The first SimCity game is my first love in city-building genre and I was more interested in destroying my cities through various disasters than building them! Seeing the Godzilla-like monster in full action was priceless. Also whenever you demolish any church, a tornado always hits the city too! I would later learn that this was specially implemented in the game "to discourage 'impious' players from bulldozing churches"! :) There's an aphorism from Turkish writer Ferit Edgü that says: "I have two personalities. One wants to create, the other one wants to destroy. I don't know who is more creative."

My most awesome city-building moment was about 1,000 moments with one game played by me and many close friends and family.

SimCity first introduced me to sim games. I loved any sim game I could find, and it wasn't easy as I didn't have a PC as a kid in the 90's, I had a SNES they had quite a few good sim games but I missed out on many of the great classics only on PC. But nothing was better then SimCity, I first seen it being played in my school library on PC in 1991 when I was in the sixth grade. I was amazed watching kids play and never had a chance to play but only watch.

Well I got an SNES for christmas that year and I would rent that game at the video store every weekend, sometimes I would get another game as well but always SimCity. After renting it every weekend for a year and all the late fees I would rack up from not returning the game on time, I finally got my own copy of SimCity for Christmas in 1992. My parents were tired of all the late fees.

I would play this game with everyone, my best friend, my cousins, even my Nana would play this all the time. We played daily and played all nighters on the weekends. But no one was dedicated to SimCity like me and my best friend. We mapped out how many blocks you could fit to a map, and then we would draw blueprints of cities we were going to build. We would map out all the zones for our residential, commercial and industrial and the best way to fit in the most blocks, as well as the best radius for police and fire departments. We also did this at school during class. We even at one point started to make a design for what we thought the next SimCity game should be and the features it should have, drawing screenshots by hand. The best memories I have of any game by far and no game will ever be able to do that for me.

My most epic city building moment happened was when I was playing Simcity 2000 on my dad's computer. I really appreciated that GOG gave away Simcity 2000 for free sometime last year. Helped to live back some childhood memories for sure.

My most embarrassing moment was trying to do one of the scenarios in Simcity 2000, specifically the UFO one (I forget which city). Apparently the player is supposed to fast forward the game until the UFO's stop attacking. Young me though that I had to combat the aliens by pausing and quickly rebuilding everything. What better to show defiance? After unpausing - another ray of destruction destroys the section of town, on top of my brand new building zones and structures. After spending the entire allowance, I had to give up in roughly 5 mins. Still kicking myself to this day - lesson learned don't try to fight aliens in a city builder.

Thanks for bringing these awesome games to GOG!

1602 A.D.
This one time in 1602 A.D. I did not go bankrupt. Like, at all. I did not get any aristocrats, though. But one can't have everything, you know?


Another time I persisted long enough to unlock the gold mine! THE GOLD MINE! Hooray! I did not even know such a thing existed. Now that I could dig for gold, all my financial woes would shurely be solved. Overjoyed I set sail for a small Island with a gold vein, build a gold mine, eagerly awaited the fortunes to come... and went bankrupt.
That day I learned that sometimes there is a difference between gold as raw material and gold as currency.

(That day I also learned about the gold standard, currency markets, world banks and how the real world economy is really realy really complicated.)

Civ IV
I once attempted playing Civ IV without a state religion, you know, for the sake of diversity and tolerance. Everything goes as usual. And then, out of the blue, the ENTIRE! FRIGGIN! GLOBE! declares holy war against me. What the heck? I did not even know that feature existed. My sizeable empire was quickly wiped of the map.
That is when I learned that if you can't fight them, join them.

(And I have been happily waging religious wars ever since. None shall stop buddhist Bismarck!)

I remember playing one of the Simcity games, and I was much younger, suddenly my cash is going down the drain, so I decided to remove fire stations from the city... lo and behold a fire breaks out in or near the fire house and they can't put it out, I just know that half the city was wiped out before I could get it under control. That city had been an ongoing project for weeks, getting to know SimCity. The funny side is that before I destroyed several fire houses, I was trying the city out to survive disasters, the moment I stop sending disasters... one nearly wipes me out.

I remember being fascinated by Caesar 2 when my father was playing it, but during that period of time, I was completely captivated by Transport Tycoon, which consumed all my gaming time.

So when Caesar 3 eventually came out, I jumped at the opportunity of playing my very first city building game. I quickly played through the first couple of training missions, but coming from Transport Tycoon I was more interested in the sandbox missions, where you could play a huge map with all the buildings unlocked. So I picked the largest map available and started playing.

