THE HISTORY OF GOD GAMES

A small genre that leaves an almighty footprint

- Rick Lane

Many videogames furnish the player with godlike powers, but surprisingly few have tried to simulate the complete experience of being a god. A specific sub-genre of management sim that emerged in the late 1980s, god games lend players control not merely over a specific institution or social structure (like a theme park or a city). They give you power over reality itself, letting you shape worlds, create life and destroy both on a whim.

God games are dizzyingly ambitious, and perhaps because of this, only a sparse pantheon has ever been made. Even then, the status of many of these as god games is debatable. Many canonical god games either neglect to acknowledge your role as a god, or outright reject it, expressing the emergence of life through natural processes, rather than divine intervention.

The history of god games doesn’t start with a bang or a command. It’s more primordial, a confluence of ideas that merged and—dare I say it—evolved over decades. Bits of god games can be seen as far back as 1964’s The Sumerian Game, and 1968’s Hamurabi. Both these games cast players as Sumerian kings, tasking them with managing grain harvests in the face of random disasters. Then there’s 1983’s Utopia, a two-player game in which each player runs their own island, Utopia is credited as being one of the first games to include city-building and real-time strategy elements.

The holy spirit of god games looms large in the history of PC gaming. So take my disembodied hand, and let us wander through the (intelligently designed) history of this most divine of videogame genres.