Do you like Classic Game Room anymore Classic Game Room No Your house burned down. Whose fault is that Science.

Before we burn this city to the ground, we have to build it in the first place here in Cities: Skylines, a video game, the spiritual successor to the original SimCity. I’ll show you more chaos and destruction at the end, but if you’re like me and you grew up on SimCity on five‑and‑a‑quarter‑inch floppy disk, before the entire series devolved into The Sims just dancing naked on each other’s coffee tables, there was once some actual city planning. But like everything else in the world, the drama and the emotions won. Who wants to build roads when you can snort a line of coke off your neighbor’s surfboard and end up in their pleasure dungeon. I guess me. I’m the one who likes to build roads.

Anyway, before The Sims, which are fine in their own right, there was just SimCity. You’d start with a big blank lot and just build a city, and that’s Cities: Skylines. It’s just a different name. And it’s more futuristic because it’s the future. It’s 20XX now instead of 19XX.

I loved SimCity, so when I discovered this I was so happy. I played it quite a bit. It’s one of these games that’s good on the exercise bike. As I’m artificially keeping myself alive, I can build a city and then torment the people living in it. Yeah, you want to take Cosmic Carnage Highway to ED‑209 Boulevard and from there it’s a straight shot into a building burning down.

I love that you can rename everything. It’s endlessly entertaining, and if you’ve ever played SimCity you’ll be right at home. The mechanics and the gameplay are a little bit different, but it all works more or less the same. This is the PlayStation 4 version. It’s also on a bunch of other stuff like PlayStation 5 and PC. You start off with pretty much nothing, just an entry point. And it’s tricky because you’re eventually going to have to rebuild everything, because like a real city, it’s the roads that screw you later on.

Cause you never have enough money to redo everything all at once. You’ve gotta do everything in pieces. So you start off by building a couple roads. You want to keep everything small at first. You don’t want too many things because then it gets expensive. There’s some financial planning involved here too. Start off with a couple roads. You zone industrial, residential, or commercial. You need power, you need water. You definitely need some bars so that people get drunk and don’t realize how miserable their life is in your crappy city. And you start a social media company called Chirper that you’ll later rename Triple X.

More on that later. It may take a while, it might take a couple games, but eventually you’ll figure out how to build a functioning city. Or at least a semi‑functioning city, which is probably the best most of us can hope for anyway.

You’ve got finances and taxes to deal with, you’ve got to build schools and hospitals, and then you’ve got to build libraries so that you can ban books in them. It’s like all the real‑world problems in a video game, and I love that you can walk around your city and enjoy it in this Grand Theft Auto kind of mode, but without flamethrowers.

So you’re like the mayor. Your job is to lie and mislead these idiots and steal from them so you can build a solid‑gold bidet in your third Bugatti. But you’ve gotta keep them happy so they don’t rise up and murder you. And you do that by listening to them. Or at least pretending to listen to them. So they’ll start complaining about stuff on Chirper—sorry, Triple X. They’ll be like: We need schools. Nobody’s picking up our trash. There’s a dead person rotting in my yard.

That’s when it’s time to act. So they start complaining about dead people, you have to build a graveyard so you can make more dead people and fill the graveyard. If they start whining about trash collection, you just tear down their building and build another one. Screw them. If they complain about education, you burn down the universities and build casinos. Pay attention to your citizens and then forcibly ignore them. It’s a skill you’ll learn.

It’s great to figure out how the commercial and residential and industrial areas all work together. It’s actually really similar to the original SimCity, which I basically mastered back in seventh grade. You don’t usually want to put your residential areas right next to the nuclear waste dump. You want to separate them with commercial zones or put in some parks.

Eventually you’ll build a space elevator, a Ferris wheel, tunnels, bridges, airports, and all kinds of expansion‑pack nonsense. It’s challenging and fun to build and manage your city and all the transportation systems.

I raised everyone’s taxes. I cut healthcare. You don’t need healthcare—eventually you’ll be dead and it’s just a waste of money. I think the life expectancy in my city is about fifteen. I built the carousel from Logan’s Run, so I’ll just hop on that thing, problem solved. I own all of the media, cable channels, podcasts, and social media companies. So whatever I say is true. Carousel’s fun, take a ride. Hey, hey, have you people seen any sailors I’m looking for sailors. Anyone. Sailors.

Look, I even built a doomsday clock. My citizens are so dumb and distracted by football and donuts that they don’t even notice what I’m doing. That’s perfect. That gives me more power to mislead all of them using Triple X and spread misinformation so they give me more money and I can build a space rocket, which I named Richard because someone’s gotta get Richard off that launch pad.

We’re going to do that by taxing everyone into oblivion and destroying their lives, but I’ve promised all of them that we’re going to fly into space and discover alien civilizations and ban books in their libraries.

That bridge was just in the way. It’s dumb. We’ll tear that down. Look, everyone’s thrilled. I’m doing a great job. This building over here is an eyesore, so we’re tearing that down. There’s a hospital over here—stupid. Nobody needs a hospital. Hospitals take patrons away from cemeteries. It’s bad for business. But you know what’s good for business My space rocket.

The few remaining citizens who haven’t either died or moved away are in for quite a show as we conquer space.

SPACE.

Yeah, I’m doing a great job. I’m the best mayor ever. Everybody says so.