The SimRefinery Tour Book/instruction manual has also now been found and archived! Check out a scan of it here, it explains a ton about the simulation: archive.org/details/sim-refinery-tour-book_202006/mode/2up

"Volume name of A: is FARTDICK" Never change Clint, you absolute diamond.

Oh no, Premium octane got set to 47. My SimCorvette is going to run like ASS.

I grew up as the son of a chemical engineer at Chevron in a refinery town in CA. I fully remember this when I was a kid, playing it on my dads office computer. I think I had just discovered sim city for Mac at the time. What a blast from the past. Also, I never realized until now how much I picked up on how a refinery works, just being a kid in a refinery town where we could visit for community days once per year. I had an internship there before college, after graduating high school, where I worked in IT and had to put on a Nomex suit and traipse out to different corners of the refinery to track down PCs that hadn’t auto-updated on the network. Just an 18 year old finding my way through some processing plants to various control rooms, looking for neglected computers to run an update on...I never realized how fun and cool it was, at the time.

I live in Richmond, CA, where Chevron's refinery is. The intro map looks like a pretty close approximation to how their Richmond refinery looks, and that's really cool!

OK I could be wrong, but having worked at a similar type of chemical plant, it looks like it was being developed as a training tool for new employees. The training where i was took weeks before you were even able to go to the production areas to start your on the job training, even for people with degrees in the field. I would love to see this finished tho and I am so glad to see a video on it done by you.

Dude, I worked at Maxis (in the 90s) AND Chevron Corp. and this is the first time i'm seeing this. This may have been just a model of the Richmond Refinery.

There's something oddly eerie about an unfinished 90s-era game. You never quite know what it's going to do.

I worked as an environmental consultant for Chevron at one of their former refinery sites up until fairly recently and I am getting so many flashbacks to actually being on site. This is surprisingly accurate, but that shouldn't really be that much of a surprise given that it's Maxis.

It seems like this game could use some refinement I'll see myself out

You know, on one hand, I'm so genuinely happy this was found and that SimGeeks will be able to play with it. On the other hand, just looking at it is making me go crosseyed.

I asked Chevron for this, and they told me "Chevron’s training materials are considered proprietary information and company confidential, and are not distributed outside the company." I'm excited to try it out. Thanks for the vid, Clint!

Having worked as a lab tech in a refinery, many of the things they have "implemented" (crude, LPG, blending of different petroleum products) as concept in the game tickles my fancy. I am confident that the different oil types have different properties. From my time in the business I remember that oil from Venezuela was quite low quality. Lot of sulfide and Mercaptan. One could always smell if the ship currently docked had carried Venezuelan oil before they came in to get new oil from us...

So the refinery isn’t doing anything initially. You need to click on a valve, in the crude unit window, for the raw oil to start flowing to the refinery. At that point it starts resembling a bit like factorio and you can set cut off points and see the numbers go up or down between the different parts of the refinery.

Plot wist: Game Actually connects to a real refinery

When you were just aimlessly clicking around I had a flashback to when you blew up an airplane sitting still on a taxiway and kept waiting for another explosion.

It says “argentina heavy”... old kids will remember when this country used to export crude

According to the article they started with the codebase of SimFarms to make this, so that would explain why it seems so similar

Now we just need to find Sim Mars

Very neat. I can kind of see why this didn't take off in a big way for Maxis, though, especially if the target market was real-world training. I worked on an industrial training simulator project years ago. Our customers wanted accuracy so much that our simulator solution ran connected to real control-room HMI units as the front end. Sim Refinery definitely looks much more like a game. Basically the difference between MS Flight Simulator vs a real 747 simulator that pilots train on.

I've never seen a KAO floppy going bad. So I'm not surprised it still worked.

8:20 those candle looking objects are flares and I used to design control systems for them!!! Back in the old days before Honeywell purchased the company. Also John Zink and Zeeco all based in the Tulsa, OK area.

This is my favorite kind of stuff lost media is so interesting.

"SimRefinery EXISTS" that got me chills down my spine

Ah, this is exciting! Awesome!

5:52 "External Events" is likely the analog of "Disasters" from Sim City. Aka random "bad" stuff will happen, likely ala oil shortages/embargoes, oil spills, changes to legislation, etc...

So it looks like someone needs to decompile this and complete.

