LucasArts' Afterlife: The 27-Year-Old God Game That Time Forgot
Lucasart's Afterlife
The author revisits Afterlife, a 1996 LucasArts city-builder that merged SimCity with Heaven and Hell. With almost no online resources—no subreddit, only vintage FAQs—they share hard-won tactics: disabling bad things, using the SHIFT-421 money cheat, and optimizing road layouts and zone adjacency. They detail how Heaven rewards diversity while Hell favors uniformity, and note quirks like population growth in 1x1 buildings and the need to lock only 2x2 structures. Their best score so far: 83 million souls.
What if you combined Simcity with Heaven and Hell?
- hliyan
Does anyone remember a Windows game called Yoda Stories? I had such fond memories of it that I tried to find the game or an emulator version multiple times. No luck. It was an elegant game from a more civilized time where resolution, shading, texture and frame rate did not define how good a game was.
- danvayn
These are my favorite kinds of blogs. Irrelevant knowledge formed from notes; even if I’m interested in game development or retro games it has little use for me to peruse, but it’s fun to play the observer and read into people’s human digest or solutions to abstract issues. I wish there were more blogs like this. Thanks for sharing.
- davidsojevic
I bought a copy of Afterlife from one of the Scholastic catalogues when I was in primary school after already having had a blast with Sim City 2000.
I absolutely loved the graphics and the theme and everything, but as it turns out, I had absolutely no idea how to play it and never got far enough into it to really appreciate its gameplay.
I should probably give it another go as an adult who has a bit more patience for reading through instructions than I did as a kid.
- N_Lens
I miss the old lucasarts era of games, it was a magical time!
- booty
Wow, this is wild. I'd never even heard of this game.
Based on the linked article, this seems exactly like the kind of game that would have had an AMAZING sequel.
You know the type of game I mean. The first game breaks all types of new ground with a bunch of innovative ideas and is fun, but also has a lot of jank and rough edges because they were trying so many new things at once. And then the sequel is where it all really comes together. The ideas that didn't work are fixed or discarded, everything else gets polish, and a few new ideas are introduced.
Too bad it never got one...