Unnatural Selection (1993): Maxis' Genetic-Engineering Creature Sim

Year: 1993 · Developer/Publisher: Maxis · Designer: Nick Corea & Peter Fokos · Platform: DOS · Theme: Science Fiction, Epic

A defected scientist has turned the local wildlife into killing machines. That’s the entire setup for Unnatural Selection, and it’s a setup Maxis used to build something that looked, in 1993, almost nothing like the rest of its own catalog. Where SimCity and SimEarth built systems around cities and planets, this one builds a system around breeding creatures, on a smaller, stranger scale that predates the genetic-engineering games most people actually remember.

You play a rival scientist, tasked with engineering your own creatures capable of fighting back against the killing machines and retaking the island. The genetic-engineering AI underneath that premise is the real point of interest here: this was modeling breeding and heredity mechanics years before Tamagotchi and Creatures turned similar ideas into mainstream hits. Unnatural Selection didn’t get anywhere near that level of attention at release, which is a large part of why it’s remembered, when it’s remembered at all, as an overlooked gem rather than a genre landmark.

Learning it isn’t effortless. The commands and systems take real time to click, and the game leans on its free experiment mode to bridge that gap: rather than a tutorial walking you through every mechanic, it hands you a sandbox and expects trial and error to teach you what each command actually does. That’s an old-school approach to onboarding, and it works better here than the description makes it sound, mostly because the animations giving feedback on your creatures are detailed enough to make failed experiments legible rather than just confusing.

Getting it running at all takes a bit of manual intervention that’s worth knowing about upfront. The game’s files need their read-only attribute stripped before anything will launch, a sound card has to be actively selected rather than assumed, and the correct executable is UNS.EXE specifically, run in pure DOS rather than through any DOS box layered on top of another OS. None of that is difficult once you know it’s required, but skipping any one step is a fast way to conclude the game is simply broken when it isn’t.

That fussiness is worth mentioning because it shapes the whole first impression. Unnatural Selection asks for more setup patience than most contemporaries from the same publisher, and a player who hits a black screen on first launch without knowing about the read-only quirk has every reason to assume the game is simply incompatible with modern hardware. It isn’t. Once the environment is configured correctly, the actual creature-breeding systems underneath run smoothly, and the technical friction disappears entirely from the experience.

How to run it today

DOSBox reproduces the pure-DOS environment Unnatural Selection expects, provided you follow the setup steps above before your first launch: clear the read-only attributes, pick a sound card in the game’s own configuration, and start it via UNS.EXE.

Compatibility: DOS (via DOSBox, pure DOS mode) · Controls: Keyboard and mouse · Setup difficulty: Medium

Legal status

Maxis was absorbed into Electronic Arts years ago, and there’s no confirmed current commercial channel selling Unnatural Selection under its own name. Status here is unclear rather than resolved one way or the other.

If you liked this, try

SimAnt, another Maxis title built around a small-scale creature simulation rather than a city or planet, shares more design DNA with this game than most of Maxis’ better-known work. Little Computer People offers a similarly odd, breeding-and-behavior-adjacent simulation from a different studio and era.