How Cities: Skylines helped me deal with leaving my hometown of 34 years
I recently moved to Melbourne, to a 14th-floor apartment building in an old industrial area of Collingwood. From my balcony, I can see the trams on Victoria Street, and the black ribbon of Hoddle Street, a five-lane dual carriageway running from the Eastern Freeway to Punt Road in Richmond, named for the architect of Melbourne’s grid plan. Hoddle Street’s wide tarmac caused me some unease the first time I crossed it. “How could anyone need this much space for cars?” I thought, having lived my whole life in a city where an express highway had three lanes and was remarkable mainly because you couldn’t park on it. “How do they have the space?”
My fascination with built environments comes in part form growing up the child of an architect interested in modernism and an industrial designer interested in computers and public transport. I’ve always loved city building games, and about a month after I moved, Paradox Interactive’s Cities: Skylines got an expansion called ‘Snowfall’ that added trams. I love trams — they’re one of the major reasons I moved to Melbourne. I had to have it.
Playing in anticipation of the expansion’s release, I pulled up a save game from before I’d moved. I noticed a couple of things. Firstly, I never used any road type larger than three-lane highway, and preferred two lanes in…