I built houses near the river, so they would have water access, wheat farms to feed my developing city, and granaries for storage. And my city grew in size, even though it was not developing. You see, for some unknown reason, my houses weren't developing beyond the starting tents. The game was clearly indicating that the tents needed a water supply, and I kept checking the water overlay, and it was obvious that every tent had access to water, so what was the problem?

What's worse, the water requirement for housing needed to be fulfilled, before the people would start eating food, so I ended up in this weird cycle, where I kept building granaries to store the food that nobody was eating, and then building additional tents along the river side, so that I could have enough workers to use as granary workers.

After a while, my goal for that game became to reach the 10,000 citizens milestone, which proved almost impossible because I had managed to build tents, along the river, from the very top of the map, all the way to the bottom.

At this point my father saw my game and explained what I was doing wrong. The water overlay, displayed the underground water supply, and I needed to build wells for the people to actually have access to water. Not wanting to waste any more game time, I paused the game, and built tens of wells, ensuring that everybody had water access, but as soon as the first tent evolved, the game engine unlocked the next game mechanic, which was the fire risk.

IMMEDIATELY, all the granaries that bordered my city, burst into flame and I lost all the food I had stockpiled and the fires started to spread to the housing areas. I remember I was so angry at missing the 10,000 citizens milestone that I deleted my save file.

Eventually, after watching my father playing through the entire Caesar 3 campaign, and understanding the game intricacies, I returned to the game and it has since become one of my favorites, but it's remarkable how close I came to utterly abandoning this true classic.

Thank you for releasing these great games GOG! They all, truly deserve their place here.

I remember one of my Civilization 2 games very vividly. I was playing the part of a paranoid military commander who just developed nukes and was sure that my enemies were not too far behind. Thus began the arms race that no other nation really participated in except me, well maybe one other civ caught on, but that did not matter at all.

I did opt for a first strike doctrine and started ramping up production of all my cities to build nukes and place them in all available bombers and submarines and a healthy stockpile in my cities.

After reaching critical mass (heh) in my nuclear arsenal I began the bombing campaign via cities, submarines and long range bombers that would irrevocably doom the planet. I then proceeded to march large armies through the irradiated wasteland and bring down all my opponents to around one city a piece and razing their other cities ( I mean I'm not a complete monster), after that I retreated all my forces back to my cities and basked in the (green) glow of my accomplishments. Hmmm , I remember Fallout releasing a year later. Coincidence?! *queue x-files theme*

However seeing as the Earth was irradiated and the nearby lush forest tiles slowly turning into desert/irradiated tiles I went ahead and decided to shift all production to building all the components for the rocket that would take my civilization to a remote planet near Alpha Centauri.

I remember smiling as I achieved a "peaceful victory" winning the space race, but knowing that all the remaining inhabitants would be doomed back on earth to watch the planet slowly parish and my glorious civilization would conquer the stars.

Welp, time to redownload good ol'' Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and "reboot" my civilization, the nostalgia is strong in this one.

The games on GOG give me a great opportunity to continue to access my favorite classics no matter where in the world I'm stationed at and never disappoint when making me feel nostalgic for my games each time I see their website.

Yes, Caesar 3 seems to be a treasure trove of humorous accidents, it seems that most of the people that posted here have wonderful memories from this game.

Missed the contest, but I had to share my funniest moment...

SimCity 4, with the Rush Hour expansion that let you drive the various vehicles in your city. Sounded like fun to me, so the first thing that I go with is the helicopter from the Army Base. Who doesn't want to fly an attack helicopter around their city? Unfortunately, I took off, and turned around just in front of my Army Base, and pressed the wrong button. BOOM! One missile took out the entire Army Base! Ooops - not only was the depot for the attack helicopter gone, but I couldn't actually land the damn thing either. Ended up flying around looking for something to fly the damn thing into.

Even now, I still wonder what was going through that pilots mind. Imagine the horror of seeing a stray missile heading to your base, and suddenly, your landing pad is gone... it's almost as bad as using a bulldozer and accidentally demolishing your own home!

Thanks, Gog, and congrats to all the winners! This was a fun read.

Thanks for a great contest, great prizes and great stories :)

Thank you GOG! Congratulations to all the other winners, and thank you to everybody else, for your wonderful stories.

For those curious I chose a key for Emperor.

congrats to the winners!

Jesus ... are you sure you put the right Korea as you're home country? Oo
Congratulations through ... I guess?