Old copy of Sim City?

[hunterjwizzard]

I've had this in my collection for 20ish years now. I bought it in a thrift store sometime around 2003/2004. Possibly earlier. I can say with some degree of certainty that its not a forgery because who the hell was forging copies of Sim City in 2003 and donating them to thrift stores?

Anywho:

So here's where I'm a tich lost: was it normal for the game to distribute on random floppy disks with hand-written labels? Or is it more likely I got someone's backup copy thrown in a box, and the original disks are long gone?

 

[Brian Todd]

Looking at them I suspect you did indeed get someone's back-up copy. Even if the originals were hand written, they would still have all been on the same sort of disks. Looking at your collection, it would seem to me that this is the original SimCity game (not SimCity 4 which was 2003), and the original disks would have looked like this. I would guess that only two of your disks are actually from the original game.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Ah ok. Well I suspect the bundle of documentation and registration cards is more rare these days than disks. Either way its a nice tchotchke.

 

[Plasma]

If a game has a printed box, it's definitely going to have printed floppy labels. You might occasionally have a handwritten serial number though.

Mismatched floppy disks are possible. I've seen these in both Maxis and Broderbund games. Seems like they just dumped disks in the duplicator, and you got what you got.

Ah ok. Well I suspect the bundle of documentation and registration cards is more rare these days than disks. Either way its a nice tchotchke.

Depends whether or not they are moldy. You are also missing the box slipcover and copy protection sheet.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

Yeah, this is definitely not a legit copy of the game. The original Sim City came on a bunch of different disk labels, here's an example of one of them.

https://ia801500.us.archive.org/11/items/simcity_1.07_3.5/img20220814_17531240.jpg

I'm most familiar with the Macintosh version of the game, and I'm aware of at least three different versions of the game for Macintosh (B&W, 4 bit and 8 bit color versions) and they all had different printed disk labels. There was also a "universal" CD-ROM version that had both Mac and PC versions of the game. I think I may still have mine around here somewhere. The different Mac versions not only had different art, but different sounds as well. Like the godzilla type monster in older versions used to make a ear piercing "WEEEEEEEEEE" sound, but it was later changed to a lizard roar. I don't remember if they changed the dialog box, but it used to tell you to try calling Ultraman in Japanese to solve the problem lol.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Ahh. All right. Well I wasn't thinking of selling it anyway, just going to keep it as part of my retro collection.

 

[seat safety switch]

See if you can get another auction of loose disks and make one full set out of them. It's a good tactic on auctions in general, as good boxes are harder to find than disks for almost every platform.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Without the sheath though is it really worth the effort? Can't imagine the outside slave goes up for auction by itself.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

If it was in pristine condition, it might have value. Otherwise, it'd probably just be wanted by someone who may have the disks but not the box.