Phil Salvador and The Video Game History Foundation do great work (simultaneously serious and fun) and excellent research and compelling writing!

In his quest to deeply research the evidence, perform interviews with the people involved with Maxis's Business Simulations Division, and document the history of Maxis's long lost SimRefinery, Phil was able to pull off the astronomically unlikely miracle of actually finding someone who had an extremely rare readable floppy disk of it! The articles he wrote tell an amazing story.

A close look at SimRefinery:

https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-analysis/

>Two nights ago, a reader on the tech news site Ars Technica named postbebop uploaded a copy of SimRefinery to the Internet Archive. This is incredibly exciting news, and it’s given us our first chance to take a closer look at the game. SimRefinery was not fully completed by Maxis, and we can learn a lot about the game from the state it was left in. Based on my research, I want to add some context and explain what some of the peculiarities the game might say about its development.

Ep. 11: SimRefinery Simulated by a Refined Phil Salvador:

https://gamehistory.org/ep-11-simrefinery-simulated-by-a-ref...

>Today’s episode features the bizarre origins of SimRefinery as well as other Sim titles which never came to be. Phil Salvador joins the Video Game History Hour to discuss a branch of Maxis, Business Simulations Division, which gives us a glimpse into a path-not-taken, alternate reality where Maxis might have only made a name for themselves in the world of business. A world where powerhouse franchises like SimCity and The Sims never existed. But alas, perhaps we could have had, but now never will have, SimArby’s. </3

SimRefinery Recovered (obscuritory.com):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23425041

https://obscuritory.com/sim/simrefinery-recovered/

>Never say never! Thanks to a reader on Ars Technica and an anonymous chemical engineer, a working copy of SimRefinery has been successfully recovered.

>Two weeks ago, I published my long-in-the-works article about Maxis Business Simulations, a division of SimCity developer Maxis that made simulation games for businesses. It was the culmination of four years of research, and I’m very proud to share their story.

>One of the games they produced was SimRefinery, an oil refinery simulation for Chevron. Very little was widely known about the game until now, and the article kicked off a wave of interest in SimRefinery that seems to have reached beyond gaming circles. Shortly after the article was published, it was picked up by the tech news site Ars Technica, where one reader, postbebop, reported that they knew a retired chemical engineer who worked at Chevron, who confirmed that he owned a copy of the game. postbebop walked the engineer through the process of reading the data from the original floppy disk, and he was able to create a digital copy.

The Video Game History Foundation library opens in early access