Chances are, you’d by no means even heard of SimRefinery except you had been certainly one of a handful of chemical engineers at Chevron throughout the early 1990s. That’s should you knew about SimCity builders Maxis’ transient foray into the world of enterprise administration instruments in any respect, thoughts. But due to some good outdated on-line word-of-mouth and a retired engineer refusing to throw away outdated floppies, Maxis’ obscure oil refinery simulation has been immortalised at no cost on the Internet Archive.
Last month, Phil Salvador over at The Obscuritory dove into a long-forgotten part of Maxis’ past. See, between 1992 and 1994, the SimCity devs had a short stint in creating office simulations by means of Maxis Business Simulations – an try to show their gamier simulations into skilled company coaching instruments. One of these was SimRefinery, a bespoke oil refinery sim commissioned by Chevron.
It’s an incredible learn, however essentially the most fascinating thread to observe is what happened after the story’s publication. See, Salvador’s piece was picked up by plenty of websites, together with ArsTechnica. Commenting beneath that story, reader postbebop famous that they knew a former chemical engineer at Chevron who, in some way, nonetheless had an outdated copy kicking round.
With assist from postbebop, the pair managed to transform the bodily SimRefinery floppy knowledge right into a digital version. That model has since been uploaded to the Internet Archive, the place it’s now playable for free – both by way of obtain or by means of the Archive’s browser-based DOS emulator.
Rather than meticulously recreating a whole refinery, SimRefinery labored by giving engineers a broader sandbox from which to consider their operations – a lot in the identical means SimCity pushed gamers to consider civic administration. The essential goal is to “maximize the refinery’s long-term profitability”, positive. Of course, being a Maxis game, issues may nonetheless go catastrophically, explosively fallacious. Failure’s a great a studying too as any, proper?
Chevron paid Maxis $75,000 for this prototype, and was seemingly acquired with optimistic reception. But regardless of these fond first impressions, and as a consequence of poor timing (arriving in a interval of layoffs and downsizing), the game by no means noticed widespread use throughout the agency. SimRefinery was certainly one of solely two games launched by Maxis Business Simulations, adopted up by SimHealth. The builders would break off from Maxis to type Thinking Tools – persevering with their fee work for company purchasers, the army and the White House earlier than lastly shuttering in 1998.
For Maxis, the remaining is historical past. But SimRefinery’s revival supplies a small – if extraordinarily fiddly – look again at a chunk of their previous the builders have lengthy left behind.
