SimAnt (1991). Play online

Summary

SimAnt surprised me as a surprisingly deep simulation for the Super NES. While the original Maxis engine ran on PCs, the console port adds eight bite‑sized scenarios where you must chase down rival red ants, and it even supports the SNES Mouse for more precise control. The game’s three play styles—Quick, Full and Experimental—let you either fight for backyard turf or become a scientist arranging walls and chemicals to watch ant behavior. Will Wright and Justin McCormick cranked out most of the code in less than a year, heavily borrowing from E.O. Wilson’s classic textbook.

The title earned the 1992 Codie award for Best Simulation Game and was praised as an educational title, even snagging a GamePro Educational Game of the Year nod. Famitsu gave it solid scores, while the boxed manual dives into real ant biology, making it more than a simple strategy title. Despite its modest sales—about 50,000 copies by early ’92—it became a spiritual ancestor of later simulation classics like The Sims. I still think the quirky graphics and the experimental sandbox mode make SimAnt stand out on a console best known for platformers.

Storyline

In SimAnt you start as a single yellow ant inside a black‑ant colony that lives in the backyard of a suburban home. The colony must battle enemy red ants, expand its territory through the garden and into the house, and ultimately drive out both the red ants and the human owners. Quick Game mode lets you control that lone ant: you can lay pheromone trails, dig tunnels, recruit other ants, collect food and pebbles, and fight larger foes such as spiders, caterpillars and antlions while dodging hazards like human footsteps, electrical outlets, bug spray, lawnmowers and rain. Full Game widens the view to an overhead map of the yard and house; you spread the colony by producing queens and drones and win by eliminating the red colonies and forcing humans out of the house. The Experimental Game flips the script, letting you play as red ants or spiders and place pheromone trails, maze walls, rocks, ants, pesticides and food. The Super NES version offers eight distinct scenarios, each set in a different locale with its own hazards, all sharing the goal of eradicating the red‑ant threat.