In 1989, a Nintendo bigwig licensed SimCity on the spot by sliding a million dollar check across the table

The road to SimCity's SNES port began with a 1989 meeting so vividly of its time that it almost sounds like it was invented for one of those recent period dramas about a product's origins, like Air or BlackBerry.

As told in Building SimCity, a new book which chronicles the legendary simulation series, the deal was made in the summer of 1989 after Maxis co-founder Jeff Braun got a call from Nintendo informing him that designer Shigeru Miyamoto wanted SimCity on Nintendo's console. As author Chaim Gingold tells it...