With the early Maxis hits like Sim City or Sim Earth, the building game Sim Refinery only has the engine in common. The simulation is about tough physics, chemistry and above all about earning money by refining oil. The gameplay is rather a minor matter at the moment – because the fact that the game still exists was questioned for years. So Sim Refinery is a little retro sensation.
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The technology magazine had in May 2020 Ars Technica published an article on the inefficient Serious Games department at Maxis in the early 1990s.
Maxis Business Simulations was founded because, after Sim City’s success, many companies in the United States wanted to buy their own simulation games for in-house training and education purposes. The problem was: Sim City was not really realistic, but it was for this reason that it was fun.
The business processes – or, as in the case of Sim Refinery, the chemical processes – of a group department are unfortunately usually boring. Even today, gamification has it same problem: How do you convey dry content in an entertaining way without overwhelming the players?
Maxis Business Simulations did not find an answer at the time, the department was soon closed again. The only known project was a cooperation with the oil company Chevron. The title: Sim Refinery. No one outside of the two companies involved had ever seen it, let alone played it. Until now.
After the article was published on Ars, a reader came forward a photo from a floppy disk that was supposed to contain the prototype of the long-gone serious game. He had received the disk from a friend in the oil industry and was able to extract and open an image after a few days Archive.org upload.
The game is now available online in an emulator and can be downloaded. There was even on Twitch first streams of the gameplay.
The game looks like a representative of the Sim series, but if you don’t have a thorough understanding of what happens in a refinery, you may have difficulty understanding what to do. There is a kind of tutorial (see video), but unfortunately it is not particularly helpful without an accompanying comment.
Perhaps it is comforting to know that some players have caused a fire to break out by deliberately changing some of the countless parameters. At least in this regard, the buttoned Sim Refinery shares a few chaos genes with its wild parents. Otherwise, the most exciting thing about this game is that history its creation and rediscovery.
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