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Around September/October 1990 Nintendo announced that they would bring the highly acclaimed Maxis game SimCity to the Nintendo consoles on the market at the
time, being the NES and SNES systems, and the game was to be released simultaneously - scheduled for a spring release in 1991. In the November/December 1990
issue two screenshots from the game were published and those two screenshots were for a very long time the only proof that a NES version of the game actually
existed.
However in 2005 Nintendo Power desided to write about the game again, this time as one of the lost treasures of the past. This time we actually got to see
the actual prototype along with a single screenshot. The game is nicely hosted in a gold cartridge - a Zelda 2 cartridge was used as a donor case.
Unfortunately I don't recognize the prototype PCB as I've never seen one of these before I believe.
Well the the two releases of SimCity were almost identical except for the fact that the SNES of course was capable of handling a better graphical apperance
as well as the sound part. SimCity was one of the launch titles for the Super Nintendo in the US and Europe and this could very well be the reason why the
NES version was scrapped in the final hour - to the the SNES version an exclusive title which should make people go out and buy the new Nintendo system.
I bought the SNES version back in the while I absolutely loved the PC version the SNES version never really caught my attention mainly due to the poor
control. Being used to control the game with a mouse, using a controller just wasn't right - as well as being slow. With the NES' smaller processing power
I would imagine the game would be really slow and with no optional mouse I doubt it wouold've been a pleasure to play.
The Nintendo version did have a cool feature that the original game didn't have, such as a special house for the mayor and so on. This idea was to be found in
the next PC version of SimCity, SimCity 2000, which also was ported to the SNES and released in 1993.
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