A deep dive into the trailblazing simulation game SimCity , situating it in the history of games, simulation, and computing. Building SimCity explores the history of computer simulation by chronicling one of the most influential simulation games ever made: SimCity . As author Chaim Gingold explains, Will Wright, the visionary designer behind the urban planning game, created SimCity in part to learn about cities, appropriating ideas from traditions in which computers are used as tools for modeling and thinking about the world as a complex system. As such, SimCity is a microcosm of the histories and cultures of computer simulation that engages with questions, themes, and representational techniques that reach back to the earliest computer simulations. Gingold uses SimCity to explore a web of interrelated topics in the history of technology, software, and simulation, taking us far and wide—from the dawn of programmable computers to miniature cities made of construction paper and role-play. An unprecedented history of Maxis, the company founded to bring SimCity to market, the book reveals Maxis’s complex relations with venture capitalists, Nintendo, and the Santa Fe Institute, which shaped the evolution of Will Wright’s career; Maxis’s failure to back The Sims to completion; and the company’s sale to Electronic Arts. A lavishly visual book, Building SimCity boasts a treasure trove of visual matter to help bring its wide-ranging subjects to life, including painstakingly crafted diagrams that explain SimCity ’s operation, the Kodachrome photographs taken by Charles Eames of schoolchildren making model cities, and Nintendo’s manga-style “Dr. Wright” character design, just to name a few. “In his new book Building SimCity , Gingold meticulously describes the history of the people and ideas that shaped simulation games. Gingold's book recognizes that games are rarely the result of a single person's efforts. Building SimCity includes the collaborators—programmers, artists, interface designers, writers, and business partners—who helped make the game an unlikely commercial success. It also situates SimCity in the wider context of 20th-century computing, design, and education.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “The triumph of Building SimCity is that it lays bare the illusive nature of simulation: that although many small parts make up a simulation, once we are through its portal, the simulation of these many different parts takes on a cultural life and reality of its own.” — Technology and Culture “I learned more about the history and practice of simulation from this book than I ever knew. While I was usually stuck in the trees when designing SimCity, Gingold rises above to see the entire forest." —Will Wright, designer of SimCity and The Sims ; Cofounder, Maxis “Much more than a book about SimCity, or even about videogames, its large scope includes the invention of interactive computer graphics for simulations of all kinds, including the ‘beyond reality’ universes of games. Highly recommended!” —Alan Kay, winner of the 2003 ACM Turing Award   “ Building SimCity tells the riveting and timely story of how the very unlikely idea of simulating cities became one of the most successful videogames of all times, tracing its origins back to the history of computing.” —Yasmin B. Kafai, Lori and Michael Milken President’s Distinguished Professor, The University of Pennsylvania; coauthor of Connected Gaming: What Making Video Games Can Teach Us about Learning and Literacy “An exhilarating read. One of the best origin stories ever told and the best account I've seen of how innovation actually occurs in computerdom. Exhaustively researched and brilliantly illustrated, this revelatory book tells the definitive origin story of Will Wright, SimCity , and Maxis. First comes everything that led to them—radical city-modeling for school kids, system dynamics, cellular automata, graphical interfaces, Santa Fe Institute, early computer games, and the people that made them, and why, and how.” —Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog Chaim Gingold is a designer and theorist whose work has been featured in Wired , CNN , and the New York Times. He worked closely with Will Wright on Spore and designed the Spore Creature Creator .