Play Simearth - The Living Planet Online

SimEarth came out for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990, developed by Maxis. It was part of that early wave of SNES games that tried to bring complex computer simulations to a console audience, sitting alongside titles like SimCity but aiming for a much grander scale.

In SimEarth, you control the entire planetary environment, not a specific character. Your main objective is to guide a planet from its primordial beginnings through the development of intelligent life and potentially into a spacefaring civilization. You directly manipulate global factors like temperature, atmospheric composition, and landmass formation. You manage the evolution of life forms, guiding single celled organisms toward complex animals and eventually sentient species. The pacing is slow and deliberate, demanding long term planning over quick reactions; the difficulty comes from the interconnected systems, where a small change to the ocean can unexpectedly collapse your entire ecosystem. Playing it feels like conducting a fragile, multi million year experiment where you hold all the variables, and the planet itself is your only real opponent.