A lost Maxis “Sim” game has been discovered by an Ars reader [Updated]

Wow. It may only be an incomplete prototype, but in a breathtaking span of time, SimRefinery has gone from a seemingly lost legend to a playable, downloadable video game. (That's its real, full-resolution opening screen, as captured using a DOSBox emulator.) And it's all thanks to an Ars Technica commenter. (credit: archive.org / Maxis / Chevron)

Update, June 9, 2020: In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the original upload for this recovered copy of SimRefinery's prototype was taken down from archive.org. As site administrator Jason Scott announced:

The anonymous uploader who put SimRefinery up on Archive got cold feet, asked his stuff to be taken down, and will either track down if someone lays claim to it or not. If they change their mind, it'll go up. Until then, we'll have to console ourselves with the 20,000 downloads. This is not out of the ordinary when something blows up like this-not everyone is comfortable in their place of work or has a family they want to protect, and this amount of attention could potentially be detrimental to them and the engineer who let them make a copy. I get it. I have found that people who worked or work for very long-lived companies tend to get a random panic attack after these sorts of altruistic efforts and convince themselves of terrible, terrible ramifications.

In a follow-up tweet, Scott opined, "Don't worry. It'll be back." As of press time, that guess has borne out, with at least one SimRefinery file upload appearing once again at the site. Whether that will remain on the site in the weeks to come remains to be seen.

Original story, June 5, 2020: We at Ars Technica are proud to be members of video game archiving history today. SimRefinery, one of PC gaming's most notoriously "lost" video games, now exists as a fully playable game-albeit an unfinished one-thanks to an Ars Technica reader commenting on the story of its legend.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments