SimCity 4 player spends 1,500 hours building massive metropolis and shares result in one huge screenshot
Released in 2003, SimCity 4 remains the gold standard of city-building simulators for many fans. Twenty-three years after launch, the game continues to impress with its scope and possibilities that modern projects like Cities: Skylines 2 still haven't surpassed. The latest proof comes from a Reddit post featuring a composite image of an 8x8 kilometer metropolis created over 1,500 hours.
User CheeseJuust shared the result of fifteen hundred hours of work – a massive city with a population of 655,000 Sims, captured in a single 12K x 8K pixel image. Creating the composite required using nearly all 32 gigabytes of RAM in Photoshop, stitching together numerous screenshots of individual tiles. The map exceeds the standard maximum game size of 4x4 kilometers by double on each axis – made possible through modifications that allow connecting multiple regions.
The detailed screenshot reveals all elements of realistic urban development – a dense central business district with skyscrapers, extensive suburbs, industrial quarters, a coastal port, a major airport, and agricultural areas surrounding the urbanized territory. Railway tracks pierce through the entire city, including loop junctions for train turnarounds. Two merging rivers divide the metropolis into several districts connected by numerous bridges.
The original PNG file weighs 200 megabytes, so you'll need to download it to examine all the details.
City-building fans expressed admiration for the work, declaring SimCity 4 the pinnacle of the genre. Many noted the organic nature of the development – the city looks like it grew naturally rather than being artificially designed. Particularly impressive were the farms separated by rows of trees along roads, characteristic of European planning.
Game enthusiasts recalled the catastrophic disappointment of SimCity 2013, which didn't allow creating even a tenth of this scale. Meanwhile, Cities: Skylines often feels more like a traffic management simulator than a full-fledged city builder.
