Comment by AshamedCaptain

You're describing SimCity 4, not SimCity 3000. The SC3k tool is not entirely 2D, but it does mostly behave like one (with emulated voxels instead of pixels).

And while I cannot confirm what Maxis was doing internally, I am quite sure no-one was using 3DS Max for rendering game assets in the 90s considering it had just been released and well into the 2000s it was still humongously slow.