Why Create a New City Builder in 2025?

Uptown - Classic City Builder for Mac - Oct 14, 2025

If you were around in the early ’90s, you might remember the magic of booting up SimCity on an old Macintosh. On that black and white screen my first little towns came alive — growing from a gathering of houses into bustling cities. By the time SimCity 2000 came along in full color, I was hooked.

I spent countless hours watching my creations evolve: laying out zones, waiting for houses, offices and factories to rise, placing special landmarks such as airports, parks and police stations — or watching with a mixture of fear and exitement when a tornado tore everything apart. My favorite part was always the early game. Starting small, sketching out the outlines of a town, and watching it slowly come to life. Those early games struck a perfect balance: not too complex, but still rich enough to make you feel like a city planner and mayor all at once.

Why City Builders Still Work Today

Fast forward to 2025, and city builders are still a very popular genre. So are cozy, creative games where you can craft and tinker at your own pace. The formula behind the original SimCity still resonates: simulation-driven play that lets you discover the rules of a little world and test what works (or doesn’t).

Those older games, as brilliant as they are, look and sound their age. Their charm is timeless, but pixelated graphics and crunchy sound effects don’t always connect with a younger audience (e.g. my kids). For a genre that’s all about immersion, a fresh coat of paint goes a long way.

Enter Uptown

And that’s where Uptown comes in. My goal is simple: take the DNA of early SimCity, give it somewhat modern graphics and sound, and gently expand the simulation without piling on overwhelming complexity. Uptown will introduce new landmarks, extra buildings, and tweaks that make the city feel more alive — but the core loop will stay faithful to what made those games so fun in the first place.

Think of it as a love letter to the classics, updated just enough to feel fresh.

Why Mac Only?

One unusual decision I’ve made is to build Uptown just for Mac. The reason is personal: I am a game developer using Unity by trade, but for my hobby projects I enjoy using Apple’s tools like Swift and SpriteKit. A change of pace, that keeps the project fun and my Swift skills alive. The tradeoff is that the audience is smaller — but Uptown will run well on modest hardware, and Mac users rarely get games designed specifically for them. Also something we haven’t seen since the ’90s: Mac-exclusives. Who remembers Marathon, Glider, Myst and tons of shareware by Ambrosia?

A Modest Scope with Big Heart

I’m keeping the scope of Uptown roughly in line with the original SimCity — simple, approachable, but still deep enough to get lost in. A dash of SimCity 2000 will sneak in as it brought many improvements, along with a few of my own ideas. Keeping that scope small has already proven to be quite the challenge. At the end of the day, Uptown is about recapturing the feeling of those early days: the joy of starting small, the excitement of watching a city come alive, and the satisfaction of being both designer, creator and destroyer of your own little world.

👉 Next time, I’ll dive into Uptown’s roots and talk about the game’s “DNA” — how the original SimCity source code, and modern tools shaped what I’m building today.