SimCity

SimCity has no victory condition. A session goes on until the player decides to end it, and publishers turned the project down for a long time: it didn't fit the notion of the time about what counts as a game at all.

The city is described by a grid of cells. The player doesn't build houses by hand, they zone residential, commercial and industrial areas, lay roads and power lines, and buildings appear on their own if the zone has demand and a connection to the rest of the city. Each cell has its own indicators: land value, pollution, crime, accessibility. They affect one another, and the consequences of a decision show up several game years later. What you manage here are the conditions, and the only way to learn is by reading the system through its response. Disasters, from an earthquake to a monster attack, were added as a test of resilience and can be turned off in the settings. The first version was written back on the Commodore 64, and the release took place in 1989.