This is the seventh part of a series I'll be doing on games played during my childhood. You can read the others below.

Part 1/ Part 2/ Part 3/ Part 4/ Part 5/ Part 6

One of the first games I remember playing when I got my Windows 95 was Sim City 2000. I must've played the ever loving hell out of it, though not with much understanding of what exactly it was I was doing. I wasn't by any means a city planner, I was about 8 years old. It was actually the SimCity 2000 Special Edition, which was released a year before I was 8, so that timeline does work. My memory may be shit, but at least I can gauge the passage of the years via game release dates. Anyway, it was the sort of game that I'd click around in, somehow get things done, but never really understand how I did it. But then, a handful of years later, I wound up with a copy of SimTower, which was an entirely different beast.

SimTower, in my opinion, is still right up there with Sims 3 and SimCity 2000 for the best Sim game there is. Maybe it's a nostalgic thing, perhaps I'm looking through rose tinted glasses, so maybe I'm biased, but I really do stand by that belief, and my reasoning for doing so is just how utterly unique and novel a concept it was and still kind of is. Sim games are by no means rare, especially these days, but back then they were sort of niche and the Sim franchise itself was really the only one doing it right and doing it well financially. Nowadays you can find any thousands of iterations of the concept of Sim games on Steam or multiple other platforms, but back then you were sort of tied to Maxis's world and how they worked, and thankfully it was worth it.

But even now, if you search through the piles and piles of games that are so clearly chasing SimCity's success, you won't really find anything like SimTower, and likely for good reason. It's a bit more basic, first off. You aren't exactly building an entire town, so it's not really as wholly engaging as the other games might be. And it isn't The Sims, so you aren't playing as little virtual people, so it isn't as immersive as those might be. Really, SimTower is extremely straight forward and simplistic; you run a skyscraper, complete with restaurants, shops, offices, hotel rooms, condos, elevators and whatever else you could think of. Sure there's a lot of components within those parameters, but it isn't anywhere near as deep as the other games, and I'm saying this as its biggest defender, so.

But, much like Oregon Trail 2 was compelling to me because it gave me the hope for escaping to a new life, SimTower was compelling to me because it gave me the hope for building a new home.

There's a sort of abandonment one doesn't talk about or really acknowledge when it comes to parents, and that's intentional abandonment. Sure we could argue all day long about parents who leave, parents who die, parents who go to jail leaving you to wind up in either foster care or with other family members, but there's one group that rarely gets discussed and that's intentional abandonment. And I don't even really think abandonment is the right word, necessarily, but it's the word I'm going to go with. My parents were there, they were home, they provided a life, but in the most basic aspect of the concept. A roof over our heads, food filling the pantries, but no love, no warmth, no recognition, no admiration, no appreciation, no sentimentality, no adoration, and absolutely zero interest in emotional growth.

A house can be just that, a house. A home is something more than just a place you live in, it's a place you feel comfortable, a place you feel safe, a place you feel you have some level of control over. A house is just a building. A home is a sanctuary. My parents made our house exactly that, a house, and nothing more. So I was always looking for ways to build better places, to design better situations inside of buildings. Something strange about me that you may not know is that - despite my absolutely terrible memory for just about everything - I can remember every single room I've ever been in verbatim, right down to the carpeting. Friends houses I spent the night at, houses I haven't been inside of in well over a decade now, I can still remember exactly the layout, exactly the room, to a tee. Because of this, it almost makes me perfect for architectural work and interior design.

When playing The Sims 3, my favorite part was designing the home. When playing Stardew Valley, I have the most fun simply decorating my living quarters. I try and keep my actual space clean and neat and organized, functional and yet not so minimally barren creatively that it isn't fun. I appreciate simplicity, certainly, but I also want there to be an aesthetic, and that's what a room is, an extension of a personality. A person can live in a house for 75 years, and that house can look like a different person lived there every decade simply because tastes and interests change and wane throughout their lifetime. What their living room might have looked like at 45 might be drastically different come 65. You can express a lifetime of individuality solely throughout rooms.

So why am I talking about this? Fair question, I mean, SimTower isn't a home, it's a skyscraper, but it's falling under the same umbrella categorically of designing a better place to be in than the one I lived in currently. As I said before, just like Oregon Trail 2 made me want to hit the road and never look back as I went in search of a better life, SimTower made me want to create a place that was all my own, where I finally felt like I belonged. Sure, I wouldn't necessarily want to live in a skyscraper, but at the same time, as a little girl, I would've been happier to live literally anywhere else besides where I was living. Hell, a dirt hole in the middle of a swamp would've been an improvement. A house is nothing without love, and my house was completely empty of love in every way from every person. At least in a skyscraper, it's a community of one kind or another, an ecosystem almost, of all these pieces working together to make the whole thing function. Each has their place and plays a role. Everything has a purpose.

That's what I wanted. I wanted a unit that worked together, that appreciated one another, and that's what SimTower (and the other Sim games, subsequently) managed to give me, or at least, if nothing else, the illusion of such a thing. I would've killed to have lived in my skyscrapers in SimTower simply because it wasn't broken like my home. A broken home doesn't have to be what the media makes you think it is; drunken screaming, merciless beatings and such. "Broken" has such a wide range of definitions, and in my case, my home was broken solely because it didn't work, which is the literal definition of broken. Something that no longer works in the way it was intended to. SimTower was escapism for a terrified little girl who only wanted to be in a place where people would appreciate what she managed to accomplish, for the right reasons, and wanted to help her right back.

I've lived better lives through all the Sims titles than I ever have in real life. That's just a fact. Like the people who played WoW to escape into a world more fantastical than our own, where they could be heroes, I played Sims games to escape into a world more normal than my own, where I could be happy. A functional world. A world that wasn't broken. Because there's something nobody ever mentions about broken homes; when you grow up in one, you spend a lifetime searching for one that isn't.

And the closest I've ever come has been a virtual skyscraper from the 90s.

My name is Maggie. I write & make art for a living. If you like this post, you might also like knowing I recently published a graphic novel here, I have a semi autobiographical book here and you can support me monthly on Patreon.