To be fair, it didn’t go anywhere. You can still boot up a copy, mess around with evolution, atmospheric conditions, and continental drift like it’s 1990… but it’s not 1990. We have 32 years of computing advances at our backs and yet no SimEarth 2. Sure there’s WorldBox and Worlds and a bunch of awesome planet generation projects, (1, 2, 3) but none allow me to play with plate tectonics, currents, or any of the “deep” factors underlying how the Earth really works.
Sometime last year, I decided against writing Will Wright a letter, begging him to spend hundreds of hours making a SimEarth 2. Instead, I did what any good programmer would do and decided to devote thousands of my own hours into the same thing. This blog describes my first step toward such a goal: describing well over a year’s worth of work and the many detours taken along the way. While there’s a long way to go from here, I’m very happy to share my progress to this point, and promise to follow up with a “part 2” at some future date.