Art of Roads in Games Skip to main content Art of Roads in Games January 29, 2026 7 min read Not sure if it’s just me, but I often get a primal satisfaction whenever I see intricate patterns emerging out of seemingly disordered environments. Think about the galleries of ant colonies, the absurdly perfect hexagons of honeycombs, or the veins on a leaf. No architect, no blueprint. Just simple rules stacking on each other that result in beautiful patterns. I can’t explain why, but seeing those structures always felt good. Humans do this too. And for me, one of the most fascinating patterns we’ve come up with is the roads. Sometimes I imagine aliens from faraway galaxies discovering Earth long after we’re gone. Forests reclaimed by nature, cities reduced to rubble, yet between them, a faintly pattern is still visible – the road network. I like to think they will feel the same way I do when looking at nature patterns. – “Man, someone really thought this through.” City Builders and Their Roads I’ve got to say, roads have fascinated me since I was a kid. I still remember playing SimCity 2000 for the first time when I was about five or six years old. I didn’t understand much. Definitely didn’t know what zoning, taxes, or demand were. But roads fascinated me from the start. I think roads lie at the heart of every city builder. It’s the fabric on which cities are built. Since that moment, I’ve played almost every modern-themed city builder out there. In the meantime, I’ve also started noticing them in the real world. Examining them in more detail. Roundabouts. Interchanges. Overpasses. Merge lanes. Noticing every intricacy. Despite every game bringing an improvement over the one before, something always felt… off. SimCity 4 added elevation and diagonal roads. SimCity 2013 introduced curved roads. Then came Cities: Skylines with a ton of freedom. You could know freeplace roads and merge them into intersections at any angle, build flyovers at different elevations to construct crazy, yet unrealistic, interchanges. I think this was the largest breakthrough. But something was still nagging me. Highway ramps were unrealistically sharp or wobbly, lanes that were supposed to be high-speed bent too sharply at certain points, and the corner radii of intersections looked strange. I mean look at this. This is probably what highway engineers have nightmares about. And then came the mods. Mods changed everything. The great community enabled a new kind of freedom. One could build almost anything: perfect merge lanes, realistic markings, and smooth transitions. It was a total game-changer. I am particularly proud of this 5-lane turbo roundabout: But even then, mods didn’t feel completely natural. They were still limited by the game’s original system. Cities: Skylines 2 pushed it even further, with lanes becoming even more realistic and markings as well. I think at this point, a non-trained eye won’t know the difference from reality. Then I stopped stumbling around and sta

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