First off, I want to say kudos and spasiba to Sochi for an amazing job with the Winter Olympics. All this Olympic spirit fever got me reminiscing about the time when I was in high school and I didn’t really have that many friends back then so I resorted to a game that I loved: Sim City. For those of you not familiar with it, its a computer simulation game that allows you to build a city from the ground up and create whatever to your heart’s desire. I was so infatuated with the Olympic Games that I pretended to have “olympic games” in the cities that I built.
Then I discovered that there’s actually a huge community of guys that play Sim City and love the Olympics, or sports in general. They called it the Simlympics. These people would recreate have host country bidding processes, opening ceremonies and games as if it was the real deal. After seeing how amazing some of these simlympics are, especially 2008’s Penthesili Games, I knew I wanted to do it.
My city was Chihiro and so I went ahead and created a bid which can be found on this link (click here). Of course that bid was very primitive compared to the more experienced guys who have been in this site for ages. Naturally, I lost. I was not prepared, my city wasn’t up to par as the other contestants and my bid just wasn’t professional enough. Yes, it was that serious! I was so disappointed but that only made me a stronger person. I wanted to try again.
I spent two years completely re-doing my city and literally planning it around my Simlympic Bid. Mind you, I was in the IB program in high school and yet I literally devoted so much of my time to making sure my next bid did not fail. I went on an all out bid to make sure that I win. I presented a comprehensive and extensive big that covers everything from venues to transportation. I looked at other bids and literally combined every great idea/suggestions they had and refined it for my bid. The Chihiro 2010 Simlympic Bid can be found here.
After submitting the bid, it was up to the International Simlympic Committee (which was a group of guys who love olympics and sim city who basically came up with the idea of the simlympics) to decide on who would host the August 2010 games. I was in DC for a vacation and as soon as I came back it was the ISC Session. I was the chosen as the host! I’m pretty sure my parents thought I was a lunatic screaming and yelling at our house, but that was a moment of victory for me.
After that I spent the next couple of weeks to put together the games, from the opening ceremony to the individual venues shots to the closing ceremony and everything else in between. It was a lot of hours and sleepless nights but it was all worth it.
The opening ceremony can be found here and the rest of the games can be found here. No, there was no scholarship or real prize to winning this. It’s the pure joy of being able to pretend that you are hosting the Olympic Games that makes all this hard work worth it all. Hosting the 2010 Simlympics was truly one of the highlights of my high school career because I met some amazing people through Simsports, AIN and all over the sim city community. This is something that I will forever cherish with me for the rest of my life!