Old fogies like me remember SimCity and its related spin-offs (the innovative SimEarth the newer SimCity 2000, 3000, and 4 and so on) more than what came afterward. I think if I had known that mess was in my future, I wouldn’t have minded the maroon piece of paper so much. Meanwhile, EA’s flaky servers made the game much more unreliable than it needed to be.
Later a developer even said it straight out. Well, EA and Maxis have never admitted it straight out, but their various hemming and hawing about multiplayer and trading fooled no one, and a modder proved it wasn’t a technical requirement. The 2013 version of the game, aside from a number of baffling design decisions involving the way you built your cities, required an always-on Internet connection as a form of digital rights management. Little did I know that over two decades later, EA and Maxis would infuriate the entire game industry with its DRM-encoded, always-on, pseudo-multiplayer version of SimCity. I’d still play anyway, because it was such a great game. It was dark red and blue because that made it almost impossible to photocopy.
I’ll never forget the maroon-and-dark-blue sheet that came with the game you were supposed to use it to look up the right answer to a question on screen before you could start playing. I also remember something horrendously frustrating about it: the copy protection.