SimAnt (1989): Maxis Goes Underground With a Full Ant Colony Simulation

Rating band: Fan-favorite · Year: 1989 · Developer/Publisher: Maxis · Designer: Justin McCormick & Will Wright · Platform: Windows 3.1 · Theme: Design Tool, Unique, Freelance

Maxis had already let players run a city and, in a sense, play a kind of benevolent overseer with SimCity. SimAnt took the studio somewhere stranger: underground, and down to insect scale, handing you command of a black ant colony fighting a war of attrition against a red-ant rival. The goal sounds almost absurd written out plainly. Win enough skirmishes, gather enough food, and reproduce fast enough, and your colony can eventually claim not just the yard but the house standing on it.

What keeps that premise from feeling like a novelty is how seriously the underlying systems are built. Combat between ants isn’t decorative; colony size and unit type genuinely determine who wins a confrontation. Food scarcity forces real prioritization between scavenging and defense. The simulation layer sits close enough to actual ant biology that the game doubled as an informal lesson in colony behavior, something Maxis leaned into at the time by marketing it as both entertainment and education. Few games in 1989 were trying to do both at once with a subject this specific.

Justin McCormick and Will Wright share the design credit, and it’s worth being precise about what that means here rather than reading too much into Wright’s later fame. Wright went on to lead SimCity’s broader design language and, years later, The Sims, a run that made him one of the most recognized names in simulation games. SimAnt predates that trajectory and stands on its own mechanics: it’s not a SimCity spinoff wearing a different skin, and its combat-and-resource loop doesn’t map directly onto anything Wright built afterward. The game earns its own place in the Maxis catalog rather than riding on what came later.

Tonally, SimAnt threads a strange needle: it’s humorous in places, genuinely tense in others, and it never quite loses the feeling that you’re managing something small and fragile against a hostile backyard. That tension between “lite” presentation and real strategic stakes is most of what earned it a loyal following that has outlasted plenty of bigger releases from the same catalog. It’s not a deep game in the way a 4X strategy title is deep, but it doesn’t need to be; the ant’s-eye framing does most of the work.

The Windows 3.1 requirement dates the game clearly, and playing it today means working around period-specific expectations rather than a modern interface. That’s a fair trade for a design this unusual. Few other games, before or since, have tried to build a genuinely playable strategy game around ant colony warfare, and SimAnt remains the reference point whenever the idea comes up.

How to run it today

SimAnt targets Windows 3.1, which makes DOSBox the most reliable route to a stable modern install, running the Windows 3.1 environment inside the emulator rather than trying to coax the game onto a modern Windows version directly. Mouse-driven interface elements carry over cleanly once the environment is set up.

Compatibility: Windows 3.1 (via DOSBox) · Controls: Mouse · Setup difficulty: Medium

Legal status

Maxis is still an active studio under Electronic Arts, and SimAnt had a documented later commercial life: EA once sold it digitally as part of a ten-game Sim bundle. That bundle is no longer active, and there’s no current standalone storefront listing for SimAnt, which leaves it without an official current channel despite a rights holder that’s easy to identify.

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Battle Bugs takes a related insect-warfare concept in a more overtly comedic direction, and SimIsle: Missions in The Rainforest is worth a look if the appeal here is Maxis’s ecosystem-management side rather than the combat.