by theygamesKeep your Unreal Engine 5, your ray-tracing, and your 4K resolutions – videogames have never looked better than Rollercoaster Tycoon and SimCity 2000. It’s not about fidelity. It’s the colors, the lines, and the intricate details juxtaposed with the playful abstractions of pixel art. Metropolis 1998 is a visual throwback, antithetical to the complex, realistic visuals of Cities Skylines 2, but it’s maybe the most gorgeous game I’ve seen this year. A city builder in the classic Maxis style, and directly inspired by Chris Sawyer’s epochal amusement park sim, with a new demo available now, PCGamesN speaks exclusively to Metropolis 1998’s creator about marrying beautiful retro graphics with modern systems and original mechanics.
Everything is granular in Metropolis 1998, a city building game where and you can drill into the lives of individual citizens.
In Cities 2, you paint in broad strokes, a residential area here, a sweeping tax cut there. In Metropolis, everything is done piece by piece. Rather than generic zones, you build houses, apartment blocks, bungalows, and everything else yourself. You don’t lay out a commercial zone and wait for it to fill organically with shops and outlets – you choose them yourself, and in response to more precise, personalized demands. If people want a cafe, you build a cafe. If they’re wanting for a supermarket or somewhere to buy discount furniture, it’s over to you.
And it goes deeper. Like The Sims, you can look inside the houses of every one of your citizens, all of which are completely modeled and furnished, and contain different, simulated families. It’s like an incredibly intricate model maker – created by solo developer ‘Chase,’ via the label Yesbox Studios, Metropolis 1998 is warmer, cozier, but also more involved than many strategy game rivals.
“I grew up playing many of the classic PC games in the ‘90s and ‘00s, and one of my favorite games was Rollercoaster Tycoon,” Chase says. “In that game, you design a theme park, but to me, what makes that game so great is that it lets you create something then sit back and watch it come to life. It has the perfect balance of decoration and simulation.
“I’d like to create what RCT did in the city builder format, but also, bigger. Much bigger. I’m glad Chris [Sawyer] never created a city builder game, because I probably wouldn’t be making this game right now.”
Chase began work on Metropolis 1998 while living in New York City in the Covid-19 pandemic. “I was in a tiny 250 square foot studio apartment and had to get out,” they say. “I also was ready to move on from my job of ten plus years. I researched the market and thankfully saw there was very little competition in the classic city builder genre. Cities 2 hadn’t been announced yet either. I felt I was ready for the challenge and knew with so little competition, I had a chance.”
The demo for Metropolis 1998 has just been expanded, revamped, and relaunched, and is now available via the game’s Steam page. It feels like a city builder, where you need to manage traffic, rates, properties, and so on, but at the scale and pace of something more intimate and accessible, Bullfrog classics like Theme Hospital and Theme Park. Nevertheless, although it looks like it’s lifted from the ‘90s, Metropolis 1998 has modern ambitions. Chase has spent a long, long time optimizing performance and developing a robust pathfinding and traffic system.
“Pathfinding code is incredibly CPU intensive,” Chase says, “so I spent a lot of time developing my own solution. It’s cool, though. Units have preferences and they will choose a path from all available shortest paths to match them, like wanting to walk through a beautiful area, a tourist area, a ‘Chinatown’ or equivalent, etc.
“The code is efficient enough to handle 100,000 units simultaneously pathing on a single CPU core. I’ve seen so many games that flop on Steam due to performance issues. I need to avoid that.”
If you want to try Metropolis 1998 for yourself, it’s available here. The visuals are incredible, but it’s also a great alternative to Cities Skylines 2 and Frostpunk – it’s less intensive and high-pressure, but simultaneously in-depth and involved. We’re still waiting on a full release date, but this is definitely one to watch.
Otherwise, try some of the best management games, or maybe the best 4X games ever made.
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