The Tale Of Immortal Mayor Jackson
The following is nothing but a ridiculous look at the 1993 PC game Sim City. Take with the joy it is presented. Everything in these serious series of articles happened...after a fact.
In 1994. In Sim City 2000. Whilst listening to the Mortal Kombat soundtrack on constant repeat.
The articles come from the Old Oilhouse site that Adam ran for eight years, and are brought here due to being mentioned in a recent Deeper Dives ep
In the year of 1900, the small town of Dagon elected into power one Mayor Jackson. The main reason for this act appeared to be the fact that his first name was, indeed, Mayor, and thus would make life easier in the long run.
How wrong they were.
Mayor Jackson held the title of Mayor from 1900 to the frankly incredulous year 3087, as Mayor Jackson was secretly an immortal demigod who mistakenly believed he could take care of mankind and create a perfect utopia.
How wrong he was.
The issues should have been obvious from the start. In the years 1900 - 1932, things went quite well. Jackson managed to grow the town from a small community to a industrial base, created a idyllic residential area around Lake Blooddeath and invented the Water-Mountain Power Farm by bankrupting the town twice in decade. Jackson distrusted the longevity of Coal Power, and instead covered the entire west face of Mt Murderpush first in waterfalls (bankrupting the town once) and then in primitive hydro-electric power stations. Once the flooding had been cleared up, and the loans paid back, Jackson began looking at his next big project. Mt Murderpush's summit was cleared and flattened, and Jackson placed both his Mayoral Home and a statue to himself at the top, so he could awaken to see his town growing beneath his feet each morning. The civilians felt Jackson, who had been Mayor for 50 years at this point, and had not aged a day, was lording it over them. It did not help when, at the end of the tax year, it appeared that in flattening out the mountain had bankrupted the town a third time.....
It was here that Jackson began a battle with the lineage of Norms. The Norms family had a love of transport, and each firstborn was given to the council, as was the custom of Dagon Council, to be trained as the Transport Advisor. Each of the Norms line was fanatical about Transport, and were known to run into berserker rages when anything threatened the trains, planes and automobiles of Dagon City. Throughout the generations, Mayor Jackson and the residing Norms would battle over funding and the roads of Dagon.
Jackson, over the years created both a idyllic paradise and an unholy hellpit of a town, in trying to make the perfect city, many suffered under the crushing weight of his grand design and his mad delusions. Whilst Dagon never managed to realise that elections would have solved the problem, they were content to try and remove the good Mayor in other, less bloody ways, having secret meetings and praying to the occasional giant metal alien Orb that appeared to take citizens from their homes once every hundred years, as the Town Laws decried. However, the one story that stands out in the legend of Jackson's baffling view of the world is the Apocalypse Fire of 2018
The immortal Mayor Jackson failed his people that day, where he spent 4 years trying to attach various pipes to allow water to flow to the newest residential zone. During this time, a fire had begun in the light Industrial area. Mayor Jackson, whilst being immortal and all-seeing and all-deciding, did not notice this fire until 2021, where it had wiped out all power stations. The city council, unable to make a single decision over these 4 four years did not see out the firemen, but instead sat under tables humming, whilst shouting at the uncaring sky about the lack of money being spent on the now melting roads.
Meanwhile, still trying to solve the subterranean water pipe problem, Mayor Jackson was oblivious until he rose in 2022 from the depths to witness the burning destruction of his once great city. After throwing the Council to the every hungry flames, Mayor Jackson spent the next 50 years battling the fire, and saving the life of at least one small dog.
He then continued his reign until the year 3076, where the Arcologies emptied and all of his citizens went to live on Mars.
How does a successful city build a prison? Would it possibly make in in the depths of the city? Or, possibly, create a large amount of free land with nothing for possible escapees to hide behind?
Or maybe, as in the case of Dagon City, combine a prison with vast amounts of Nuclear power.
Mayor Jackson decreed that prisons should work akin to a hamster in a wheel, and created actual wheels to power the city. Why he decided to fill the land around it with no less than 8 Nuclear Power Stations, 4 Coal Stations and a park is anyone's guess. Jackson said on multiple occasions that the park was for the Prisoners to look at whilst running around the giant wheels. Jackson looked upon his achievement, his prison power grid, and was pleased. So pleased in fact, he scoffed at the constant questioning of “What is it powering when it's surrounded by power stations?”
The answer was simple, and came to the fore after a few months. In 1971, after years of questions and wondering, a pair of simple technicians discovered that the prison was not connected to the city grid. Cables ran from relay station to relay station to a giant battery that lay under the city centre. A battery that connected to one thing.
The Dagon City Christmas tree.
Jackson held his hands up, saying that the tree was a drain on the grid each festive time, as any light covered Giant Redwood would be! The miles and miles of bulbs, angels, captured seagulls and men with beards and hats took up so much power that it could only be charged by Parkview Prison. And the populace agreed, saying this was a good thing, and never questioned why twice a month, shadowy figures would come to change the battery for a empty one, usually before the Alien Robot Orb came for it's twice-a-year abductions of the innocent from their bedrooms.
And so, life continued in as normal, until 1983, where disaster struck Dagon City! A whirling horror made of wind and anger swept through the area.... the area being a 9 mile radius that contained only the power stations and the prison. Thankfully, by 1989, when power was finally turned back on and all the escaped super-powered and now mutated criminals recaptured, life returned for a short time.