Sim Copter 1 reporting heavy traffic.

You know you can shoot down the copter, right? Just use the centering tool on it, and it'll go "I'm hit" and spiral in?

"copter" is a silly way to abbreviate "helicopter" because while it is a compound word, it's not "heli" + "copter". It's "helico" + "pter".
Like in "pterodactyl" . It means "wing"

It's helix and pteron, Greek for "spiral" and "wing"

Here's a GIF of the copter shootdown, probably being ruined by twitter's mp4 compression

A cropped one to make better use of the limited video bandwidth.

The Sim Copter in SimCity 2000 (1993) inspired the game SimCopter (1996), which even let you import SimCity 2000 maps into it to play on.
Sim Copter was fun, even if Maxis's 3D engine was janky as hell.

SimCopter is probably best remembered for a hack placed in it by one of the developers, which causes lots of shirtless men to spawn on certain dates and swarm your helicopter.

This was reportedly added in protest of the working conditions at maxis and being told to add more of the "bimbo" characters, women in bikinis.
So he modified the game to change the spawn rates on certain dates, creating tons of "Himbos".

BTW that employee was Jacques Servin, who cofounded RTMark and The Yes Men, culture-jamming groups.
The Yes Men is most famous for temporarily wiping TWO BILLION DOLLARS off the share price of Dow Chemical, by announcing that they would finally pay for the Bhopal disaster.

The Bhopal disaster was an industrial disaster in 1984 where a pesticide plant leaked a toxic gas into the neighboring village, injuring half a million people and killing nearly 4,000.

The plant was owned by Union Carbide but Dow now owns them.
Dow has paid money to the victims but it's considered to be an almost insulting small amount for one of the worst industrial disasters of all time.

Part of the problem is that the "official" cause of the disaster was ruled to be sabotage, presumably by one of the employees at the plant.

The more common interpretation is that Union Carbide was severely skimping on maintenance at the plant and handling dangerous chemicals in exceptional unsafe ways, because they could get away with it.
The "sabotage" angle was pushed because it got them out of most of the blame

Eventually in 2007 and 2010 some more compensation was paid to the victims and their families, but most of that money didn't come from Union Carbide/Dow. It was provided by the Indian government.

So there's quite a few people who think Dow should be paying quite a lot of money to make up for what they did, explaining the Yes Men's actions.
Basically they had "Jude Finisterra" on BBC World News and announce Dow would finally pay for the cleanup and restitution

Jude Finisterra was not really a Dow spokesman. He was Andy Bichlbaum, who is actually another name for Jacques Servin.

Anyway, The Yes Men are a very interesting group, check them out! They've made 3 films about their activities. Their general strategy seems to be to pretend to be part of another organization, and announce that the company is doing The Right Thing

which of course causes the company to have to issue terrible reactions like "oh no, we're not ACTUALLY going to re-open all the public housing in New Orleans, we're just rebuilding a third of it, cause that's way cheaper"

so this hoax draws attention to the injustice and the company profiting off it.

Anyway, supposedly a group called "RTMark" paid Jacques Servin 5,000$ to do the hack in Sim Copter.
But one of the founders of RTMark is "Ray Thomas", which is another name for Jacques Servin.

So the whole thing is likely another layer of obfuscation. Servin has also said he founded RTMark after the media storm surrounding the SimCopter hack.

Amusing side-note: the picture of Jacques Servin is a picture of "Shepard Wolff" presenting at the Gas and Oil Exposition in 2007
on behalf of the ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council, announcing they've developed Vivoleum, a way to convert humans into petrol fuel.

We’re not talking about killing anyone,We’re talking about using them after nature has done the hard work.After all,150,000 people already die from climate-change related effects every year.That’s only going to go up-maybe way, way up.Will it all go to waste? That would be cruel.

in any case, this thread was started by me running into (not literally, thankfully) a traffic jam on California State Route 237 near the exits for U.S. Route 101, which had a helicopter observing it for some reason.
So "Sim Copter One reporting heavy traffic" played in my head

cause I played entirely too much of a pirated copy of SimCity 2000 on my 486 as a kid. The rest of the thread happened because I have ADHD and ramble on between lots of vaguely connected topics :)

BTW a project I keep thinking about for SC2000 as a "someday" thing:
Build a SC2000 to Minecraft converter.
What you'd do is crowd-source rebuilding all the buildings in minecraft.

like you'd have a template map that's 16x16 or 32x32 or whatever and people can submit possible Minecraft versions of tiles built in it.

inspired by the various sim city 2000 buildings that people have already made in minecraft.