Wren

Sorry to hear the old sites are down. I'm the original creator of them, and I just looked for the files I originally sent Dirk. Not finding them anywhere, but maybe Dirk has the original .zip I sent him? I can check with him. I also have some of the original files scattered in some old backups, but so far they don't look terribly viable. Maybe some of the site is immortalized in the Wayback Machine?

I'm the creator of the three SCURK buildings, which might have been included in various tilesets. The foreground building was indeed inspired by 225 South Sixth which I thought was called the Towle Building, but now it's Capella Tower. The one on the right was based on Jackson Tower. It's specifically part of the Galtier Towers (or Galtier Plaza), but it looks like they are called Cray Towers (or Cray Plaza) now. I was born in St. Paul and grew up in West St. Paul, so buildings around the twin cities were often used in my SCURK art. The building on the left, just for completeness, is based on a building from the SimCity 2000 box art. The original tilesets are still hosted at http://www.sc3000.com/sc2000/scurk/fulltils.cfm and are part of the Renew 95 tileset specifically. There's another Minneapolis tower in the Renew USA tileset, which is based on Wells Fargo Center as mentioned. There are others I made based on real world buildings, but posted those may need to be an exercise for another time. ;-)

The development team at Maxis has re-launched SimCity's official Facebook page. With all of the recent SimCity news coverage around GOP candidates and SimCity 4, they are inviting everyone to come visit their facebook page and share stories about setting taxes in SimCity.

If you haven't already heard, SimCity has made some pretty big news because a lot of people are referring to the game's RCI default tax rates (9-9-9) being inspiration for Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan for a new national sales tax, income tax, and corporate tax. Check out Maxis' new official Facebook page for more news stories and video - Official SimCity Facebook page. I just thought it was pretty interesting, trendy, and who knows, maybe more news will come out of that page?

Good news: I was able to uninstall and then reinstall with success. A reboot after uninstall was thrown in for good measure as well. Hopefully that will work for you. Also, avoid doing anything with your computer while it installs. I'm not sure but that may have caused my problem. Good luck!

I wanted to try this game tonight, but wow, so many technical issues. I can't even get the patches to install, which means it won't let me play. I'm on Windows XP. I log in to the game, it downloads the patches, but when I try to install the patches, I get: democxl_3007_to_3008c.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. [... and then another error dialog for each successive patch] Anyone else get this? And apparently, the latest patch fixes an uninstall issue. Great, so now I can't play the game, nor can I uninstall it. Not a very good impression. I guess I'll go play "sleep for the night". ;-)

Actually, I have to make a slight correction to the building name. Maxis named the buildings using employee last names, at least for probably 99% of cases. Wren Insurance is named after an employee whose last name was Wren. My building is in there though, and it's named Weburg Apartments. That apartment complex doesn't show up too often in game, I think it's a medium or high density building, with lower land value. ;-) You can imagine that me and the guy whose last name was Wren got confused by quite a few other Maxis folks! We got each others' e-mail, etc. For the takeover, I'm really happy to see such great support for the merging. I look forward to working with ST on that in the next month or so.