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OpenCity

Free and open-source city building game

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
1 min read
Source updated June 16, 2026
Image credit is listed at the end of this article.

OpenCity is a discontinued 3D city-building game started in 2003 by France-based Vietnamese programmer Duong-Khang Nguyen. The game mechanics are similar to SimCity, although the game developers do not strive to make it a direct SimCity video game clone. It is free and open-source software which is licensed with the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).

01Gameplay

In the game, the player builds a city by marking land as commercial, industrial or residential zones. Those zones depend on each other to grow. The player also must supply the city with power and connect the different zones by building roads.

02Origins, development

OpenCity is the product of programmer Duong-Khang Nguyen and 3D artist Frédéric Rodrigo. Nguyen was inspired by the open source game FreeReign; when he realized that the FreeReign project was cancelled and the source code was not in condition to be improved, he began developing his own city-building simulator. The work on the project began in 2003 with the registration on SourceForge. Contributions to the game came from the game's community in form of translation and quality testing. OpenCity is built on cross platform libraries and application programming interfaces (APIs) like Simple DirectMedia Library and OpenGL, which allows porting to various operating systems (OSes) and platforms, like Windows, macOS, and many Linux distributions.

03Reception

OpenCity achieved a broad spread as free and open-source and freeware video game, and was downloaded directly from SourceForge between 2003 and May 2017 over 190,000 times according to the SF download statistic. OpenCity has also been packaged for many Linux distributions: Fedora Linux, Debian, SuSE, Slackware, Ubuntu, Pardus, Frugalware Linux. OpenCity was reviewed as "well made 3D remake" of SimCity by Chip.de in 2013.

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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “OpenCity”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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Related topics

List of open-source video games

This is a list of notable open-source video games. Open-source video games are assembled from and are themselves open-source software, including public domain games with public domain source code.

Lincity

Lincity is a free and open-source construction and management simulation game, which puts the player in control of managing a city's socio-economy, similar in concept to SimCity. The player can develop a city by buying appropriate buildings, services and infrastructure.

SimCity

SimCity is an open-ended city-building video game franchise originally designed by Will Wright. The first game in the series, SimCity, was published by Maxis in 1989 and was followed by several sequels and many other spin-off Sim titles, including 2000's The Sims, which itself became a best-selling computer game and franchise.