Maxis was a company in the 1990s that quickly rose to PC dominance. It was pretty uncommon in the 90s not to hear someone talk about SimCity, SimFarm, SimAnt or any of their other various simulation games; and for good reason. The games were a great blend of fun, cartoony, entertaining and immersive. While few games close to the sheer colossal popularity of SimCity, most of their games sold very well.

Well, except one. Enter SimHealth.

SImHealth was almost doomed to succeed from the start. Maxis decided to make it an ultra serious simulation about (at the time) the American healthcare system, so the gameplay itself was a huge departure from the entertaining, kind of cartoony nature from their previous titles. Further to that, they made a strange decision to not release this game via the usual retail outlets. It was a mail-in game you could only buy from magazines, which has inadvertently caused it to become the holy grail of Maxis games among big box Maxis collectors. It’s estimated only 50000 copies sold, which was an utter failure compared to other sales metrics of other Maxis titles. It’s estimated SimCity sold in comparison 3.18 million copies.

What makes this copy in particular very unique, is there was pre-release copies of SimHealth sent out to press and politicians to try out the game at the time. It’s very hard to find information about how many pre-release copies were sent out to politicians and journalists to test and review, but the number was very small. This particular pre-release copy ended up belonging to American Senator Bill Bradley. I cannot express how ridiculous it is to find SimHealth in the wild. I’ve always had the term saved on eBay and this might of been the first time in over 10 years a copy came up for sale; much less a pre-release copy.

It came complete with registration cards, manual, floppy disks and the seller even backed up the original floppy disks for me.

If I had the technical know how (in case they were never dumped at this point) I would have no problem releasing the floppy disk images to archive.org.

Really nice copy that’s extremely difficult to price for future resale.

LGR made a very good review on YouTube about SimHealth if you want to ever learn way too much about it: