19 years of The Sims - Happy anniversary!

Happy Birthday Sims™

https://i.imgur.com/18rtlw9.jpg

Four iterations, multiple spin offs and console releases. One of the best selling games of all time and one of the most recognizable games of all time for it's uniqueness and appeal with players of all ages.


It's great to see that this franchise has endured the hard waters of the gaming industry with the years and it's great that the fans will never let this wonderful franchise go, fighting with passion for it to be the best possible version of itself. I'd like to thank the developers, the ones that are gone and the ones that are here for making this franchise possible, fun and enjoyable, and of course, I have to thank the original creator Will Wright for his originality, creativity, innovation and vision in creating the number one Sims™.

The Sims™ has been my favorite game over the years, it's one of the things that entertain me and inspire me the most, it keeps the boredom away and enhances my creativity like no other game, from creating intricate sims to building whatever mansion I can dream of, or just by playing and watching the sim's virtual lives unravel as I manipulate their strings. I have been a player since the start of TS2 and I am happy this franchise is going forward.

When I think of The Sims over the years, I remember some sleepovers with my friends when I was a teen. The plan? Playing The Sims while having pizza and chatting until late in the night :smiley:
Just one of the countless memories!

I discovered the Sims through a friend's teen-age daughter way back in 2000. She was playing it all the time, and I laughed with my friend about it (how silly - controlling people's lives? I already have too much of my own life to control), but then with my husband gone all the time (he was in the military) it struck me that Sims would give me something to do after my own kid was in bed. I played it off and on, until the divorce happened and a move to a new place where I knew only a few people, and then it became my lifeline.

Sims 2 joined my library when it came out (and I can still get the Ultimate Collection to play on my computer) and added so much more fun to my play. When Sims 3 came out I wasn't sure if I wanted to make the jump, so I played 2 for a while longer. When I finally moved to 3, I was pulled in just as deeply and loved every minute of it. Then 4 was announced. That one took longer for me to move over to, and I'm not sure why, because once I started playing it, I realized I love it just as deeply as I've loved the other ones.

Thank you Sims (creators, devs, designers, coders, all of you who have created the game I love) for games that got me through a rough time in my life and then have continued to be so much fun that both my kids play it, too. It's the most played game on my computer! :heart: :heart:

I'm 19 years in. I started playing my freshman year of college and have never stopped. The game is just that good. Thanks for the memories and fun.

I was already an adult when a A Game called The Sims was first introduced to me by Will Wright. He and his partners at Maxis had included two disks about the game and making the game with his Sim City 3000 game I had just bought - having been a fan of the first Sim City game that happened to come free with my new desktop - I looked forward to this much more advanced version. But as I was going through the discs in the box - saw th two disk about a future game Will and his company was working about some of the people he called Sims who lived and worked in his new Sims City.

I was intrigued as I enjoyed the two videos I saw on the Making of the Sims, to say the least and it really did look like something I would enjoy playing - so at the end of the second video where Will had asked people viewing the video if they would be interested in testing the game when he had it ready for testing - I filled out the little post card with my name and phone number and sent it in. Also that day two of my family members whom I thought would be interested I called them up and told them they had to come see this new game and gave them the disk. They likewise sent out post cards with their name and address to Will Wright showing interest. A few months later (Nov. 1999) - myself and several of my family members and family friends who had signed up - got sent the first Test of the game. It was amazing - and totally blew all of us away.

Proud to say all of us who first signed up and tested the Sims still love and play the Sims to this day - as do all our kids as well.

I discovered the Sims through my grown daughter. She was put onto it by her two sisters-in-law after my daughter and son-in-law (who was in the Army) got stationed in KS. He got deployed to Kuwait, so I was very glad she had The Sims to keep her mind occupied for the duration. We talked frequently over the phone and she would regale me with this game. She wasn't ready to move on to Sims2, wanting very much to get her fill of Makin' Magic, when her newly returned home hubby got her the Sims2 for Christmas. It was such an advancement over the first she was blown away. When they got back to our home state, she couldn't wait to show me the Sims2. I was hooked almost instantly. LOL Nobody, even me, saw that one coming. This was in 2005. I've played ever since.

Happy Anniversary, Sims!

Thank you for the Creative Outlet and the camaraderie. The love and innovation of the community is a wonderful place for all of us who love to interact, encourage each other’s creativity and support each other’s artistic expression.

@EA_Mai -I used to end up playing sims all night when I only meant to play for an hour back when my games were full screen until I managed to get TS2 into windowed mode and TS2 is played as a window so I dpn't lose track of the time and play for a whole night.
I've been enjoying playing my towns as they grow from new settlements with just one couple to eventually becoming a town with a few or more families.I also want to watch more growth in my towns as the generations pass by with me playing the entire town in a TS2 style of rotational play in my heavily Modded TS3 game.I used to play TS2 without Mods and had to start using them in UC because most of the cheats I used to be able to use quit working.I play TS2 and TS3 though Sims 3 is more like an open world Sims 2 game with my Modded story progression heavily tuned for rotational play.
Here's a picture from my apcocalypse challenge in the middle of the winter of 1525 showing a town in it birth stage.
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7925/33046362918_60bd9af036_b.jpg

I was in my 40s and had just gotten my first personal computer -- a clamshell iBook (I had a lot of Mac software from attending numerous MacWorld conventions up at Moscone Center) I bought for programming classes at a local community college, because of this new fangled thing called File Transfer Protocol that allowed me to do most of my homework at home imstead of having to camp out in the campus computer lab. I was cruising the software shelves at the local Apple Store and saw this game called The Sims by Aspyr (they did the Mac ports for the orignial The Sims plus The Sims 2) and thought it looked interesting. 19 years later, I'm still playing though I'm now closer to being an Elder instead of a Young Adult. It's been a way to feel like I have some control in a life that has felt way out of control at times. I'm not a fan of many games in the current day, where it seems like the main goal is to kill as many virtual people/creatures as possible in the shortest amount of time, but The Sims is different.

To Will Wright, wherever he may be -- thank you for leading us on this adventure. The game has changed a lot since those early days, due to graphics and in response to societal developments. Overall I think the changes have been positive, while some of the implementations have had their bumps in the road (don't even get me started on Sims 3 and Macs being forced to play under the Cider emulator!). While I now use a Windows laptop I do appreciate that Sims 4 is natively coded for the Mac in house and Mac players no longer have to wait an extra 6 months for new content (though Aspyr did a great job of squashing many of the PC bugs when they did the recoding!).

I came to sims in my twenty's, in 2000. I was married with two boys and didn't get any play time during the day. I would get my boys to bed and then get on sims. More often than not, it would end up, me playing the game until 4-5am and going to bed and getting an hour or two of sleep before I had to get my boys up and do it all again.

Now I'm early 40's, with 3 kids. My two boys are grown and my daughter is a simmer, too. My husband says he doesn't understand how a game can hold my interest for 19 years, when most other things I grow bored within a couple hours.