Disasters in SimCity 4

One of my goals for SimCity 4 was to make the disasters tactile and playful. Half the fun of SimCity is destroying what you've labored to create, so we needed to make destruction as compelling as creation.

Here's my early mockup for one of the ideas, done in 3DS Max; The tornado on a leash. I thought of the tornado as a huge, eager, but destructive dog. You could sort of control if you really tried, but it would try and get away and chew up your buildings if it could. A badly housetrained tornado.

Mockups like this are a great way of getting a design idea across. They abstract out everything but the point, and show how it should be implemented.