Even if you don’t play The Sims, you almost certainly know someone who does. The series is one of the most popular in video games, but it’s often overlooked by huge swaths of the gaming audience (which surely has nothing to do with the series’ audience being around 60 percent women). Yet even those who ignore The Sims have felt its influence on gaming, as it popularized the life sim genre that was relatively unknown at the time, but dominates the indie scene in particular today.
The Sims kicked the massively popular series off on February 4, 2000. For all its good-natured goofiness, the game that’s been a comfort to so many players over the years grew out of tragedy. In 1991, the Oakland-Berkeley Firestorm ripped through California’s Bay Area, burning homes along its path. One of those homes belonged to Will Wright, creator of SimCity, and later The Sims.
The Sims has all the drama of your favorite reality TV show.
“When something like this happens, you get a big picture,” Wright told Berkeleyside in 2011. “Where do I want to live? What sort of things do I need to buy? You see your life almost as a project in process. When you’re embedded in your day-to-day life you don’t get that perspective.”
Those questions eventually turned into a pitch for The Sims, a game about building a life from the ground up, starting with the most mundane details. The Sims was an immediate success upon launch, even among people who don’t play many, or any, other games, which remains true of the series today. While it wasn’t the first life sim, it was far far the most popular game in the genre up to that point, and players responded to what felt like an entirely new kind of game.
Unlike fellow life sims Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, The Sims isn’t about controlling a single character. Instead, it’s about building an environment for a group of characters to live in and influencing, but not always directly dictating, how they interact with it.
This is what a dream home looked like in the year 2000.
Since Sims act independently of the player, they often converse with one another without player input. But players still need to know their emotional states in order to respond, which gave birth to one of the series’ most lovable quirks — Simlish. The characters in The Sims speak an invented language that’s focused on conveying emotion rather than meaning. Developing Simlish was reportedly a stressful affair for developer Maxis.
The developer first tried using musical instruments to represent Sims’ voices, according to The Verge, before bringing on improv actor Stephen Kearin. After multiple frustrating attempts of phonetically recording dialogue in languages Kearin didn’t know, before Kearin pulled on his improv experience, demonstrating a game called Foreign Poet, in which an actor recites a poem in gibberish but imbues it with as much emotion as possible. The sound team was impressed, and Kearin recorded the rest of the game’s male character dialogue the same way, bringing in friend and fellow improviser Gerri Lawlor to record the dialogue for female characters.
Another defining — and divisive — trademark of The Sims series is its inclusivity. On one hand, The Sims has a history of including diversity of race, gender, sexuality, and body type, paying more attention to how they’re represented in recent years. On the other hand, disabled characters are still totally absent, and modders have had to fill in the huge gaps in the series’ options for Black skin and hair.
When they weren’t being drowned by sadistic players, Sims had a pretty good life.
Even the now-famous kiss between two female characters during The Sims’ first E3 demo was reportedly an accident. Programmer Patrick J. Barrett III told The New Yorker that an early version of The Sims included gay characters, before the feature was cut. But Barrett unknowingly ended up basing his work on a design document that still mentioned gay couples and implemented them, after which publisher EA decided to keep the accidentally reintroduced option. In 2009, The Sims introduced gay marriage — which is still before it was legal in most of the United States — and in 2016 removed gender restrictions from cosmetic items and offered options to better represent trans characters.
The Sims series is still going strong today, even as some players aren’t happy about the decision to keep updating The Sims 4 instead of releasing a sequel. The Sims 4 just got an anniversary update and limited-time, in fact, bringing more than 70 new items to the game. A re-release of the first two Sims games also marks the occasion, letting players see just how much things have improved since the original.
As The Sims passes its 25th anniversary, it still has few direct competitors. While life sims are a huge deal right now, none have really matched the feel of The Sims, with its unique take on what simulating a life actually means. The closest anyone’s ever come may be out this year, with the generative AI-infested Inzoi and the considerably more interesting Paralives both aiming for a very Sims-like kind of gameplay. If any game is ever going to challenge the dominance of The Sims, it may be close at hand, but it’s telling that its taken 25 years to even get close to the king of life sims.
