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When it was released on January 14th 2003, SimCity 4 had its problems. Its huge cities would chug on even decent PCs, for one, and its traffic simulation seemed outright broken.
Twenty years later – thanks to faster PCs, the Rush Hour expansion, and a huge modding community – SimCity 4 is the best of all SimCity games. If what you care about is simulation, scale, variety, and the beauty of urban sprawl, it’s also the best citybuilder.
It’s easy to take backwards compatibility for granted on PC, so much so that we rarely even use the phrase “backwards compatibility”. Most old games will simply run, and for everything else there’s usually a compatibility mode built into Windows or DOSBox to get it going.
This didn’t happen by accident, as an old blog post by a former Microsoft programmer explains. When Microsoft wanted users to switch to Windows 95, for example, they went so far as to add specific code that looked for SimCity and, if it was running, changed how memory allocation worked so that the game wouldn’t crash.