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Man makes a virtual city with over 100 million residents

Some people love to build really huge, sprawling cities in the SimCity series of games that take a lot of planning and management to make work, which is partly why 2013’s SimCity – a game that actively discouraged it – was such a fiasco. Illustrating that point is a SimCity 4 player, Peter Richie, who Motherboard says used the vanilla, unmodded version of the 11-year-old game to create, what can only be called a megalopolis, a city of truly immense proportions even by SimCity 4’s standards.

When he was done, Richie’s MegaCity One had a paved road network that spanned more than 26 000km, 324 hydrogen power plants to supply it with electricity and over 2000 schools, to name but a few of the items on the staggeringly long list of amenities.

Most impressive, though, is the city’s population of over 107 million virtual souls; that’s around double the population of South Africa, shoehorned into a land mass that my naked-eye estimations tell me is only a bit bigger than the greater Johannesburg area.

As you might imagine, traffic is a nightmare in MegaCity One.  Think “Jo’burg roads on a Monday morning” traffic hell, just about everywhere.

Traffic_bad
Yikes. Perhaps it’s time for a bicycle.

The eight months it took Richie to build it included a four-month planning phase that started back in December 2013. He only started the actual building process in March of this year, and lucky for us he recorded his work and created a lovely video montage showing off some of the highlights.

If you’re interested in city planning on a large-scale, you can grab Sim City 4 on Steam for just $19.99 (around R220). Just be sure to stop by at SimTropolis.com and consult the game’s ever-helpful fans first before you get going on your own megalopolis project. Despite being 11 years old, Sim City 4 still has a very active community of gamers that have created mods for the game that make it prettier/better/more efficient/more realistic and they’re a fantastic resource to draw on for inspiration.

For a whole lot more background on city-building in the real world and information on Richie’s MegaCity One, I highly recommend reading the original Motherboard article here.

[Source, Image – Motherboard]

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