SimCity 2000 - Newspapers

Simcity 2000 doesn’t just have terrain generation. Every city has between one and six newspapers that are updated every month with new stories about the city.

The articles are clearly generated from templates, with liberal word substitutions. The templates frequently correspond to the current state of your city, with a few international news items thrown in. The absurdity of the word swaps and the tone of the templates fit in well with the rest of Maxis’s trademark humor. 

Later SimCity games would use news tickers, but I miss the extra bit of narrative connection you get with your citizens when you read an interview with them, even one constructed out of absurd templates. The news tickers tended to have clever headlines, but become exhausted fairly quickly, whereas the newspapers had predictable, even serious headlines and funny madlib text, which is I think what gives them more staying power.

Fred Haslam, Debra Larson, and Chris Weiss are credited with writing the content for the newspapers.