CityOne, IBM's Serious Game for City Planners, and Its Status

IBM presented CityOne on May 3 and 4, 2010, at its IMPACT 2010 conference in Las Vegas, and promised a release in fall 2010. The company described it as a no-charge, sim-style game that teaches how cities and their industries can become smarter. IBM called it the world's first Smarter Planet interactive simulation. The pitch rested on urban pressure: IBM cited estimates of a million people moving into cities every week, cities using about 75 percent of the world's energy and cities losing as much as 20 percent of their water supply to leaking infrastructure.

The missions are organized by industry. In the water mission the example city has seen water use grow at twice the rate of its population, loses up to 40 percent of its supply to leaks and faces rising energy costs. The player has to introduce a water management system fed with accurate real-time data. In the banking missions the player pushes a bank toward customer-centric services such as mobile payments, dynamic invoicing and micro-lending.

The October release grew the game to more than 100 scenarios, among them Water Crisis Management and Smarter Retail. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency supplied content and resources, and an EPA representative said the agency was helping users "to more thoroughly investigate environmental issues". Across all missions the player decides where to invest, balancing financial, environmental and social goals against a budget and the needs of citizens. Alongside the city decisions, the game introduces service reuse, process management, cloud and collaborative technologies as ways to make a business model more agile. IBM positioned it for customers, business partners and students, and as part of a line of games that includes INNOV8, RoboCode and PowerUp.

INNOV8 is the best documented sibling. At the time of the announcement IBM said the series was used by more than 1,000 universities and offered free to schools through its Academic Initiative.

The October 2010 release described CityOne as a way for business and civic leaders to balance economic, environmental and social interests under a limited budget. It told readers to download CityOne at ibm.com/cityone. In November 2026 that address shows an IBM notice that the page cannot be displayed.

IBM's main site works normally, so the game's own address is the part that has gone. No working download from IBM is known, and the game's current availability is not confirmed.