Read this excerpt from http://www.mindjack.com/feature/gne.html
Stewart Butterfield: When I was really little I had an Intellivision, and though I enjoyed the car racing game, Astrosmash, and Advanced D&D, it was Utopia (a very early sim game where you controlled an island and tried to build a good society) that really caught my attention. A few years later we got an Apple II and I played Hard Hat Mac, Aztec and Drol (classics all) while learning a lot of useless AppleBasic. Still later, I played some arcade games (none more than Galaga) but it was when the second generation of Macs came out that I got inspired. Balance of Power was great, but it was Sim City that started me on this course.
Mr. Butterfield, and his company Flickr was just acquired by Yahoo!