SimCity Classic in the Browser (micropolisJS)

What it is

SimCity was Will Wright’s city-building game, published by Maxis in 1989 for the Amiga and Macintosh and then for PCs and many other systems. In January 2008 its source code was released as free software under the GPL version 3, a release motivated by the One Laptop per Child project. Because EA kept the SimCity trademark, the open version is called Micropolis, the game’s original working title. Don Hopkins, who had made the UNIX version of SimCity, developed the open release.

micropolisJS is Graeme McCutcheon’s hand-written port of Micropolis to JavaScript and HTML5, started in 2013. It is not an emulator running an old program: the simulation was rewritten for the browser, and the classic tile graphics come with the open-source release. The code was last updated in July 2025.

How to play

1. Open the site with the Play button on this page. A random map appears; Generate another rolls a new one, Play this map takes it.
2. Type a city name (up to 15 letters) and choose Easy, Medium or Hard. Easy starts you in 1900 with $20,000.
3. Pick a tool on the right and click the map to build:
   • Zones: Residential, Commercial and Industrial cost $100 each. Watch the R, C, I demand bars at the bottom left to see what the city wants.
   • Power: a Coal plant ($3,000) or Nuclear plant ($5,000), connected with Wire ($5). Unpowered zones never grow.
   • Transport and services: Road ($10), Rail ($20), Police and Fire stations ($500), Park ($10), Stadium ($5,000), Port ($3,000) and Airport ($10,000).
   • Bulldozer ($1) clears land; Query shows what is on a tile.
4. The left panel has Budget (tax rate and service funding), Evaluation (what the citizens think), Disasters, Save, Settings, Take Picture and Pause.

Disasters you can set off yourself: fire, flood, nuclear meltdown, monster, plane crash and tornado. Settings switch auto-budget, auto-bulldoze and random disasters on or off and change the game speed.

Saving: Save stores one city in your browser’s local storage, and Load game on the start screen opens it again. It does not sync between devices.

The other browser version: micropolisweb.com

Don Hopkins runs his own WebAssembly build of the newer C++ engine, MicropolisCore, at micropolisweb.com. It opens on a large finished city that you pan and zoom with the mouse and keyboard. He calls it an unfinished, evolving demo, so for an actual game from an empty map, micropolisJS is the better pick.

Is it safe and legal?

• Legal: yes. The code and graphics are under the GPL v3 with EA’s additional terms. Those terms say the trademark SimCity is not licensed and no one may claim a link to Electronic Arts.
• Unofficial: micropolisJS is a fan project, not made or endorsed by EA or Maxis. We use the name SimCity only to say which game Micropolis is.
• No ads, no account: the site asks nothing of you. The author no longer takes donations for it and points to a refugee charity in Scotland instead.
• Micropolis is a registered trademark of Micropolis Corporation (Micropolis GmbH) and is licensed here as a courtesy of the owner under the Micropolis Public Name License. See micropolis.com.

Not working?

• The map does not respond to clicks: choose a tool first; the selected tool is highlighted in the Tools box.
• Nothing grows: zones need power. Build a power plant and run Wire to the zones, then add roads.
• “Brownouts” message: your plant is overloaded; build another one.
• Load game is greyed out: there is no saved city in this browser yet, or the site data was cleared.

Unofficial. This page is written by an independent directory. It is not made by, endorsed by or affiliated with Maxis (now Electronic Arts) or Graeme McCutcheon (micropolisJS) (SimCity Classic in the Browser (micropolisJS)'s author). We do not host any files, and we never link to game files, ROMs or ISOs.