Play Sim Earth Online

Sim Earth is one of those weird, ambitious SNES games where you play god—literally. You start with a barren rock and try to nudge life along over billions of years, from tiny microbes to spacefaring civilizations. It’s messy, complicated, and sometimes frustrating, but there’s something weirdly satisfying about watching your little planet evolve (or crash and burn because you messed up the atmosphere).

You’ve got way too much power—raise mountains, flood continents, even trigger disasters—but everything costs energy, so you can’t just spam volcanoes forever. The real challenge is balancing ecosystems, climate, and tech levels so your creatures don’t wipe themselves out with pollution or nuclear war. Half the time, you’ll be squinting at cryptic graphs, trying to figure out why your dinosaurs just dropped dead.

It’s not for everyone—the interface feels like a science textbook, and things move at a glacial pace—but if you ever wanted a sandbox where you could accidentally doom an entire species by tweaking the oxygen levels, this is it. Just don’t expect to get everything right on the first try.