Many people which barely slept the night before the launch of the new Sim City game was disappointed when they could not even play the game when it launched. Gamers where raging on EA forums, /r/gaming and social networks and everything from EA to DRM was blamed for the apocalyptic launch of Sim City. 

It first started off with downloading the game. For me, this was in fact not a bad experience looking away from the fact my internet connection was not stable at that moment. However, when the game was patched at installed, the fun part had barely started. In order to play the game, a server had to be selected. And if you where lucky to get the list of servers up, you would just be stuck on the next screen displaying "Authenticating with servers". When if the authentication was done, you where able to enter the game. Hooray? No. The first times I was able to enter the game, I was greeted with the message it lost connection to the server. And when it was not, it would barely let you make a region for your cities. Once the servers where able to calm down (around 9PM UTC+1), I could see that each of my attempts on creating a region was successful, but my client turned out to have timed out. However, once I was in-game, the servers where disconnecting now and then, making me frustrated about whether my city was saved or not. 

We all remember in the early days of the Internet when we had to use a dial-up modem to connect to the modem. Opening one single web-page could often take several minutes and being able to use the Internet, the modem had to call a specific phone number which created a sound, which is what we associate with this time (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqEIp2YmtE). It was in the good old days. Most people used Windows 98 with Internet Explorer and using the internet was expensive since we had to pay for how long our connection was open and how much data was transferred.