There was a multiplayer version of SimCity for X11 in the early 1990s. It ran on Unix workstations, could put several people into the same city over a network, and its surviving web page still has the product announcement to prove it.
Visit Don Hopkins’ SimCity archive
The page is maintained by Don Hopkins, who worked on Unix and multiplayer versions of SimCity. What survived is not a retrospective assembled thirty years later. It is a pile of primary material: screenshots, manuals, reviews, conference material, demo transcripts, interface discussions and the original announcement for Multi Player SimCity on X11.
That announcement is dated 1993 and reads like software distribution from another planet. A fully functional demo could be copied and played without a license, but there was a catch: the city melted every five minutes.
That is copy protection with personality.
SimCity escaped the beige box
The archive has screenshots of SimCity running on SGI Indigo hardware, Sun systems and NCD X terminals. There are transcripts from demos of both X11 SimCity and a HyperLook edition for the NeWS window system.
There is also a proposal for SimCityNet and material on user-interface design, including a summary of a Will Wright talk about interfaces for simulation games.
One line deserves to survive on its own: multiplayer SimCity went on tour with the Electric Carnival at Lollapalooza.
Today, networked games are ordinary enough that nobody thinks twice about the plumbing. These pages come from a period when putting a familiar simulation across networked Unix workstations was itself interesting enough to demonstrate at conferences and music festivals.
Why the page matters now
For game developers, this is source material. It shows not only what existed, but how it was described to users and other developers at the time. Product announcements list licensing models. Screenshots show actual interfaces. Transcripts preserve the way the software was demonstrated before streaming video became the default historical record.
For webmasters, the page is another good example of why boring HTML ages well. It is mostly a list of links with useful labels. Thirty years later, that is enough to reconstruct a little piece of game-development history.
This page came from the larger Ancient Web collection CacheRat is working through. The complete research list contains 1,967 sites for anyone who wants to do their own digging.
See the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
The best part is that the old SimCity material is still sitting there waiting to be opened instead of summarized into oblivion.