I’m a Pipefitter, and I did a Turnaround on Small Refinery in Mississippi. This is really neat, I never knew that this existed, and the Unit Names are real to those in a Refinery. The Crude Unit is where I worked installing new piping around old equipment, I talked to a Operator about how it worked a little once. Light, Medium, Heavy Diesel, or Crude. He said that light was closest to what ends up in your Car if I can recall. Anyways Operators are always out in Each unit taking Samples to check Chemical Makeup for Flaws or Possible Hazards. Some Units used Sulfuric Acid, not mention H2S Gas that may be present. Just this is really awesome, need to try it out

When anything is recovered like this, it makes me smile with absolute joy! Sometimes it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to recover something and I am eternally thankful to the people that do these kinds of things!!!

5:23 "Trajectory headings for multiple-impact re-entry vehicles" - What does that mean? I don't know. But it's GREAT!

I worked on a big construction project at a chevron refinery around 2015. Workers there seemed genuinely happy and seemed like Chevron treated everyone relatively well. This was probably a very cool way for people to learn about their new job!

Anyone notice that the backdrop for the title screen is roughly similar to the one used for the SNES version of SimCity?

Literally just read the article and popped on KZfaq to search if anyone had uploaded anything. Checked my sub box first and here it is!

This isn't a prototype for SimFarm. It's a prototype for Factorio.

I knew after reading an article this morning that I could count on you to put something out ASAP. Thanks!

Watched Phil's livestream last night and it was amazing to see the game in action and hear more behind the research that went into the article and finally the discovery of the floppy. Glad to see you playing it on your channel!

Thanks for LGR Blerbs, this is the type of thing I originally subscribed to LGR for and I'm glad to see these types of videos come out where it's just random interesting stuff that you get excited to talk about.

I had no idea this channel existed. LGR should advertise this on his main channel. I saw this from an Engadget article.

This is so good LGR, thanks for the video. I'm still waiting for Sim City 2000 windows 95 special edition to come out. It had the extra zoom and special and extra buildings.

I'm now convinced your Blerb idea was a good one. Some things are not enough to justify putting the time and effort of script, in depth ressearch and multi-camera production, but are still worth sharing.

Being corrected by your future self has the same vibes as those narrator memes. “Aw, it doesn’t look like it has fire animations...” Narrator: “It actually did.”

This is freaking awesome, I need to try it myself. The lack of the catchy SimCity SNES theme song on the title screen made me sad though 😞

dabbing my oils to this vid, thank you for your golden voice BTW always soothing retro/vintage PC content thank you Clint

This entire video is very analogous to how I felt when Pokémon Gold's 1997 beta was discovered, dumped, and showcased to the public and how I got to try the ROM myself. I totally understand your awe and excitement here Clint, I love it.

Having grown up in Wilmington, CA during a portion of my childhood something like this would have struck all of my curiosity buttons, especially since Wilmington and parts of Long Beach are just brimming with refineries and oil stuffs...

I've been binge watching your stuff, not in any order and not that it pertains to any of my daily life but I love your content. Keep it up.

I love how these old games and programs still pop-up.

0:23 You almost turned into the Christmas Clone there!

There's some discussion on reddit about how there might be a finished version of this on a floppy disk some where

Sometimes you can find fun or interesting things in these old programs, either on purpose or for debugging, but taking this one apart for a quick glance didn't seem to show much other than what it's supposed to be. I'm betting the developers didn't have a lot of fun making it.

Very cool vid! Glad to see ya so happy. I was never a fan of any SIMS type games. But, Still stoked that you enjoyed it. All the best!

The first thing I thought when I saw these news that was you gonna love it! Thanks for making the quick video about the game!

I'm really enjoying the Blurb channel LGR, its nice to get the extra content, really appreciate it!

Maxis, Bullfrog, Nova Logic, Microprose from the 80s and 90s, I'd love to hear about all these companies

Now somebody finish this game in cooperation with the original creators and their vision. This is amazing.

At roughly 13:14 that "barn" at the top right corner definitely gives off the SimFarm vibes. Even the foliage feels similar.

I purchased a copy of SimEarth when it was released. Just recently I got a virtual machine up and running on Windows 7 that is dos 6.2. The SimEarth disks from 30 years ago were readable and I made images of the disks and was playing simearth in the virtual machine. I have also original Doom diskettes that were readable too and was playing Doom in the virtual machine too. So, yea, diskettes can be read for a long time.

I worked for engineering at a biopharma production facility for a while. The similarities in overseeing and management in this game are pretty close!! Looking forwards to playing it myself. Really love the balancing in this, super exciting.

Playing a mythical oil game on a wooden PC The irony is strong with this one...👌

Wow, I've been waiting for like forever for someone to unearth this treasure!

