Ants are incredible creatures. A single, tiny ant can pick up 20 times its body weight. Worker ants respond to queens, which can have millions of babies in their lifetimes. As constant foragers, pheromone tra🧸ils guide them and they “hear” only through vibrations. Th💛ey have extraordinarily tiny brains; however, the collective amount of ant brains within a colony of 40,000 ants would be roughly the size of a single human brain.
So, perhaps it wasn’t that weird that back in the early 1990s, someone thought it would be a good idea to make an ant colony simulation game. Developed by and released in 1991, SimAnt would never be a mainstream commercial success. Instead, it would live in the shadows of Maxis’s hit game , SimCity 2000 and, later, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Sims. But even though SimAnt was unable to establish a foothold in an era where 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sonic the Hedgehog and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past reigned supre♚me, the obscure game 🎃lives on in the minds and hearts of a particular breed of ‘90s gamers.
Throughout the 1990s, Maxis gave players a slate of other unusual simulation games. Among them was SimEarth, the simulation game that allowed a person to play God. There was also SimGolf, a premise that was exciting to no one except elderly retirees who had no idea how to use computers. And, there was SimFarm, the farming simulation precursor to , the game ꦬthat single-handedly corru💖pted your Facebook feed with its spammy marketing.
But SimAnt remains, perhaps, the strangest all.
SimAnt: Mounds Of Fun?
Like the rest of the Sim games of the moment, SimAnt had a simple premise. The player's job was to grow an ant colony by dragging ants around a yard and through a maze of ant tunnels in a constant effort to obtain small, green spheres of food. Bringing back these spheres of food to ꦑthe colony would ensure it would thrive, so you could produce soldier ants to fight enemies, forager ants to gather more food﷽ and breeder ants to reproduce. Succeeding in developing and sustaining the right mix of ants would allow you to grow your colony and expand to additional nests.
At the start of th🌜e game, the colony was a single hill on a tile in the yard of a family home. By the end, should you have wisely built your ant empir💎e, you could take over the entire house.
Of course, a game isn’t much of a game without an🌃 antagonist. You could find yourself up against a competing colony of red ants. Or, should your ant make a wrong turn, it could 𒁃become prey to a giant arachnid, something the game made sure to implant in my impressionable child mind with its twisted sense of humor.
You'd also have to consider hazards such as lawnmowers and pesticides. And, if those types of opposition forces wer♛en’t enough, you also had to face nature as a storm could flood your colony.
It’s hard to understand the marketing pitch behind an ant colony simulation. Certainly, no one was sitting in a meeting and suggesting SimAnt could be the next 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario Bros. While fairly so💖p⭕histicated in terms of ‘90s gaming capabilities, it sounds today like it might be more in line with an aspiring game developer’s jokey side project. But perhaps it stands as a simple relic of its time. Within Maxis’s early series of games, there was a tacit emphasis on education — a hope that people could learn something by doing it, even if it wasn’t a perfect simulation.
It ta🔥kes a certain type of person to want to play an ant simulator. The simple premise attracts a uniquely nerdy person who loves science and discovery as much as they love marking tasks off of checklists.
In other words, it's someone like me.
Indeed, I was a weird kid.
An Aspiring SimAnthropologist
For people like myself, there’s inherently something fascinating about a well-constructed simulation game. Whether you’re building a simulated city, a virtual theme park, an online dollhouse or an entire 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:civilization, there’s a strange appeal within the monotony of it all. Though the simulation management tasks may be repetitive andไ mundane, it’s rewarding to grow it into something bigger than the sum of its parts.
One of my earliest memories is of falling into a pile of reꦬd ants. Growing up in Florida, those little suckers are everywhere. On that unfortunate day, they were also all over my legs as my four-year-old self screamed and cried for my mom. But that day alsဣo inspired a strange childhood interest in ants.
Maybe it’s no coincidence that the same year Maxis gave the world SimAnt, I also got my hands on a book called Scary Stories for Sleep-overs. In the book, there's a story called “The Gift.” It's about a child who receives an ant farm for a gift. Thinking it’s stupid, he tortures the ants. He later discovers that they've dug their tunnels in a matter that spells the word "HATE" in the dirt of the ant farm. He attempts to kill them all with peroxide, then later then wakes up in the ℱmiddle of the night to find himself being eaten alive by ants.
Eventually, I decided I needed an ant farm. It’s onlyౠ in hindsight that I realize the experience of falling into an ant pile may have grown into some sort൩ of morbid curiosity. Though I knew that was impossible, a small part of me also wanted an ant farm just so I could bear witness to any potential cryptic ant farm spellings (not that I planned to torture my own ants).
With good reason, my parents were fundamentally opposed to me owning an ant farm. I already had a guinea pig. Wasn’t that enough? SimAnt would be the closest I’d ever come to owning a for🍎micarium.
Queen of the Hill
I can’t recall whether I ever won a game of SimAnt. Frankly, I’m not sure it mattered. SimAnt was a game that rew🌺arded patience and diligence, of which I ha๊ve neither.
But still, there was something intriguing about this type of strategic gameplay. It was a balancing act, something Maxis had mastered with SimCity. Sk🐷ill and strategy were involved, and every choice had a consequence. I found myself 🌜drawn in by this cycle of action followed by a reward. I suppose it helped that these tiny creatures looked like terrifying monsters up close, something that made this cooler than the cartoonish games I usually played.
Looking back, I realize it doesn’t matter whether it’s an ant colony, a space colony or an entire empire, as long as the gameplay gives players an interesting way to shape the worlds t🎃hey're creating.
As ♊someone who primarily plays FPS games today, ꦑit’s hard to imagine my foray into a gaming career was inspired at least in part by simulated ant colony management. But there I was, a leader among many. I ran the nest, and all the ants in it were required to answer to me and only me — even if my decisions frequently got them all killed.
In any case, the magic of SimAnt is that it allowed me to become “queen for a day.” That's true even if that simply meant being the queen of a virtual ant colony. It loved ♉it, and it lives on deep in my mind when I think about my earliest years playing video games.
However, all good things must end. Once the game began to feel repetitive, I turned my attention to SimEarth. In that game, my favorite activity became putting radiation all over the p🦹lanet to try to get snakes to mutate to fly.
Did I already mention I was a weird kid?