SimEarth

SimEarth: The Living Planet is a god-game from Maxis (1990), designed by Will Wright and programmed by Fred Haslam, that puts the player in charge of an entire world across roughly ten billion years of geological and biological time. Move continents, seed life, and shepherd a civilization to the stars.

Gameplay

You guide a planet from molten infancy through ice ages, mass extinctions, and industrial collapse, balancing pollution, disease, famine, war, and climate against the long-term survival of whatever species you favor. Tools let you raise mountains, drift continents, and tweak atmospheric chemistry.

Design lineage

SimEarth followed SimCity in Maxis's open-ended simulation line and drew heavily on James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, treating the planet as a self-regulating system rather than a level to win. There are no victory conditions in the conventional sense; the goal is to keep the biosphere going.

System requirements

The Macintosh release runs on a Mac Plus or later and is compatible with System 6.x through Mac OS 9, making it playable on most Classic Mac hardware of its era.

Legacy

SimEarth is remembered as one of the more ambitious entries in Maxis's pre-SimCity 2000 catalog and is frequently cited as an early mainstream introduction to planetary-scale systems thinking.