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Maxis' obscure business tool SimRefinery is now playable after 30 yearsOil’s well that ends… well.
Oil’s well that ends… well.
Chances are, you’d never even heard ofSimRefineryunless you were one of a handful of chemical engineers at Chevron during the early 1990s. That’s if you knew aboutSimCitydevelopers Maxis' brief foray into the world of business management tools at all, mind. But thanks to some good old online word-of-mouth and a retired engineer refusing to throw away old floppies, Maxis' obscure oil refinery simulation has been immortalised for free on the Internet Archive.
With help from postbebop, the pair managed to convert the physical SimRefinery floppy data into a digital edition. That version has since been uploaded to the Internet Archive, where it is nowplayable for free- either via download or through the Archive’s browser-based DOS emulator.
For Maxis, the rest is history. But SimRefinery’s revival provides a small - if extremely fiddly - look back at a piece of their past the developers have long left behind.
