Earliest SimCity Series Memory...

[SimmedCity 2]

Can't quite pinpoint the exact version (either on MS-DOS or Win 95), but definitely SimCity 2000 on Windows.

Not sure why, but the hydro dams stick out to me. And I remember you could build a cascade of them with terrain. Almost like a fountain. What a way this game has come. So happy its still active.

[Forow 2]

I found SimCity 4 Deluxe at a carboot sale when I was 12., and it was missing Disc 1. "Borrowed" a copy from a "friend" and installed the game. I'm still not good at the game, but I always come back to it and its music.

[Eclipticalstorm 30]

I don't remember how I got my first copy of SimCity, but It was SimCity 2000 on PlayStation in 1996 or 1997.  My cousins and I would compete to see who could make the largest city without going broke.  We'd marvel at the preloaded cities and study them to see how they functioned.  Pretty soon I introduced the game to some of my other friends in the neighborhood and we were all trying to build bigger and better cities.  We'd have sleep overs and stay up all night laying out infrastructure and zoning and letting it run a little while we slept.  The poor little PlayStation couldn't handle it.  After running for about 16 hours the game gave us an error message that read something like, "City cannot be loaded - Go outside and play."  We were all dumbfounded.  This was long before responsible gaming messages were built in like warnings on the Nintendo Wii.  We didn't question it - we took our tails outside.  Long story short  I still play today (SimCity4) and the game has had a profound influence on my course of study and drastically shaped my career path.