Technology, Culture, Commentary on the Internet Revolution

SimCity OLPC

by Mike Abundo on November 11th, 2007

Anyone who’s been to a third world city knows their governments seriously need lessons in urban planning. That’s why future generations should be happy that Electronic Arts is donating the original SimCity to the One Laptop Per Child project.

The game is currently being ported to the OLPC by Don Hopkins, the man responsible for the original multiplayer Unix port of the game. Hopkins created the Unix port of SimCity—which uses TCL and Tk—for DUX software in 1991. When the ten-year distribution contract between Maxis and DUX expired, Hopkins contacted Maxis parent company EA and attempted to negotiate for licensing rights so that he could adapt the program for educational uses and continue distributing. He didn’t succeed at the time, but now that EA is gifting the program to the OLPC project, Hopkins finally has a new chance to reinvent SimCity for academic uses.

Hopkins has already managed to port the game and make it run on the XO laptop and is now working on making it integrate well with the OLPC’s Python-based Sugar environment. Hopkins says that the final version of SimCity for the XO will be fully scriptable in Python and he hopes to make much of the underlying components reusable in order to provide generic building blocks for building XO games.

If poor kids learn to take a developmental view of their urban wastelands, then maybe in the future cities like Manila won’t be such a mess.

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POSTED IN: Education, Gaming