The Sims is so enormously compelling because it offers the fantasy of control over life itself, including all the things that are so maddeningly unpredictable in the real world – relationships, careers, family, house renovations. Part of the appeal of video games is control – not just the act of controlling a character’s actions, but the greater control of understanding a set of rules and systems and bending them to your will. There is no racial prejudice, no gender pay gap The Sims is more than a dolls' house for the digital generation. One of my lecturers, spotting The Sims open on my laptop in class, admitted to the worryingly common virtual crime of drowning his Sims in their own pool by deleting the ladders. My own personal obsession with The Sims was so all-consuming that when The Sims 3 arrived in 2009, I had to cut myself off in case I failed my degree. A university classmate created the cast of Friends, and used them to play out a drama that was definitely better than the final season of the show.

Mortifyingly, some teen pals and I used The Sims 2 to insert ourselves into elaborate Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction. A friend’s mother played so much Sims that she forgot to clean the actual house for weeks.Ĭreator Will Wright … the project started as an architectural simulation, until the development team realised testers were having more fun manipulating the onscreen people. Whereas in the past “a large female audience” meant maybe 5% of the user base, with The Sims, women were the majority. One thing creator Will Wright realised very early on was that the game was appealing to a large female audience. With four main instalments, countless add-ons and spin-offs, and more than 200m sales worldwide, it is equalled perhaps only by Tetris in its universality. Before we knew it, it was 3am.Īlmost everyone has played The Sims. With a thrill, we discovered we could make Sims “smooch” (though we were disappointed to learn that they couldn’t actually bone down – that wouldn’t happen until The Sims 2). We bought them a little telly, a nice couch, a blender, paging covetously through the game’s furniture catalogue. We took turns sending them to work, changing the wallpaper, and ordering them to put dirty dishes in the dishwasher instead of leaving them to gather flies. It was at my friend Hannah’s house three 11-year-olds huddled in front of her dad’s bulky old computer monitor at midnight, gazing into a miniature house populated by tiny people going about their inexplicably compelling daily business. L ike many girls of my generation, I first played The Sims at a sleepover.

What year did sims 1 come out