[The success of "SimCity" spawned a variety of different, sometimes bizarre, Sim-style games, including "SimEarth," "SimGolf," "SimCopter," "SimHealth," "SimAnt" and "SimRefinery. As Wikipedia notes, this last game was not released to the public, as it was developed by the business-oriented division of Maxis for internal use by the energy company Chevron.

Interest in the game was revived in May when Ars Technica reported a detailed history of SimRefinery on The Obscuritory, a site dedicated to "little-known weird games and software." The game itself, however, seemed out of reach.

"No one kept SimRefinery around because it seemed unimportant. It was a one-off, somewhat failed training program for an oil refinery in California," The Obscuritory wrote.

"In Maxis' grand scheme of things, it was one of their least important titles, and only became of interest to the video game community because of its unavailability.

It turns out, however, that the game is not entirely lost; one of Ars' readers found a working copy of the game and uploaded it to the Internet Archive.

As Obscuritory noted in an update, it is not only the game itself that is interesting, but also "the historical context surrounding it."

SimRefinery was developed in 1993, just a few years after the original SimCity, and was the first game to be developed by Maxis (more specifically, co-founder Will Wright), reflects a sustained interest in extending video games beyond traditional audiences and ideas.

A similar approach to game production can be seen in Maxis' 2008 evolutionary RTS, Spore. Wright stated in 2007 that he considers himself a toy-maker, not a game designer, and told Wired, "Most games cast the player as Luke Skywalker. This is more about putting the player in the role of George Lucas."

Archive.org's SimRefinery is an "incomplete prototype," so some buttons don't work and there is no documentation, so you have to solve the puzzle yourself. It's also not the most intuitive game I've ever played: menu options include alkylation, modification, residum, H2, iC4, sulfur, etc., which would make sense if you signed up for a crash course in the resource mining industry, but if you're trying to find ways to unleash Godzilla If you're trying to find a way to unleash Gojira, then it doesn't help much.

However, it is easy to run. You can download and run it locally if you wish, but it will also run just fine in a web browser. See here.