Widget Workshop (1996) was my favorite: with a large selection of widgets (such as logic gates, switches, displays, number generators, sound and graphics modules) you build 'functional cause and effect pipelines' in a a cute drag and drop canvas. There is a puzzle mode too. Very Rube Goldberg. Great fun, and educational!
At a young age SimEarth made a huge impression on me. I think it was the inscrutability and huge manuals that spoke of a wonderful ecological secret, tantalisingly out of reach no matter how many times I tried...
I can’t even estimate how many hours I sunk into some of these Maxis games. SimCity grabbed me harder than any game had ever grabbed me before and I’m sure I spent the equivalent of years of full time work playing it. SimEarth’s manual felt like a PhD program for a kid.
This game isn’t covered in the article but SimGolf had such an impact on my sense of humour that decades later I still think “gregiscool.com” would be a great name for a startup.
I might be misremembering since it's been over 35, but the orinal Mac versions of these games would be better to play today with the higher resolution they had.
This game isn’t covered in the article but SimGolf had such an impact on my sense of humour that decades later I still think “gregiscool.com” would be a great name for a startup.