The Story of CityScale: From Games to Reality.

Continuing with the story of the project's birth, we'd like to share how it all began.

The creation of CityScale was inspired by our fascination with computer-based city-building strategies. Specifically, Caesar III.

Interestingly, we had a version of the game that was localized by GSC Game World. Yes, that same GSC Game World that later created Cossacks and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. For some reason, the founders of the company don’t mention this part of their history. Maybe it wasn’t entirely official.

Back to our story. The idea was to transfer the simplicity of the gaming tools that allowed the creation and management of virtual cities into the real world. By doing so, we aimed to simplify the quality and cost of living assessment when choosing a place to live and city planning.

Initially, we thought that high-quality visualization and mechanics would solve, if not all, then most of the problems. However, over time, it became clear that the main issue was the lack of data, specifically open data. That’s when we began shifting our focus to its release.

Since then, we’ve prepared quite a few interesting open datasets, though even more are waiting for the right time to be published. So, this year we’ve planned an update to the open data section, counting on your support too.