SimEarth: The Living Planet

About SimEarth: The Living Planet

SimEarth (1990) is Will Wright's planet simulation for Maxis, built with the help of Gaia hypothesis creator James Lovelock, in which players shape a world over ten billion years in the hope of evolving a civilisation that leaves for the stars.

SimEarth: The Living Planet in Depth

Players adjust a planet's atmosphere, temperature and landmasses, place life on it and watch it evolve. In the "Random Planet" mode it is a software toy without set goals, though the great challenge is to evolve sentient life into an advanced civilisation whose Exodus carries it off the planet, before the world dies ten billion years after its creation as its sun becomes a red giant. Eight scenarios have goals: managing Earth's evolution in an Aquarium, Cambrian Earth and 1990 Earth, terraforming Mars, Venus, an Ice Planet and Dune, and saving a future Earth from self-replicating robots and nuclear war. A Daisy World mode, based on Lovelock's Daisyworld model, has only daisies that change colour with temperature.

Panels let players regulate everything from atmospheric gases, to three decimal places, to continental drift and mutation rates, at a cost in energy units. Disasters range from hurricanes and wildfires to disease, pollution, nuclear war and nuclear winter, and global warming can boil away the oceans. All multicellular animal groups are equal, so sapient molluscs are possible, and civilisations pass from the Stone Age to the Nanotech Age. The gameplay can be mystifying, with species thriving or dying for no clear reason.

Making SimEarth: The Living Planet

SimEarth was Wright's second game, published by Maxis in 1990, with versions for the Macintosh, Atari ST, Amiga, IBM PC, SNES, Sega CD and TurboGrafx-16. Lovelock advised the team, especially on its geophysical models, and wrote an introduction to the manual, arguing that Gaia models linking biology and geology are "for some reason stable and able to resist perturbations", and saying the game had "a degree of realism" despite being "little more than a game", noting that many professional climate models of the time ignored clouds, the ocean or biology. Computer Gaming World called it "absolutely fascinating" and superior to SimCity in scope and replayability, though it wanted more visual feedback. It won the Software Publishers Association's 1991 awards for Best Secondary Education Program and Best Simulation Program, The One gave the DOS version 95%, and Entertainment Weekly gave the SNES version an A−. It was later re-released in the Maxis Collector Series and on the Wii Virtual Console.