Ancient Web: ClubOpolis Kept SimCity 2000 Strategy in a 1995 Help Site

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A city full of angry Sims and unpayable bonds could ruin a perfectly good afternoon. Patrick Coston built ClubOpolis so SimCity 2000 players could ask one another what went wrong.

Visit ClubOpolis, the SimCity 2000 fan page.

The surviving homepage calls itself The Ultimate SimCity 2000 Web Page, with sections for cheats, strategies, basic knowledge, SCURK, contests, cool cities, and a download library. It explicitly dates its creation to July 7, 1995, with a last update of April 4, 2006.

This matters because SimCity 2000 was a game of systems interacting: taxation, transit, power, water, pollution, land value, and public services. Players could spend hours discovering that a beautifully laid-out city was financially unsustainable. A text guide made from actual player problems was a useful companion to the manual.

The readers supplied the strategy book

The strategy index includes sections on when to build, providing water, making money, bonds, and twenty quick tips. Coston describes it as a growing collection of advice submitted by anyone willing to contribute.

One particularly revealing discussion about bonds records a player trapped by debt. Other contributors suggest cutting spending, adjusting taxes, waiting for favorable interest rates, and, in one strategy, replacing expensive bonds with cheaper ones. Coston adds that his early cities failed because he expanded too fast.

The page preserves names and individual, sometimes contradictory, solutions. This was not yet the modern model of a wiki in which a single supposedly definitive strategy overwrites older advice. Players contributed under their own identities and could argue about what worked.

There are separate DOS and Macintosh cheat pages, recalling how different computer versions could have different hidden commands. The site's older references to gamebooks, FTP downloads, and email feedback also make the web-publishing era visible.

Not every downloadable resource or old image was verified during this review. Nevertheless, the date-stamped indexes and readable strategies preserve an authentic piece of 1990s fan assistance: a city-planning help desk run by other mayors.

Read the player strategy index and the bond discussion.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.