Micropolis — City Planning Simulator

Micropolis is SimCity as it began - only open to everyone. When Will Wright created SimCity in 1989 he invented a whole genre: the building game with no enemy and no win condition, where the appeal lies purely in watching a living system grow. The original source code was later released as Micropolis under a free licence, and this is exactly the version you play here, right in your browser.

The core principle is simple and deep at once. You designate areas as residential, commercial or industrial zones, connect them with roads and rails, and power it all from power plants. Where the conditions are right, people move in, firms open, factories produce. The zones grow on their own when you give them what they need - and decay when you neglect them.

A city is a cycle of supply and demand. Too much industry and no one wants to live there. Too few roads and everything chokes in traffic. No money for police and fire and crime and fires eat your tax revenue. You adjust the tax rate, allocate the budget and watch how your decisions shape the city over years. There is no right ending, only a city that keeps on growing.

And then there are the disasters. An earthquake tears whole districts open, a fire eats through downtown, a tornado or a flood puts your planning to the test. You can let them come or switch them off - but a little chaos is part of the appeal, because only the rebuild shows how robust your city really is.

Controls are comfortable mouse work. You build and navigate by clicking, a right-click shows info about a tile, and the scroll wheel zooms into the map or out. Anyone who has played a building game feels at home instantly, and newcomers learn how a city ticks as they build.

Micropolis runs entirely in your browser. No download, no installation, no account. It is open source, nothing is permanently sent to a server, and you can start right away and raise your first metropolis from the ground.