Play Sim Earth - The Living Planet Online

Sim Earth came out for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990, developed by Maxis. It was part of that wave of simulation games on consoles, a time when you could find complex PC-style strategy titles making their way to living room televisions. The game stood out for its sheer scope, letting you manage the development of an entire planet.

You control the planet's climate, terrain, and the evolution of life itself. Your main objective is to guide a world from its primordial beginnings all the way to a spacefaring civilization, or sometimes just to keep it from becoming a lifeless rock. Key mechanics involve adjusting atmospheric gases, placing and managing different life forms, and using a terraforming tool to raise or lower land. The pacing is slow and deliberate, and the difficulty can be unforgiving; a single wrong decision can trigger a runaway greenhouse effect or an ice age that wipes out everything. Playing it feels like conducting a very long, very fragile experiment.