The Sims
Written by : ISKAN
Type of Game
A life simulator that could replace your guidance counselor.
release date on our machines
February 2000—not like Sim the comedian, who, according to rumors, supposedly rubbed shoulders with dinosaurs.
Developer
Maxis—if the title includes “Sim,” it's probably from them (except for the comedian Sim).
Publisher
Electronic Arts, whose name includes “Art,” just like the theater company Sim-Art, founded by comedian Sim
The Sims: available, huh, what? Oh, never mind. At first I thought it didn't exist anywhere, but you can actually find the Legacy Collection on Steam, EA's website, Microsoft's website, and the Epic Games Store. What a relief !
Ah, the year 2000 and its wild technological promises! Flying cars (a breeze), AI-controlled personal robots (a given), and a video game where you could control every move of one or more characters (totally impossible!). That’s pretty much the debate I had with my friends during a study hour, huddled around a video game magazine featuring Maxis’s upcoming blockbuster, The Sims. Even though we were just sixth graders, we’d already played SimCity, and while we thought a city that developed on its own was impressive enough, the idea of managing one of its residents seemed revolutionary to us. A few months later, the holy grail was finally here. We made plans to meet at Michael Durden’s house; besides being the class heartthrob, he had an older brother who was a whiz at computers. It was at his house that I discovered The Matrix, with Michael Durden and my best friend at the time commenting on every scene of the movie.
Back to the Future
I also remember wild four-player games of Micromachines on our Game Boy Colors and some pretty racy photos of Sarah Michelle Gellar or Clara Morgane… But the topic of the day was definitely The Sims, which my older brother had pirated and which we could get for the modest sum of 10 francs—enough to cover the cost of a blank CD. In addition to the crack to generate the CD key, the CD also contained a patch to remove the pixelated blur when the Sims went to take showers or use the bathroom—a rather pointless addition, given that the programmers hadn’t bothered to detail the models… Back home, I installed the game and started a new playthrough. My lack of money forced me to take the smallest house and its Sims, Jojo Nouvot and Paulette Nouvot.
The days are short, and there’s a stark contrast between the limited time available and all the tasks you can or must do if you want to avoid ending up with a bunch of human wrecks. Of course, you have to find a job to pay the bills that arrive every three days (when you don’t forget them in the mailbox), manage basic needs, and entertain your Sims to keep their spirits up, try to socialize with other Sims who will always visit at the worst possible time, and improve your skills to get a promotion. You’re always running out of time! At first, you’re fumbling around, trash piles up, you oversleep, and you get a warning from your manager that the next time you’re late, you’re fired! Basically, it’s like discovering the adult world at 13—I wouldn’t be surprised if Macron played the game on hard mode, for sure!
Once you’ve got your schedule under control and your income is steady, you can upgrade your home. And once that’s done, you tear it all down and build a bigger house, then you furnish it, redecorate, fix up the garden and the pool, and then you tear it all down and start over… And if your Sims ever get on your nerves, you can remove the pool ladder while they’re swimming or take down all the doors in a room—and there you go: life insurance plus a free headstone, a major asset for your Halloween decor! You add furniture and appliances, then change the carpet and wallpaper, work on landscaping the garden, and dig the pool.
Sister Act
Life was going along peacefully in SimCity, but a threat loomed: whether big or small, our sisters were going to take over our computers. And while we might have hoped it would be only temporary, we hadn’t counted on Maxis’s complicity—they seized every opportunity to release an expansion pack and rake in a little more money: travel, pets, college, magic, parties… In total, over 23 years, we’ve had 4 Sims games, 5 spin-offs, and 59 expansions or add-on packs—an average of 3 games a year, worse than a mogwai’s reproduction rate after a good shower! Enough to extend those loooong gaming sessions that began with meticulous character creation, continued with building the house, and—if there was still a little time left—finally ended with an actual gameplay session.
Absolute Cinema !
I know the usual thing to do at this point in the article is to talk about the game’s music, but what really sticks in my mind is the intro video. Usually, when a game launches, we hammer the Esc, Enter, and Spacebar keys to save a few seconds—which, after a year of gaming, add up to several minutes or hours, depending on your playstyle. No need to remind us that your company made the game—we’ve already bought it anyway! Gaming sessions are short and access to the family computer is limited, so we have to optimize everything, but with The Sims, I savored every second of its opening credits. Right from the start, the game presented us with all the promises it had to offer: starting out in a small, barely furnished house and ending up, after several stages, with a large, fully decorated mansion. And that’s not all, because our Sim was also going to make friends, throw parties, become popular, and find love. Strangely, they don’t mention the fact that you end up alone and in debt, with your morale in the gutter and your energy bar empty…
To wrap things up, people tend to look down on The Sims and dismiss it as a game for girls, but it was a revolution even for little boys. And even though you could quickly get around the basic rules—by typing “klapaucius” to get unlimited money or by spending more time designing and furnishing your house than actually playing in it—everyone found their own way to have fun with the game, even if it was mostly at the expense of the other users of the family computer!
