The Birth of SimCity and the Dawn of Pipe
I thought that after the grueling Expo finally wrapped up and we finished handing everything over to the Korea Telecom staff, I might actually get to rest in the club room. But then…
“The computer lab’s being temporarily repurposed as the course registration room.”
“Huh…?”
“We’ve been evicted.”
That’s right. Between preparing for the Expo, working as a guide, and attending the celebratory events, time had slipped away like water through a broken bucket. My precious first-year summer vacation had been completely replaced by the Expo. Sure, once registration ended, the temporarily requisitioned room would return to us… but still.
“The semester’s starting…?”
For the first time in my life, I felt the exact same sensation I’d experienced when meeting the President — the feeling of all the blood draining from my body.
Once the course registration period ended and we reclaimed our club room, I pulled out the proposal that had been gathering dust in the corner. It was finally time to restart the City-Building Simulation project that I had pushed to the back burner while scrambling to handle the Expo.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the code and how to actually build this thing…”
They say that the one who ties the knot should be the one to untie it. Im Jin-bae, the person who had launched this massive project, brought out the results of his agonizing deliberations. The outcome?
“I don’t understand any of this, sunbae.”
The code had become so tangled with overlapping variables that it was impossible to comprehend in one sitting. But what could we do? This was how it had to be made. In the end, every member of the club swallowed their tears and began development.
Yoo Ji-young and I set aside coding for the moment and started dotting away in Paint. Because it was a city-building game, we had to manually create pixel art for countless buildings — single-family homes, villas, apartments, skyscrapers, and more. Of course, I still helped with coding in between, assisting the other members and eventually earning the title of “God” from them.
During that process, I also created a version control system. It let us store files on a central server, let connected users download the files they needed, modify or add to them, then upload the changes back to the server where the differences would be saved. Thanks to this system, we could quickly catch errors and review updates efficiently.
…Wait. Isn’t this just Git?
Around that time, the open-source operating system Linux was beginning to stir. So I cut into my sleep even further, downloaded the early versions posted on the web, found areas for improvement, and sent feedback. I’d write patch notes for the suggested changes and send them to the developers. If my patches were accepted, my name would appear in the next set of notes. True to its origins as open source, it was brilliantly designed to hook contributors, keep them working for free, and make them addicted. Of course, I fell for it completely.
My average sleep dropped to two hours a day as I somehow ended up responsible for nearly half of all patches. My nickname, FoxC, dominated the credits. I even received an email from Linux’s developer, Linus Torvalds, asking what kind of person I was. In the end, Linux was officially released a full year earlier than in my original world thanks to our insane pace. I had a feeling this would snowball into something big later.
Anyway, getting back on track — thanks to the budget we’d earned from the Expo, we replaced all our computers and built what could only be described as a cutting-edge development environment. Our club was unstoppable. Every single one of us, myself included, was ground down equally. We started by dividing the entire map into a diamond-shaped grid, studied urban planning textbooks I’d borrowed from one of Im Jin-bae’s friends, and implemented zoning for residential, commercial, and industrial districts. We connected countless variables — water, electricity, fire services, policing, education, starting location and conditions, initial debt, quality of life, crime rate, economic budget, population, traffic, debt, and even housing prices. Then we created interactions based on what the player built and the policies they chose.
Could anyone believe this project was completed in just three months, right before final exams? Even I wouldn’t believe it. And honestly, you shouldn’t. Anyone who does is a gullible fool destined to fall for every scam artist’s hook.
To be precise… we did make it. We only made it. Bugs? We couldn’t catch them all. The tangled variables kept causing problems — fix one bug and two or more connected variables would break. In the end, we only managed to block the fatal ones. Optimization? As if. The game would often crash on launch due to resource issues, and the moment a high-density residential zone appeared, the framerate would tank. Ten frames per second felt like a blessing. We all knew exactly what this was.
“This is industrial waste. It’s wasting the computer and server memory just by existing.”
We learned the bitter lesson that passion and environment alone cannot make you invincible.
