Press Play, Mayor SimCity 4 shipped with two soundtracks – and a Grammy winner on oboe

Last week, a group of unpaid volunteers fixed a bug that had been sitting in SimCity 4 since January 2003. Not a typo in a tooltip. The Eternal Commuter Loop: a regional pathfinding fault that sent your Sims bouncing between cities forever, hunting for work, never taking any of it, until demand collapsed and the whole economy went down with it. 23 years. Fixed on a Wednesday in August 2026, by people doing it for free, in an update that also cut the mod’s codebase by roughly 90% and more than 10,000,000 [10 million] lines.

I bring this up because the game is old enough to legally drink in America and is still being maintained like a load-bearing bridge.

And because there’s a decent chance you’ve never heard a second of its music – which is ≈3 hours 15 minutes long, has been free on the internet for most of this century, and features a Grammy-winning oboist, a seventy-piece Czech orchestra, and the guy who scored Monkey Island.

The game nobody has managed to put down

Quick receipts, in case “2003 city-builder” reads as “grandpa’s software” to you. SimCity 4 shipped on January 14, 2003, took 84 on Metacritic and a 9.2 from IGN, and was a top-ten selling PC game that year. Urban planner Jeff Speck has said its traffic model is ahead of what most traffic engineers actually use. The Verge ran a piece in 2025 about the modding scene simply refusing to stop. And the NAM release above is from 10 days ago.

So: not a museum piece.

A thing people are still elbow-deep in, on purpose, in 2026, 23 years after the box art stopped being embarrassing and started being cool again.

The music, though, is the part that escaped the game entirely – and just a few ever talked about.

It isn’t one soundtrack – but two, and the install folder admits it

Pop open SimCity 4’s music directory and the filenames sort themselves: SC4g1 through SC4g7, then SC4m01 through SC4m17. The Rush Hour expansion carries the same tell, with _G and _M tacked onto the end of each name.

g is god mode – the region view, before the city exists, when you’re still shoving mountains around and deciding where a river goes. m is mayor mode, down at street level, where the taxes and the traffic live.

Two moods, two folders, two completely different records. God mode is long ambient drift: wind chimes, held synth pads, an oboe wandering in from somewhere. Mayor mode is trip-hop, breakbeat, live saxophone, a lot of brushed drums. The game also lets you drop your own music into either bucket separately, which tells you Maxis knew exactly what they’d built.

Small confession: I described this split in a German post back in 2018 – untouched wilderness, then the machines arrive – without having the faintest idea the files were literally sorted that way. Nice to be accidentally right about something.

Who actually made this

The credit on the box says Jerry Martin, and that’s true but thin. Martin joined Maxis in 1996 as studio audio director and ran the room until 2004 – SimCity 3000, The Sims, SimCity 4. Before that he spent a decade writing music for AT&T, Toyota and NBA commercials; 10 years of writing music that has to be beautiful, unobtrusive, and incapable of annoying anyone on the fourth listen. That’s the job description for a city-builder, and he’d already done it 200 times.

But the tracklist is a whole department, not one man: Kirk Casey, Kent Jolly, Anna Karney, Robi Kauker, Walt Szalva, Edwin Dolinski, the Humble Brothers (Ken Marshall and Traz Damji), and Marc Russo, who played alto sax in the Yellowjackets through the 80s and has been touring with the Doobie Brothers since 1998.

Then there’s the session bench, which is where it gets silly. The oboe on By the Bay and the bass clarinet on Bohemian Street Jam are Paul McCandless – founding member of Oregon, four Grammys, once a finalist for the New York Philharmonic on English horn. The congas are Karl Perazzo, who plays percussion for Santana. Someone got these people into a room and said: right, this one’s for the ZONING SCREEN.

Two more names, for the deep-cut collectors: Primordial Dream, one of the region-mode ambient pieces, is by Michael Land – yes, that Michael Land, the Secret of Monkey Island guy who built iMUSE. And Taking Shape is by Bob Marshall, who was working on contract for Martin, submitted his five minutes, got paid, and then didn’t appear in the credits at all. He’s said so publicly, without much bitterness, which is more grace than I’d manage. Getting left off is a shitty thing to do to someone, even by accident, even in 2003.

