have the most success with the original The Sims if they focus on making smaller simulations.
SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony
SimAnt is a strange simulation game where you lead a group of ants with pheromones, just like an ant would. The player doesn’t have direct control over their ants, which makes this less of a strategy game with a unique theme and more of a simulation. Random things like floods that wash away pheromones and people walking on a lot of insects, which kills a lot of them, make strategy even less important.
Even though SimAnt is a simulation, it is still a strategy game, with all the depth and strange abstractions that come with that type of game. Players can only control one ant at a time, but they can choose which one they want to control as if they were taking over its tiny mind. In the campaign, players move their colony from garden to garden, not for any reason in the game, but to make the game more interesting.
SimLife: The Genetic Playground
In SimLife, players explore a simulated world and interact with it. There are optional scenarios that players can try to beat, but the game does its best not to give players clear goals. Players can change planets, animals, plants, and even some rules of physics before the simulation starts.
SimLife isn’t a very well-known game anymore, but back in the day, it created a whole subgenre. Any creature-creation simulation, which Maxis pioneered with its 1992 title, has its roots here. This includes Spore by Maxis and other games from the middle of the 2000s like Impossible Creatures.
SimEarth
SimEarth came out in 1991 and was the second game in the Sim series. The first game in the historic series, SimCity, made the series and its creator, Will Wright, well-known in the PC gaming world. The tremendous success of SimEarth served to further establish Maxis as a dominant force in the simulation industry.
The idea behind SimEarth is simple: players make or change a planet until it fits their needs, then drop different types of life into the simulation and see what happens. As with most games in the Sim series, there are some scenarios in SimEarth where players are given specific goals, but the freeform simulation is where most of the fun is.
Spore
Spore is still good, even though both fans and critics didn’t like it when it came out. It might not be Maxis’s best game, but it’s definitely one of the most interesting games the company has made since the original Sims games in the 1990s. Spore is also one of Maxis’s longest games, with 5 ages to go through and a strong system for making species and changing them.
Spore might look at first like other Maxis games like SimLife, but it stands out right away because the player only ever controls one character at a time. The game doesn’t just simulate natural selection and evolution; the player also has a direct impact on how well their species can survive.
The Urbz: Sims In The City
The Urbz looks a lot like The Sims, and it is a spinoff of that series, but the two games are very different on the inside. For one thing, The Urbz doesn’t have the same goal as its older brother or sister to be a game about everything, with endless add-ons that take the house simulation to college, the woods, the mall, etc.
The Urbz’s looks and characters have held up surprisingly well over time. This game tries so hard to be cool that it endures, but it’s more than that. The Urbz is different from most other Maxis games because it has real characters with their own dialogue and animations. As well as a world that was made by hand. When it comes to worlds, Urbzville was the first city in the popular Sims series. Bridgeport, from The Sims 3, came next.
SimCopter
Maxis has a lot of simulation games, but SimCopter is a bit different. Happy Wheels game doesn’t try to show how hard it is to run an airport or direct air traffic over a city. SimCopter, on the other hand, is a simple flight simulator that is simple even by Maxis’s standards and compared to other helicopter simulators.
The SimCity 2000 integration, which lets players import their own cities to fly around in. Seems to be the most important part of the game. This option is only available when in user mode. The other main mode is called “career mode,” and it has a lot of challenges like arcade flying games and simulators.