I was recently driving through the California desert and came across the Salton Sea. Long story short - it rained a lot and the Colorado River overflowed a bunch of dams and dikes meant to contain it and created a huge inland sea. Oops.

Some enterprising souls must have decided that despite the lack of any natural flushing dooming the sea to a salty, polluted existence, there was ripe opportunity to create a sea-side metropolis.

From the ground, it is a bit of a fun ghost town to explore. The typical "everything just abandoned" type thing. But when I came to geotag some photos I took there, I was quite astonished to see this.

That looks exactly like what I used to do in SimCity. I'd use the F-U-N-D-S cheat at the start to max out my money, then build my little empire with neat roads and school and harbours and whatnot — they've even got an airport! Then I'd press "go" and people would slowly move in to the residential areas, one house on one block at a time.

I guess poor old Salton City never made it past "turtle speed"!

posted at: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:26 | in /humor | permalink | add comment (3 others)