Three surviving images of SimRefinery, a game produced by Maxis’s Business Simulations division for Chevron.
Top: PC Magazine article “Businesses Play War Games” by Christopher Barr, June 15, 1993, 31.
Lower-left: San Francisco Chronicle article “Computer Games Get Real - Simulations let companies solve complex problems” by Ken Siegmann, Ben Wildavsky, and Chronicle staff writers, March 5, 1993, D1. (via Beyond Sims on Flickr)
Lower-right: Washington Post article “The Realities of Simulations” by John Burgess, April 12, 1993, 19.
For context, from the Post article… (shortened)
Simulations. They are already a big part of why computers are everywhere. Just look at arcade games. Now companies like Chevron and Maxis are trying to move the discipline to a new plateau, by using the whimsical approach of games to liven up industrial training courses.
Maxis’s SimRefinery may look familiar to some PC users. That’s because SimRefinery was produced by the same team that created the cult program SimCity in 1989. One of those rare programs that defines a new genre, SimCity has gone on to sell more than 2 million copies and create fanatic loyalty.
Chevron spent about $75,000 on a SimRefinery prototype that lacks some features - for example, the user should be able to design and build the refinery, as well as operate it, for example. But so far his team is still waiting for the go-ahead - and the money - to finish and introduce it. People at Chevron like it, [Chevron computer engineer Terrell Touchstone] said. But it’s still a big leap to make, this merger of games and training.
I wonder if any of these attempts at corporate productivity simulators were preserved?
So although I have doubts about whether there are any copies remaining in the wild (since they were purpose-built for specific companies), there’s a surprising amount of information about what games Maxis Business Simulations actually worked on. In addition to SimRefinery, they also developed SimEnvironment (an environmental management game for EPA contractors?), SimPower (an electrical power simulator, though it may not have left planning stages), and SimSite (a military site reclamation sim, also possibly unproduced).
MBS was eventually spun off into Thinking Tools, Inc., which developed SimHealth and other non-Maxis-affiliated programs like Telesim (regional telecom management) and the Y2K preparedness sim Think 2000.
It’s so easy to write these things off as ephemera, but if SimHealth is any indication, business modeling software, mass-market simulations, and “serious games” intersect in some really interesting ways. I’m really curious about if/how something like Telesim plays with more explicitly game-y tendencies.