That said, we didn’t give up. After the seniors’ screams accompanied the end of finals, the club members were once again ground to dust during winter break. Ah, Yoo Ji-young got ground down too. Even though she couldn’t code, she helped spot flaws in the abstract conditional statements scribbled across the whiteboard. She also handled the massive pile of review documents we had to submit right after break ended. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say she took care of everything except the actual coding. No one in our club could escape the mountain of work, whether they were a coding slave or not.
In the end, the game managed to rise above the level of industrial waste. We optimized it enough to run on our old computers and fixed as many variable-related bugs as we possibly could. The fact that planting trees on sloped or special tiles raised property values, or that wind power plants increased pollution levels, was completely intentional. And so, the game that would come to be known as the beginning of the simulation genre — SimCity — was finally revealed to the world.
“But how are we supposed to distribute it on the web?”
“Ah.”
If we just uploaded it to our club homepage, we’d probably get socially crucified… and there wasn’t really anywhere suitable to post it.
“Then why don’t we make a dedicated distribution webpage?”
And that was how the world’s largest online game store, Pipe, was born — for such a pitiful reason.
And so, on a cold day in February 1994 when the winter chill was still raging, a new website suddenly appeared. With an extremely minimalist design, the site only featured two categories: Analog Games and Digital Games. While the Analog section contained various board games like chess and Othello, the Digital Games category only had three downloadable files — one of which had an overwhelmingly large file size.
People who initially visited for the clean UI and fast-paced board games gradually began trying the digital titles and got hooked. Although it didn’t cause a massive stir, games began spreading among people who used computers and the internet as an enjoyable but somewhat embarrassing underground culture.
At this point, I should briefly recap the status of games in this world.
During the time when arcades were growing thanks to the success of Pong and Space Invaders, home consoles — specifically the Famicom — were released a bit earlier than in my original history. Arcades eventually surrendered their throne to home consoles, and the explosive growth of the latter inspired just about anyone to jump into game development. While arcades failed to produce any more hits after their final desperate attempt with Galaga, home consoles churned out countless titles on the back of their explosive popularity.
However, with so many people jumping in, the quality of most games was lacking. This led to a flood of pornographic games that prioritized shock value over gameplay — the so-called “eroge” — along with broken titles that barely functioned, often mockingly called “code clumps.” On top of that, the appearance of computer ports, gamers’ growing dissatisfaction and fatigue with video games, and the cutthroat market competition caused companies to engage in suicidal pricing wars that piled up massive losses.
In the end, gamers no longer wanted to buy video games that had been branded as low-quality trash. Yet publishers, expecting record-breaking sales based on old data, ordered enormous quantities. Naturally, they went bankrupt. After that, game companies collapsed one after another, and their existing titles were practically given away for free. Of course, they were either trash or eroge. This led gamers, religious groups, and the government to declare in unison that games were a social evil, resulting in the era of the Great Suppression.
What the gamers failed to realize was that religious organizations and the government are always deadly serious about suppression. The goal of stopping the flood of low-quality games and encouraging the creation of fun, high-quality titles completely backfired. The government and religious groups simply erased the entire culture of video games from existence. As a result, home consoles and video games were wiped from history. Nintendo and Sega — who in the original timeline had signaled the revival of gaming culture — never even appeared.
What remained? The dying arcades. Arcades that only carried games with proven gameplay and that didn’t fall under government censorship became the last sanctuary chosen by gamers. Of course, the brief flash of Street Fighter was suppressed for its violence, so in the end, only Galaga — the final desperate cry of arcades — remained.
Thus, in this world, the culture of games came to be perceived externally as childish, lowbrow entertainment for kids — essentially, a kiddie subculture. That was the status of games here. In other words, games in this world were seen as something with all violence and sensuality removed — the kind of thing only children would play.
I got sidetracked again, but anyway, that’s why our game succeeded. Unlike existing titles, it was simple yet required thought, delighted the eyes and ears, and represented the true form of gaming that players had been longing for.
This eventually spread overseas as well. SimCity, scattered across the internet, became a masterpiece of the century that anyone who used the web had to try at least once.
“Hey, I think there’s something wrong with the variable handling on this webpage. Didn’t you mess up the conditional statements?”
“What? Where?”
“Right here. The download count variable looks weird.”
“One, ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand… hundred thousand? Wait a second.”
Without even realizing it, we had become internet stars.