Lost & found: decades-old chevron game simcity spin-off surfaces
Thirty years after it vanished from public view, a remarkable piece of gaming history has resurfaced: Sim Refinery, a simulation game commissioned by Chevron and developed by Maxis in 1992. Its rediscovery offers a fascinating glimpse into a time when the lines between entertainment and corporate training blurred, and when even the oil industry sought to harness the power of the burgeoning video game landscape.
A corporate quest for simulation
The story began with the phenomenal success of SimCity. Maxis, riding high on its urban planning simulator, attracted attention not just from gamers, but also from businesses looking to explore the potential of simulation for training and analysis. John Hils, a software specialist from Delta Logic (later acquired by Maxis), proposed a series of “serious” simulations, including Sim Health and a military training project, Project 28. The idea was to leverage Maxis’s simulation engine for applications beyond pure entertainment.
Chevron, seemingly envisioning a novel way to train its workforce, approached Maxis with an unusual request: a game that simulated the complexities of managing an oil refinery. The oil giant provided a modest $75,000 budget for a prototype, setting in motion a project that would ultimately be shelved, yet leave an indelible mark on the history of simulation games.
The project, spearheaded by Hils and the Maxis Business Simulation division, seemed promising. A prototype was developed and received positive feedback from Chevron employees in September 1992. However, a corporate restructuring within Chevron, coupled with widespread layoffs, abruptly halted the game's development. The timing was unfortunate; launching a game during a period of internal upheaval would have been a public relations disaster for both companies.
From disks to the internet archive
For decades, Sim Refinery remained a forgotten footnote, accessible only to those who worked at Chevron during its brief existence. Its rediscovery began with a chance encounter on Ars Technica. A reader, recalling a colleague's experience with the game at Chevron’s Richmond, California facility, mentioned possessing a copy on a floppy disk. This seemingly insignificant comment sparked a chain of events that would bring the lost game back to life. The disk's contents were subsequently uploaded to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, offering a rare peek into a corporate simulation project from the early 1990s.
While a prototype, incomplete with missing functions and unreactive buttons, the core mechanics of Sim Refinery were remarkably intact. The game’s tutorial and gameplay sequences demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of refinery operations, showcasing Maxis’s ability to adapt its simulation Technology to a diverse range of contexts. The discovery even unearthed the original employee manual, a testament to the game’s intended use as a training tool.
The ensuing wave of interest prompted a swift removal of the game from the Internet Archive, likely due to copyright concerns from Chevron, now the owner of Maxis’s intellectual property. Yet, remarkably, the game remains accessible online, suggesting a surprisingly relaxed approach to its preservation and dissemination.
Today, Sim Refinery stands as a unique artifact, a testament to a bygone era of corporate innovation and a fascinating example of how the principles of game design can be applied to fields far removed from entertainment. Its accessibility serves as a potent reminder that even in the volatile world of geopolitics and energy markets, the human drive to simulate and understand complexity remains a constant.