Trivia / SimCity 4

• Cut Song: Apparently there were supposed to be twelve additional songs in the Rush Hour expansion pack, but some four or five were removed in the final product.
• Distanced from Current Events: A plane crash disaster was cancelled because of the World Trade Center attacks. The developers cited this trope.
• Dummied Out:
  • Dirt roads were supposed to be present and would have been cheaper than streets but also have lower capacity. They were presumably cut due to redundancy. The transport adviser was supposed to recommend them as a cost-saving measure and the leftover code has been reused by the Network Addon Mod team to create the "Real Highway Plugin".
  • The City Hall was supposed to be upgraded 2 times as your city grows, like the airports who are upgraded when they reach higher capacity. The in-game City Hall is supposed to be the Small City Hall, and models exist in the game files for the Medium and Large versions alongside the fully functional code, making it unclear why it was cut, and trivial to re-enable, though due to a bug one of the trees will be replaced at random by any custom prop installed, meaning unless you patch it your small town city hall could have an airliner, sequoia or concrete slab on the front lawn.
  • Similarly to the cut City Halls cut above and the airports in the retail game, the Seaport was supposed to upgrade when it reached high-capacity.
  • There was a large amount of code, apparently cut fairly early in development since it's mostly incomplete, that added weather and also complex water mechanics, such as aquifers and salt water. There was supposed to be a desalination plant that would take salt water and turn it into fresh water, and it was possible to drain the water table if you exploited it too much. The only remnants of this in the final game is the "Water source: Aquifer" note on the water buildings, though the final product aquifers are bottomless.
  • A garbage incinerator was going to be implemented. It was apparently cut very late in development, since most of the code is complete and it even has an icon in the game file that looks similar to the incinerator in 3000. It would have been a cheaper alternative to the Waste-To-Energy plant that consumed garbage but only produced pollution and no power. Some plugins restore it to the game.
  • City ordinances from 3000 like the public smoking ban are still in the game files, but unused.
• Multi-Disc Work: SimCity 4 needs two CDs to be installed.
• What Could Have Been: SimCity 4 was originally going to have more expansion packs after Rush Hour, but they were all cancelled after Will Wright deemed the game had gone too complex. One of them in particular would have been focused on nature and the environment in the same way that Rush Hour focused on transportation, and would have added things like waterfalls and mountain lakes.

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