The original will hold a place in my mind forever, but Simcity 2000 is simply one of those sequels that was meant to be. It was one of those sequels that double down on everything brilliant about the first game, with a stunning visual makeover that saw the top-down 2D look turn into a gorgeous isometric city panorama. It's more complex, and it could do much less well, and I'm not sure if Maxis or EA have ever improved SimCity after that.

I played this game a lot as a kid and thought I had a pretty good memory of it, but a piece of trivia caught me completely off guard Sim City games are always packed with Easter eggs, but one of the little surprises of Sim City 2000 1 was that Neil Gay was a very good kid. It turned out to be an essay on the nature of the city by Iman.

Gaiman is now one of the most famous and prolific writers in the world, but when Simcity 2000 came out in 1993, he found that the most essay in the pioneering Sandman comic series is simply titled Simcity and will show you the option to "ruminate" in the game by clicking on the library building. You will find it. If you do, the game displays Gaiman's essay, which certainly ruminates about the nature of the city and the personality they hold. 

This is a short piece and can be read in full on the Gaiman website. The first few paragraphs go:

"The city is not a person." But like people, cities have their own personalities: in some cases, one city has many different personalities — a dozen London, a different New York

"Cities are a collection of lives and buildings, with identity and individuality. The city exists in place and time.

"There are good cities — those that welcome you, those that seem to care about you, those that seem willing to be among them." There are cities that are indifferent — cities that honestly don't care if you're there or not; cities with their own agendas, cities that ignore people. There are cities that have gone bad, and in cities that are otherwise healthy, there are places that are rotten and maggot-like like windfall apples. There are even cities that seem lost — some cities lack a center, but others, somewhere small and somewhere understandable, make you happy.

Gaiman wonders about what people a city is like ("Manhattan, in my head, is a fast-talking, unreliable city"). He is well-dressed, but has not shaved his beard"). As ruminations go, it's cool stuff, and very much in tune with the game's characters (Will Wright himself was originally inspired by the pioneering book Urban Dynamics). I'm sure I must have read this a few decades ago, but my ancient brain mistakenly submitted memories.

The questions I have left, and I've been searching around for answers with little luck, are why Gaiman was tapped up to contribute to SimCity2000 in the first place. PCG's Fraser Brown notes that Gaiman has a particular fascination with the nature of the city: "The city as a mysterious, ever-changing place is rife with Sandman, and he has a mini-series and the accompanying novel about the idea that every major city has a magical parallel world that exists beneath it." He created Neverwhere."I've reached out to Gaiman and will be updated with any response.