Afterword by Paulémile
The Sims evokes such a huge phenomenon and I’ve spent so little time with it that I didn’t have the courage to write an article about it. In this case, imposter syndrome held me back, so I decided to let ISKAN handle it instead. That’s so convenient. But I still had it on the apartment’s PC, just like about 108% of the population back then. It wasn’t mine; it was THE computer game of my little sister, Rebecca Vestibule. I didn’t have enough problems as it was, with my stepdad already sitting in front of his Pentium way too often for my liking, and now my sis was getting into it too! How was I supposed to level up my characters in Diablo II and conquer the world in Heroes of Might and Magic III? On the weekends? When the whole family headed out to the countryside except me? Yeah, sure. But that wasn’t enough, hey, oh!
So, how do I go about trying to get my sister to leave on weekdays? First, I wait until my stepdad isn’t looking. Then, I sit down next to her and trash her favorite video game any way I can. “Wow, that’s ugly!” “Wow, that’s lame!” “Wow! Um… it’s ugly and it’s lame!” “It’s from the creators of SimCity? So what? It’s totally lame!” The most unbeatable arguments in the world, really. Except that, first of all, she’d go straight off to whine to her mom’s skirts, or rather to her dad’s grubby pants, and I’d get sent back to my room faster than a day goes by in The Sims. Second, my method didn’t work at all, because, believe it or not, the super-smooth concept had me hooked in two minutes, just like everyone else. I’d already tried to get Rebecca off the computer back in the Adibou 2 days, and I hadn’t succeeded, because I’d ended up loving the game like never before.
Same goes for A Bug's Life and Spyro on PlayStation. Of course I was going to fail again with one of the most successful games of all time. So, I did dive into it a little bit. Not to the point of playing it alone or with my buddies Randall Geyser and Leyland Lampion on the weekends—I had my limits. But I ended up having a blast coaching my sister so she could build the coolest house possible, inhabited by the least miserable people possible. Like ISKAN, I remember that it sometimes required a level of precision similar to that needed in Civilization II, reflexes as sharp as in Counter-Strike, and micromanagement almost as intense as in Starcraft. And just like ISKAN, I also had a good laugh letting my Sims burn to death by sealing off the kitchen, or drown by removing the ladder from the pool. But what really drove me crazy were the sounds.
Beyond the barrage of sound effects we have to endure constantly—which, over time, become absolutely infuriating—we have to mention Simlish: the language spoken by the Sims. Well, can we really call it a language, given that it consists solely of grunts and made-up gibberish? I don’t know, I don’t care—I just thought it was brilliantly cool. It sounds like what the peasants in Age of Empires used to say, but put through the wringer of progress. If I love the improbable babbling of Little Big Planet so much, it’s also because The Sims had laid the groundwork years earlier. Honestly, just how much of a cult thing has it become to listen to our Sims talking nonsense while making psychopathic gestures, with icons that have absolutely no meaning floating above their heads? Everyone loves Simlish, even those who claim to hate it. I hope that’s clear.
I think Rebecca appreciated me giving her a hand. Otherwise, I would have heard from my father-in-law, his eyes blazing with hatred. That said, she often mentioned that she would have loved to include a dog in her virtual home, to make it a little more like ours, with our beloved Mèmès (an old, clumsy, whiny Cavalier King Charles, but we loved him more than anything). I understood how she felt, passionate about her favorite video game, which she wanted to see even more expansive, even more stylish. I’d experienced the same frenzy with Total Annihilation and its millions of additional units created by fans. So, in the same way, I searched for patches and mods on various obscure websites. I struggled to find anything, but I eventually stumbled upon a single program that let you have a cute little dog.
And… I really shouldn’t have. I guess back when The Sims first came out, adding animals was practically an impossible feat. For starters, the dog was listed in the same menu as the furniture, right next to a bed and a dresser. It had a greenish-beige coat and just slid across the floor without playing any animation. You couldn’t interact with it at all, but worse yet, it left puddles of poop every twenty seconds! And I mean actual liquid puddles—way too brown to pass for pee. Within ten minutes, the house and garden were flooded with hellish excrement, and the Sims had no time left to do anything but clean up. They died of starvation and exhaustion shortly after. Or from a disease caused by the dog’s poop—I don’t remember. Man, I just wanted to make my sister happy, but I couldn’t have found a better way to get her off the computer. Um… Mission accomplished?
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