As you all know, I’m a huge collector of Maxis products. I am not the only one though, as LazyGameReviews is the same – with a much bigger collection than what I have. However, I hope to soon match what he has one day. In his most recent post, he discusses about an unusual version of SimHealth he found on Ebay a few years back. It took me a long time to get a hold of the ordinary white box with blue lettering, but the one he found was silver. He had to do some research on this special version, and here’s what he discovered:
I found some intriguing information. According to this article from a November 1993 issue of InfoWorld magazine, congressional staff members involved in health care were sent an early edition of the game in order to give it a once-over and then provide feedback to the developers on the game before it the final version was released. It also mentions that it was available for $29.95 by ordering over the phone, directly from The Markle Foundation.
There is also this article from the 2000 book “Big Bird and Beyond”, SimHealth was “launched” at a Capitol Hill press conference in November of 1993, the same time as the previous InfoWorld article. Makes sense. Also, Cathy Clark from Markle stated that it sold “a few thousand copies” and “it was not entertaining enough to be on the store shelf”. Interesting indeed! So this basically backs up all the information I’ve seen saying this never actually saw a store shelf officially. It is certainly possible certain individual retailers ordered batches of the game for their stores, but I still have seen nothing that states it saw a wide release and in fact have seen only information regarding its scarcity and very low sales.
So what does it mean? Well, I was wondering what possible reason there would be for a preview version of the game to have such fancy packaging. Having it sent to members of congress would certainly be a good reason for a nice flashy box!
If anyone out there spots a silver boxart version of SimHealth, please, please let me know about it as I would love to add it to my collection! I have a feeling it’s going to be extremely difficult to obtain.
