The Sims

The Sims is a life-simulation video game franchise developed by the studio Maxis and published by Electronic Arts?, in which players create virtual characters called Sims, build and furnish their homes, and guide them through careers, relationships, and the daily routines of ordinary suburban life.⁶¹³ The original game debuted on February 4, 2000, and grew into one of the best-selling video game series in history, with lifetime sales eclipsing 125 million copies by its tenth anniversary in 2010 and more than 150 million by 2013.⁶¹¹ The franchise is part of the broader Sim series of open-ended simulation games begun with SimCity in 1989.²⁵

Origins and design

The Sims was the creation of Will Wright, the designer who had earlier built SimCity, a game in which the object is to design and manage a modern city rather than to win or lose.⁵ Wright traced the game’s genesis to the Oakland-Berkeley Firestorm? of October 20, 1991, in which his home on Norfolk Road was among the first to burn; he, his first wife, and immediate neighbors escaped by car through a corridor of flames.² The experience of assessing his losses and reacquiring the basics of daily life — “a toothbrush, underwear, a car, a house” — set him thinking about the value of possessions and the structure of everyday existence, which he framed in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?.²

To build the game Wright drew on his fascination with architecture and living spaces, combining it with research into how people spend their days, including John Robinson and Geoffrey Godby’s time-use study Time for Life, and into shopping behaviour.² The technical foundation came from SimAnt, a game Wright had just completed; he had moved its entire source code from his home to his office only two weeks before the fire.² The result was a game whose focus was building spaces and simulating the daily habits of the people who lived in them.²

Wright belonged to a generation of designers who in the late 1980s pioneered the so-called “God game,” in which the player exercises omniscient power over a simulated world; his contemporaries included Peter Molyneux, creator of Populous (1989), and Sid Meier, whose Civilization series began in 1991.⁵ Where most games drew on myth, fantasy, and violence, Wright moved the subject matter toward ordinary social life, asking, “It occurred to me that most books and movies tend to be about realistic situations. Why shouldn’t games be?” ⁵

Gameplay

The game is open-ended, with no fixed winning condition; players may set goals such as a career, a family, or a wide social circle, or let their Sims live lives of directionless chaos.¹³ In the original game players began with a budget of 20,000 Simoleons — the franchise’s fictional currency — and could buy a lot and build a house or purchase one outright, furnishing it from more than 150 items.¹³ Players were expected to tend to their Sims’ eight basic needs — hunger, energy, comfort, fun, hygiene, social, bladder, and environment — to keep them from sinking into depression or dying.¹³ The Sims speak a fictional language, Simlish, for which recording artists including The Black Eyed Peas, Nelly Furtado, Katy Perry, Natasha Bedingfield, and Depeche Mode have recorded songs.⁶ The Sims was among the first video games to feature same-sex couples, a feature continued throughout the series.¹³

Sequels and expansions

Within six months of release Maxis issued its first expansion pack, The Sims: Livin’ Large, which pitted Sims against aliens and roaches and introduced characters such as the Grim Reaper and Sunny the Tragic Clown, along with new careers.¹³ The first game ultimately accumulated seven expansion packs, among them House Party, Hot Date, Vacation, Unleashed, Superstar, and Makin’ Magic.⁸

The Sims 2, released in 2004, added genetics — so that babies inherited traits from their parents — along with five aspirations (fortune, popularity, knowledge, romance, and creativity) and hundreds of new objects.¹³ Its many expansions included tie-ins with real-world brands, such as The Sims 2 H&M Fashion Stuff and The Sims 2 IKEA Home Stuff; in 2008 nearly 1,000 H&M stores worldwide featured a garment designed by a player.⁶⁸

The Sims 3, launched in June 2009, introduced a wishes system and an optional “story progression” feature by which other Sims in the neighbourhood continue their lives — meeting people, having children, and dying — while the player focuses elsewhere.¹³ It sold more than 4.5 million units worldwide within months and held the top-selling PC title position for 2009 in North America and Europe.⁶ In the week of June 28 to July 4, 2009, it ranked second on the NPD PC software charts, behind only Microsoft Office 2007 and the only game in the top ten.⁴⁷ The Sims 3 community site drew up to six million unique visitors monthly, handling 300 content downloads per minute.⁶ The PC release received generally favourable reviews, with a Metacritic aggregate based on 75 critic reviews.¹⁰

The Sims 4 was announced for PC and Mac on May 6, 2013, and released on September 2, 2014.¹¹¹² It refined Sim personalities with a new emotions system and gave players greater flexibility in Build Mode, but was met with mixed reviews, with critics noting features missing relative to The Sims 3, including pools and basements that were later patched in.¹²¹³ On October 18, 2022, EA and Maxis made the Sims 4 base game free to download across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms, by which point it had seen 31 million players worldwide.¹² By the mid-2020s the game supported community content through a Gallery and an in-game Marketplace, and EA marked the franchise’s 25th anniversary in 2026 with re-releases of the first two games as Legacy Collections.⁸¹⁴¹⁷

Reach and legacy

By 2010 The Sims had generated more than $2.5 billion in revenue, putting it, in EA’s reckoning, in the same commercial class as the films Avatar, Titanic, and The Matrix trilogy.⁶ The original Sims was the best-selling PC game in nearly every major video game market worldwide and was available in 60 countries and 22 languages.⁶ Editorial commentators credited the franchise with an unusually broad appeal, drawing players from hardcore gamers to “young women, celebrities, conservatives, professors, soldiers, grandmothers”.⁶ To game designers, Wright became “the Zola of the form,” the figure who steered video games toward the depiction of everyday existence.⁵