The original 1989 SimCity box was a Rorschach test that cost Maxis $50k.

The cover was a Bakelite toy city simulator appliance with a red MONSTER disaster button, and a stompy T-Rex-looking creature waving over San Francisco on its TV screen.

Maxis never called it Godzilla on the box or in the game. Reviewers looked at the inkblot and saw Godzilla anyway.

Original monster cover:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m...

Revised cover after the lawsuit, monster swapped for a tornado (the MONSTER button survived):

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m...

In Feb 2024 I emailed Jeff Braun (Maxis co-founder/CEO) and asked what actually happened and how much Maxis had to pay. He wrote back the same day:

> Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement.

All the box scans are in the Micropolis repo -- high res front, back with the "floods, earthquakes, fires, tornados, meltdowns and monsters" disaster list, side panels, and the platform variants, each with descriptions:

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume...

Full email thread:

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume...

The back of the box kept advertising monsters as a feature the same year the monster got lawyered off the front.

The function names in the code all refered to it like "MakeMonster()", but admittedly there was a "GOD" symbol in the code used to index the Monster sprite likw "GetSprite(GOD)", but Toho could not have know that, since it was a C preprocessor macro that was compiled away in the binary:

https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...