#simcity3000

RCT1 - The Classic

RCT2 - The Definitive

The song of success. One of my favorite songs of my childhood. 

The hope of a new city. So many citizens pouring in to move to your wonderful and aesthetically pleasing dictatorship. This song is about potential. Setting up for the greatness that is to come. 

Fuck Kirby, okay? I’m actually going to talk about SimCity 3000 because that music was awesome. Video Games are a really demanding medium for composers, because they force you to write a lot of different music for a whole litany of different contexts. Jerry Martin was the in house composer at Maxis Entertainment in their golden years, before EA ruined them and shuttered the studio. He wrote the music for every basically everything in the Sims Franchise up until 2005. He knows his shit, too. Here’s some of the pieces that really stuck with me from Simcity 3000:

I didn’t realize this until years after having played SC30k, but most of the intro to this piece is just the piano. He reaches inside the sound harp to rake and pluck the strings, which is what gives it that really dark quality. The constant pulsing and instrument choice (mostly the clarinets) remind me a lot of the American Minimalists, particularly a piece by Steve Reich called City Life.

Another one in the Steve Reich vein, this one has a real Nagoya Marimbas feel to it. The Violin and synth intro give me flashbacks to playing the Original Planetside, but that’s because solo violin backed by Synthesizers will forever bring me back to driving an invisible ATV across an empty continent to capture an unguarded lookout tower.