I load up Sims 1 occasionally, and jut plain vanilla without the user-made add-ons.
I played all 5 games, that includes TSO, which was basically just everyone chatting while their sims read books. Don Hopkins and I were testing his Maze runner program that allowed us to create oodles of money quickly and build a mansion. We let other people move in and we would have our sims standing at the maze the whole time. And then I would deck the place out.
I was sad when it died. They never could figure out how to make the game-play interesting, because skills were so hard to maintain as they depleted and balanced out, you could not really max out all your skills. Then everyone would stand at the Pizza machine shouting out in "Text Bubbles" things like Lg Cheese, M. Pepperoni, Sm Mushroom and then the leader would tell who to to put in what, so you could make a pizza and sometimes you just had to make one to burn. That was probably the most fun aspect, the job objects, but the skill building was aweful. It needed to be removed, as sitting in a house reading books was just boring.
I even made add-ons for it. Will Wright had some great ideas about how to have user content that was more similar to the way other future MMORPGs worked. We sat down and talked about how to integrate it all and how it would work for Maxis and the Add-On Community. I really wish I could play that game again, but with some improvements. After TSO died, Luc Bartlett went on to create a similar game, that never really quite hit the mark for me. I think Second Life (or something similar) came out around that time, and people had moved on from the sprite art 3D hybrids to full 3D.
