The Sims at 25 – confessions of guilty gamers playing with virtual lives

As video game The Sims celebrates its 25th anniversary, fans of the virtual life simulator help to explain why it’s remained so popular for so long. For many younger gamers there has never been a world without The Sims. The original was released in 2000 and was intended as a spin-off of sorts from city-building game SimCity. Created by renowned (but now increasingly forgotten) creator Will Wright, its premise was a simple one: a virtual dollhouse in which you controlled the lives of customisable characters called sims – the daily lives of which you could control in detail or leave them to enjoy on their own.

This was all decades before the phrase ‘cosy game’ was coined, a modern genre of video game that focuses on non-violent gameplay and includes some of the best-selling titles of all time, such as Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Most cosy games tend to be made by indie developers, with major Western publishers happy to waste tens of millions copying other trends, no matter how oversaturated they seem to be, but always reticent about anything that’s aimed at an audience in any way different from the norm. And this in an industry that is constantly complaining about the need for growth and finding new audiences.

Although I am not ashamed to admit I was firmly addicted to The Sims 2 for some time, following its launch in 2004, there’s no doubt that the primary audience for The Sims is women. That’s still rare today but it was almost unheard of in the late 90s, when the game was originally in development. (1996 hit Barbie Fashion Designer is generally regarded as the first major video game to be aimed primarily at women and its customisation options do share some similarities with The Sims.).

The original The Sims, when it was still viewed as an experimental spin-off, wasn’t laser-focused on a particular group but over time publisher EA has refined its marketing, and the games themselves, to create something more innocuous and safe. With the first two games though, there were a lot of interesting rough edges. For this article I asked a number of Metro staff members, who don’t usually write about games, for their memories of the franchise and almost all of them talked about how they used to torture their sims by trapping them in a room without a door and watching them go crazy.

From the beginning, The Sims has allowed players to create their own buildings and house layouts and while many players used this to make dream homes and recreations of TV and movie locations, there’s few that didn’t at least experiment with seeing what happens when sims are trapped in a room with another character they hate or where they run out of food… or the oven catches on fire. The apparently well known trick of trapping a sim in a swimming pool and then deleting the ladder that allows them to get out is one that has been recounted to me multiple times while writing this article, as you can see in the anecdotes below.

Even by the time of The Sims 2, in 2004, this sort of emergent gameplay was being discouraged by EA and while today’s entries are considerably more complex they don’t have the same anarchic open-endedness as the original. Despite the franchise’s success its future is somewhat opaque, with plans for The Sims 5 recently being cancelled, as EA instead decides to continue to support The Sims 4 for the foreseeable future – since its success has never really waned, thanks to a steady supply of expansions and new content. Although a spin-off codenamed Project Rene is currently in testing, even if the fan response so far is mixed.

The complaints are that it’s too safe and corporate, which The Sims never was originally. It was a daring and innovative game, not only in terms of who it was trying to appeal to but what it was attempting to achieve with its gameplay. The Sims 4 was first released in 2014 and is free-to-play on PC, with EA making their money from paid-for expansions and downloadable content. There are versions of the game for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (plus The Sims Mobile, which stopped receiving new content last year) but it’s always best to play The Sims on PC, due to the wide range of fan-made extras you can add to that version.

For the 25th anniversary, EA has re-released The Sims and The Sims 2, which had been unavailable for years. Although that hasn’t gone as well as fans hoped, since both have technical issues that mean they don’t work as well as they did in the noughties. Although that’ll probably be fixed over the next few weeks. The Sims Legacy Collection costs £17.99 and The Sims 2 Legacy Collection costs £24.99 and are available now on Steam.