Back in 1994, I was 9 years old and my dad bought me my first PC. It had a Pentium 60 processor, 14-inch CRT monitor, and came dual-booting OS/2 Warp and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. I loved it, spending hours glued to the screen playing demos of games that came free with computer magazines at the time.

But I didn’t just play demos. I had one game. The incredible Sim City 2000, which perhaps my dad thought would be educational and might prompt me to become a town planner like his brother. That didn’t happen, but it did come with one of the best manuals I’ve ever come across, written – it seems – by one Michael Bremer.

It wasn’t like the other manuals of the time – a brief explanation of the basic functions and a list of troubleshooting tips, then a run-down of the credits and a couple of pages of “notes” – instead it had a detailed description of every single tool in the (large) game. Best of all, though, were the quotes peppered throughout that discussed the “spirit” of a city, and the philosophies involved with urban planning.

Looking back, those quotes – which I obsessively read when my computer wasn’t working because I’d deleted autoexec.bat or command.com or something – probably expanded my pre-Secondary School mind quite considerably. I loved it, and the game, to bits – mainly because it made me think about a city as a thing, rather than a collection of things.

All of my cities in that game were always absolutely utopian. There would be no crime, no traffic, no lack of electricity or water and no budget problems – thanks to my liberal use of cheat codes. After all – in the future, money’s no longer an issue, right?

I whiled away hours and hours on those cities, while sunny afternoons came and went outside. I meticulously constructed railways, high density commercial zones and fusion power plants, while planting as many parks and laying as many rivers as I could get away with.

…

Fast forward to January 2009 and Mirror’s Edge arrives on the scene. Trailers had already taken my breath away thanks to the light, colour and motion that were demonstrated. The game unfortunately didn’t sell as well as EA hoped, but it’s gained a cult following – mainly for its setting.

EA dropped the ball, really, with the protagonist – a 24-year-old girl called Faith who comes with dark hair and tattoos that was perhaps designed to appeal to 16-year-old kids of an “alternative” persuasion. Nothing wrong with that, except that the game dumped those kids into a brightly lit, colourful world of glinting glass windows and soaring skyscrapers.

The sense of place was incredible – I was suddenly on top of the arcologies, monorails and office buildings of the cities I had built in 1994. Being able to explore the interiors and exteriors of those environments was incredibly liberating – particularly in the early levels in the game, before it devolves from the awesome platformer it starts as into the lame FPS it ends up as.

While the environments were ultimately a little on the linear side, it’s still an absolutely incredible, and beautiful experience to hit up the time trial modes that challenge you to run as fast as you can through the levels without the hassle of the police chasing you.

Stripping out the police turns the city from an authoritarian dystopia into the shining, glimmering places that I had meticulously constructed fifteen years before. And while that might be a personal thing, the setting was one of the aspects of the game most praised by reviewers.

Dystopias are overused in videogames. It’s easy to build a plot in a hive of scum and villainy. Let’s see some more paradises, fairylands and Shangri-las, and some creativity in how they’re applied.