Building a Bustling (Sim)City – Music Monday – August 24, 2026

Since it’s been introduced, I have listened to Nintendo Music a lot. I’m super excited to see all of the different Nintendo music that they’re adding and I can listen to it while I work or while I drive back and forth to work. This past week, Nintendo Music released the soundtrack to the SNES Game, Sim City. I hadn’t played this version of Sim City so I was interested in hearing the music that I missed. This post, however, isn’t about this specific game but a game that was a later sequel.

The SimCity game that I played the most was SimCity 3000. I can’t remember if I had the game first or if I played it at school first, but I was in the Gifted Education class and I vividly remember having assignments where we would design a city in SimCity and run it for a certain amount of time. That was an interesting assignment (and I was always terrible at maintaining the balance to keep the city out of the red).

One of the songs from the game stuck with me too, I found it, as some of the other songs I’ve done, by putting the SimCity 3000 CD in a CD player (and if not I was snooping through the CD Drive?) and this song played a ton as I think it was part of the main menu? (I should go back and play this again)

The Broadway track from SimCity 3000 just hits that “busy work life” track that really evokes the “let’s build a city” that the game’s objective holds. It starts with a few piano chords and then transitions into what I would compare to an intro to a romcom where the main character is a “busy working person who lives in the big city.”

While the track is unrelated, I also thought about this song because I’ve been listening (when I’m not listening to VGM) to the SiriusXM station On Broadway (I got a free trial with my new-to-me vehicle) and while this isn’t a Broadway song, it has the same energy.

This seems like it’s a lesser-known song but a quick search shows that it has its own set of fans. I found a really good piano cover of the song searching to see if any covers existed:

Did you ever play SimCity or any of its pre-Sims sequels? Do you have a favorite track from this game? Let me know in the comments or over on Discord!