SimCity games had long shelf-lives and were on the sales charts for years. It could be it wasn't individually special and it was just "make sure the top 20 windows games work".
Microsoft had a program internally within it's development teams for Windows 95 that you could get any software for free. You just had to agree that you'd ensure it was compatible with Windows 95 and take ownership of its quirks to get it to run on Windows 95.
I'm familiar with SimCity and Raymond Chen. So familiar to know that SimCity was one of the top-selling Windows (not DOS) games. So while you and I and everyone loved SimCity, Microsoft had the economic motivation to make it work. They also certainly put more effort into obscure business software nobody remembers.
Per wiki, they released "SimCity Deluxe CD-ROM" for Windows 95, so the game was obviously still selling well even then.
