Widget Workshop (1996) was my favorite: with a large selection of widgets (such as logic gates, switches, displays, number generators, sound and graphics modules) you build 'functional cause and effect pipelines' in a a cute drag and drop canvas. There is a puzzle mode too. Very Rube Goldberg. Great fun, and educational!

At a young age SimEarth made a huge impression on me. I think it was the inscrutability and huge manuals that spoke of a wonderful ecological secret, tantalisingly out of reach no matter how many times I tried...

I can’t even estimate how many hours I sunk into some of these Maxis games. SimCity grabbed me harder than any game had ever grabbed me before and I’m sure I spent the equivalent of years of full time work playing it. SimEarth’s manual felt like a PhD program for a kid.

This game isn’t covered in the article but SimGolf had such an impact on my sense of humour that decades later I still think “gregiscool.com” would be a great name for a startup.

I might be misremembering since it's been over 35, but the orinal Mac versions of these games would be better to play today with the higher resolution they had.