Five tracks, if you only give it 20 minutes

These are mine, in a rough order that runs from morning to very late at night. All five happen to be mayor-mode tracks, which tells you something about me, somehow.

The morning commute

Martin, and one of five Rush Hour pieces recorded in Olomouc with the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra – 70 musicians, conducted by Petr Pololáník. Martin’s own note says it came out of the morning toll gate on the Bay Bridge. A traffic jam, scored for a symphony orchestra, in the Czech Republic.

It is the best arriving-somewhere music ever written and I will not be taking questions. Car, motorbike, plane, doesn’t matter – the strings come up while the ground gets closer and something in your chest does a small ceremonial thing. Commute is not just a title here.

Wheels of progress

Andy Brick, same orchestra, same conductor. Brick isn’t a game-audio lifer either – he studied composition under a Pulitzer winner at Michigan, did graduate work at Mannes, and spends a lot of his time standing in front of orchestras at symphonic game concerts.

Which is why this one sounds like it wandered in from a completely different disc. It’s the track I put on to come down, or to wake up slowly and watch the sun do its thing over District 7 before the heat gets serious.

Urban underground

Anna Karney, and one of the few tracks where none of the composers left a note behind, so you’re free to hear whatever you want in it. What I hear: heavy industry under a low sky, chimneys, freight, the smog fading everything past two kilometers into flat gray, like someone turned the contrast down on the world.

Which in Sài Gòn is not a mood, it’s December. Air quality goes orange, then red, then purple, then brown, the towers across the river turn into rumors, and you can taste the air on the balcony. The track stops being atmosphere and becomes a documentary.

Great song. Bleak endorsement.

ElectriCITY

Ken Marshall and Traz Damji, working as the Humble Brothers – the same pair behind Metropolis, Terrain, Arctica and Epicenter, which is why all of those sit in the same pocket of humming, patient machinery.

This is my 2am track. Coding with the balcony doors open, hot coffee by my side, one lamp on, the sun still hours off. It also has the single funniest footnote on the album: NPR used it as the intro theme for an hour of On Point about the video game revolution in December 2005 – an episode that never once mentioned SimCity. Took the music, skipped the game.

Night owl

Kirk Casey, playing both guitar and synth himself, with Eddie Ramirez on trumpet. Casey notes it’s the original mix from back when the game was still internally called Sim City 4000, which is a nice little fossil.

A relaxed drift through the concrete veins of somewhere large: traffic, a siren two blocks over, the glow of ad boards blinking at nobody. Warm and a little lonely, the way a city is at three in the morning when it’s finally quiet enough to hear itself. And while you’re in Casey’s corner – he’s said Tarrmack came out of listening to DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing. So a chunk of how SimCity 4 feels at street level is downstream of a 1996 sample record. Go listen to that one too.

Assorted things nobody printed on the box

Drive an ice cream truck in Rush Hour’s U-Drive-It mode and it plays the SimCity 2000 theme by Sue Kasper, hidden in there as a 30-second easter egg. (I’ve written about what people have since done to the SimCity 2000 music, and it’s a lot).

Marc Russo’s Street Sweeper is the track from the intro movies, so it’s the one you’ve heard even if you’ve never played the game.

And the people who do know this soundtrack? Well – unhinged about it, in the good way. Over on RateYourMusic somebody files it as the finest atmospheric drum’n’bass nobody’s heard, with the caveat that appreciating it requires being clinically obsessed with urban planning. Another review just says Maxis was on a generational run and leaves it there. Fair.

Where to actually hear it

EA gave the Rush Hour soundtrack away as free MP3s back in the day, the 2003 retail CD has been out of print for two decades, and the whole thing has been floating around ever since. It’s on Spotify and YouTube, it’s on khinsider as a complete set, and there’s a music pack on the Cities: Skylines workshop where the comments are people saying they can’t stand another minute of the stock soundtrack.

For me it never stayed near the game at all. It’s gym music. It’s office music. And above all it’s long-haul flight music – the thing I put on somewhere over the South China Sea at hour nine, half-conscious, engines droning, watching a wing light blink in the dark. Music written to sit under a simulated city, doing the same job for a real one.

Twenty-three years, no expiry date, still free. Press play, mayor 🏙️