GOG labels this as the Special Edition. This is a lie. This is a standard version of the game.
The Special Edition allows for you to change tilesets.
This option is one of the reasons I reinstalled.
As a young boy I used to play with the futuristic tileset and wanted to relive the past.

Thanks GOG.

"Use the Urban Renewal Kit tools to design your own buildings."

Are you sure this still isn't the version you're thinking of? GOG doesn't have the Network Edition available due to compatiblily reasons.

Yes I'm positive. If you have the edition from GOG load up any city and go to File. There should be an option "Load Tile Set" but there isn't because its not the special edition.

It is also changeable from the main menu in the special edition. I found the attached screenshot on google as an example.

Maybe this is a difference between the Windows and DOS versions of the games?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_2000#Ports_and_special_editions
Wikipedia says this about the Special Edition:

"A re-packaged version of SimCity 2000, SimCity 2000 Special Edition, was released in 1995 for Microsoft Windows and DOS PCs. In addition to containing All expansions, it also featured the SimCity Urban Renewal Kit, the Vol. 1 scenario pack, remade music, new cities selected by Maxis from a 1994 competition, bonus scenarios and cities, and movies.[3]

The movies were a first for Maxis; SimCity 2000-SE was the first "Sim" game to feature "real" videos (compared to "animated bitmaps", such as the winning screen in SimAnt). These videos included the introduction movie and four commentary videos by Will Wright; the latter were accessed via the "WillTV" application that came with the game."

I've been looking into this and I can reach only two conclusions: Either the DOS version of SC2000SE does not have this feature, or the GOG build is some half-breed version of SC2000 with some added Special Edition features (Scenarios, WillTV etc).

Interesting...

I don't think its a half-breed...
I uninstalled and reinstalled to see if I could notice if anything at all said Special Edition.

The biggest red flag I saw is after you install via the GOG installer you are greeted with a screen that says
"Name Your Game"

And it clearly says on it Simcity 2000

When I was a kid this wasn't what it was like.

The splash screen also simply says 'Sim City 2000' and is dated with the year 1993. The special edition windows version you provided a screenshot of says 1994. I've not been able to find a screenshot of a potential DOS version that says 1994 or 1995..

For Christ sake, you can change your tile set by over-writing the one used in the game.

Just to confirm, I loaded the SC2000 Special Edition from CD. This IS the Special Edition. The DOS version does not advertise itself as the SE but still gives you access to the scenarios and such that the Windows version has. Any lack of feature compared to the Windows version is not the fault of GOG as this particular vesion IS the retail SC2000 SE DOS executable.

As a young lad I had the SC2k SE CD format and it was the exact same as the one on GOG... unless I just never found it on my CD...

I have a windows copy as well, t doesn't have a "Load Tile Set" option.

EDIT: I ran the Urban Renewal Kit (ran, didn't save anything) and the option shows up now. Tried the same thing in the DOS version, it didn't show up. I guess it's just version peculiarities or something,

What you need to know is that the DOS version had a different way of loading tilesets, which you can only do from within the SCURK application.

On the Mac it automatically boots into Simcity, but there is a menu option called 'return to launch options'.
From there you can go to the SCURK.

While in SCURK, you see the option "pick and copy", which is the option you need to load a tileset into simcity.
What it does is set a 'permanent' tileset to Simcity each time you start the game. It's not truly permanent, but you can only change the tileset again by using SCURK. So there's no "Load Tileset" menu in the DOS version at all. But it is definitely the Special Edition.

If you type in "vers" while in Simcity, you'll see that it's version 1.10 which is the Special Edition.
(well okay, it was originally called the CD Collection, but when they added support for Windows '95, they renamed it the Special edition.)

So, are the SE Tile Sets included in the GOG version, or do they need to be sourced separately?

Aren't they under the SCURKART directory?