lock the structure, in which case a maintenance fee is charged yearly. The balance level is measured in a grayscale bar, with the two extremes dedicating to research (permanent souls) or production (temporary souls). The Macromanager, on the other hand, allows the player to balance manually or automatically all fate structures of a specific virtue/sin simultaneously. "Bad Things", which are akin to natural disasters, occur at random. Each one can be repelled by one of the Special Buildings that are granted as rewards for reaching population milestones. Bad Things can be disabled via an in-game menu. However, doing so decreases the player's soul rate by half. Like most god games, Afterlife is open-ended and does not have set conditions for winning. There are, however, a few definite ways of losing the game. These include having an excessive number of unemployed workers (leading to an all-out war between Heaven and Hell), staying too deep in debt for too long, and the Planet's population being wiped out by either nuclear warfare or an asteroid event. Development Lead designer Michael Stemmle said the idea for the game came as he played SimCity, combined with a fascination for creating an organized afterlife "that tickled my bone ever since I read Dante's Inferno". In what he attributed to LucasArts being "a rather experimental studio at the time", his pitch was approved and a team of 20 people would then work on the game. Stemmle wanted in particular to go "whole hog goofy" by not having a setting trapped to reality, full of satirical descriptions and pun-based names. He found Hell to be easier to design, as "ironic punishments are dime a dozen", leading him to find Heaven more creatively rewarding. Reception The game received "favorable" reviews according to the review aggregation website GameRankings. A Next Generation critic called Afterlife "a title that will immediately attract anyone who was even mildly amused by the mother of all sim-builders, SimCity", and praised the vast number of options and responsibilities, the characters, and the complex government. They also made similar praises of the PC version, but with a lower score. Macworld gave Afterlife its 1996 "Best Simulation Game" award. References External links 1996 video games DOS games Windows games Classic Mac OS games LucasArts games God games City-building games Video games about angels Video games about death Video games about demons Video games about the afterlife Video games