An inside look at SimEnvironment, Maxis' long-lost toxic waste simulator

In 1992, computer game company Maxis spun off a business arm that would attempt to do for employees at oil companies and health insurance firms what SimCity had done for a generation of kids: Show them how complex systems function at a high level through pixelated, game-like simulations.

The small team behind Maxis Business Simulations generated numerous ideas but few actual games, leaving a breadcrumb trail of unfinished project titles scattered across contemporaneous news articles. But in recent years, a small community of Maxis fans and historians have helped bring these forgotten Sims into the limelight. In 2020, after game historian Phil Salvador published a thoroughly researched article about Maxis Business Simulations on his website The Obscuritory, a reader discovered and uploaded a copy of the division's first project, the oil refinery simulator SimRefinery, to the Internet Archive. Several months later, retired Chevron engineer Terrell Touchstone, who worked on SimRefinery, donated a second copy of the game to the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. He also donated a floppy disk containing something even more obscure: a copy of the division's second title, the pollution simulator SimEnvironment.

Touchstone's copy of SimEnvironment, re-discovered while SimRefinery was generating buzz in the early days of the pandemic, is the only one known to exist. A lifelong Maxis fan and environmental journalist, when I learned it was at a museum I was insatiably curious. And so, in May of 2022, I drove up to Rochester to check out the game for myself. I then spent months tracking down former Maxis employees, chasing dubious leads with government agencies, and trying to piece together the story of this truly bizarre blip in Maxis' history.