By Wren Weburg
5/19/02

It has been an impressive and rewarding experience to host user-uploaded cities at this site. Opened on August 16, 1999, the City Center has taken in thousands of cities, terrains, and starter towns, each one calling the City Center its "home on the Web". For nearly 3 years, it has served as a powerful, complete system for receiving and showcasing SimCity 3000 works of art.

Looking back, it's fun to see all of the City Center announcements in the news archives broadcasting "X new cities uploaded this week" and the like. Particularly interesting was the announcement that 200 cities had been uploaded, on October 18, 1999 - 2 months after the section of the site was opened. Feel free to unearth other moments! There have been quite a few over the years.

Of course, having a large and powerful system requires a lot of work and server resources, especially over a long history. It is necessary for me to refocus that energy and time, and my server's energy and time, on the next major version of SimCity -- SimCity 4 and beyond. I am always up for a new challenge!

Because SimCity versions never die, the City Center will continue to operate in a read-only mode, and will live on this site for the foreseeable future. This means that everyone will still be able to search for and view cities, and download them now and far into the future, but the City Center will not grow.

But where can I upload my cities now?

Rest assured, you can still upload your cities to the Web. As most of you know, the official site at www.simcity.com has a very robust SimCity Exchange, which will accept your cities as well as your SimCity 3000 Unlimited buildings and scenarios. So, you have no reason not to trust the experts to showcase your stuff! Best of all, uploads are immediately accessible after uploading. And, I can't forget to mention that there are other SimCity Webmasters out there will to look at and host your creations.

I realize many of you may have special concerns. Perhaps you had a city you were planning on uploading, or you wanted to update an existing city, etc. I understand it may be frustrating for the City Center to close without notice. However, I felt I would end things on a high note instead of trying to accommodate special cases over the course of several weeks. The City Center will leave off in a natural state.

Final words

I want to take a moment to thank all of the contributors to the City Center. Without you, the entire site would not be as useful or as colorful. I have thoroughly enjoyed looking at the cities as they made their way to the site. I truly hope that the City Center has added to the fun of the game itself, and of course, that it continues to do so in its new mode.

Wren Weburg,
SC3000.COM Webmaster