Unreleased SimCopter 64 build turns up over 25 years later

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A copy of a scrapped N64 game called SimCopter 64 has surfaced online out of nowhere.

Last week on May 25, video game historian Damiano Gerli took to Twitter to reveal that a playable version of SimCopter 64 for the N64 had been unearthed. If you’re unfamiliar with the original game (because let’s face it, it’s nearly as old as me), SimCopter puts the player in the role of a helicopter pilot, letting them fly above cityscapes and even load in SimCity 2000 maps.

A working cart of SimCopter 64 has apparently been found (over at Reddit) and hopefully it’ll get dumped soon(ish)? Had no idea this was ever being developed for Nintendo 64 so I’m definitely curious to give it a spin. pic.twitter.com/BQk75phUacMay 25, 2022

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SimCopter was released by Maxis on PC back in 1996. As Gerli references above though, the N64 port of SimCopter wasn’t even widely known among the gaming community, probably because it came out all the way back in 1996, and news on it would’ve been relatively hard to come by.

There is, however, one demo of SimCopter 64 out in the wild. Thanks to the Unseen 64 video just below (as reported by Nintendo Life (opens in new tab)), we can see there was actually a public demo of SimCopter 64 at E3, all the way back in 1997, and this seems to be the only footage of SimCopter 64 in existence. 

Also reported by Nintendo Life is the person who actually got their hands on SimCopter 64. It turns out Reddit user a707northbayer (opens in new tab) got hold of SimCopter 64 from someone who used to work in the games industry in Northern California. Could this person have actually been a developer on SimCopter 64?

In fact, a707northbayer reveals they might even try to duplicate the copy of the old game. There’s no confirmation that they’re actually going to go through with this at the time of writing, but here’s hoping they can replicate this piece of history and put it out there for the world to see.

Check out our guide to the best games like The Sims if you’re curious about seeing what the rest of the genre has to offer.