Heck yeah, as soon as i saw the announcement i was giddy to see you feature it :D

I can't wait to try it out. Sim City and and Sim Ant are two of my favorite PC games from that time.

ohhhh that brings back old memories from when oil prices were above zero

Now the community that enjoy's Retro games needs to get this in 100% working form.

Absolutely beautiful puristic graphic style, somehow this always creates this special atmosphere. The restrictions of that time created some of the most focused graphics. Feels totaly "on point".

Literally just read this in the news. Glad you posted.

Clint's joy brings me joy.

05:10 I really liked the part he set the octane value of premium to 47 RON... Epic...

"Oh no! Congress is about to pass a bill giving a tax credit to companies who use solar energy! Send your lobbyists to Washington."

Interesting to think of that the map we're looking at is the actual floor plan of the refinery that this one build of the game was SPECIFICALLY designed for. 😮

This is amazing! Makes me wonder what else got made for corporate contracts? Maybe there was a dungeon crawler RPG for Amway salespeople

Memory dump... I think I played this or something similar to as a kid. I remember going to the science museum Oklahoma (omniplex) or possibly to another place (venture 2000? or a name like that) and they had a PC that you could stand at that was placed at a desk coming off a column or something. But I remember playing the original SimCity (or possibly this) and then another game... I remember lots of blue or one color on the screen, and the word oil. Might of been oil barons but after looking at screens not so sure. Now I wish I could remember if it was at the omniplex or not... I remember a counter on the wall something to do with 'number of hotdogs eaten by Americans'. God my childhood memories are strange.

We have _Oakflat Nuclear Power Plant Simulator,_ we now have _SimRefinery._ Now we need a _SimNuke_ to make radioactive space batteries so we can have _SimSpace: Voyages of the Starship Llama Drone._

I love the content please keep it up you have a good channel here

so many uploads, you must be having fun! I love this channel.

The "FCC Unit" is the Fluid Catalytic Cracking Unit. It makes shoes for orphans.

NICE, DOWNLOADING NOW, WANTED TO PLAY THIS FOR A LONG TIME

I have stopped the video and now opened Boxer on my MacBook Air. I have successfully run SimRefinery on my MacBook Air. Thank you very much Clint LGR.

I hope when I get older there’s a pill to make my floppy recoverable.

This looks very interesting, as well as a great piece of Maxis history. Although now I want a fully working version where I can build a oil refinery company from the ground up, and then promptly destroy it with all the available disasters at once.

Very cool! You can take a course right on your computer the fun way to learn about the refinery. I like it.:)

The refinery fire disaster option must be wild.

With the Internet Archive link taken down, does anyone have a back-up of SimRefinery that they might be able to share with people again?

Man I'm loving these Blerbs

This just made me remember how cool it is to play the Oil Specialization in Simcity 2013👀

That is really cool. I had never even heard of that game and I'm an inspector in the oil and gas industry.

Some enterprising individual with experience designing refineries should come along and finish this.

I can imagine some insane ex-chevron employee with a passion for games "finishing" this via mod. Adding functionality to things that aren't implemented, make all the buildings functional with whatever system intertwines them all with complete control of the layout and all that. Maybe some fun characters like the advisors of other sim games. I mean, I won't play it, cause omg that sounds boring, but it would still be cool to see.

Duuuuude, I have been hoping for this for so long!

wow didnt know, i have a little netbook dedicated to maxis games, cant wait to add this,

That is an industrial simulator to the core. Lots of process related terms that are specifically niche.

You can hear the excitement! It's so awesome!

Lgr blurbs is great and I think you should keep this channel going

Instead of being attacked by Godzilla, you get overrun by hippies

That's seriously fucking cool! Nice one Clint!

Hi Clint, you should track down and review Sim Life (if you haven't already). It's a Sim about evolution and the piece of software that will bring any PC to it's knees... It simulates all the individual life-forms and since the amount of those grows exponentially, you can guess what happens. My 12 MB RAM in my machine was eaten up in less than 20 minutes and only a hard reset could bring that machine back to life. Anyway, you should try it!

I know it was meant to be a business sim if it had been finished. But this makes me think that this would of been better as an expansion to sim city rather than its own game.

Fuck, I need this, I love these simulators of industrial systems

It is all sim but not so simple. Great find

" Back to regularly scheduled whatever...." --LGR adeptly but inadvertently sums up the rest of 2020....hopefully 👍👍👍😸😸🤘❤❤☺️🤪