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10 dec 1999 - 22:00

Talk about big news. CNET Gamecenter has selected The Sims as one of the "ten most exciting games of 2000."

Gamecenter Review


Of next year's games, The Sims is the hardest to define, but it's also the most intriguing. Developer Will Wright gained fame by creating the popular SimCity series, and with The Sims, he turns his eyes toward the more intimate canvas of the family household. Don't think of The Sims as just SimHouse, though: it's much, much more. Wright drew inspiration for the game from everything from home design software kits to his daughter's dolls. The result is sure to harness players' imaginations in the same way that SimCity did.

Throughout the course of the game, you'll guide your Sims through their lives, from bachelorhood (or bachelorette-hood) to dating and courtship to marriage and the family. Eventually, you'll build a small neighborhood of houses, and you'll watch the social interactions that occur between your Sims. You'll handle every major decision, from whom they date to how much they splurge on a top-notch home entertainment center. If that kind of godlike control doesn't whet your gaming appetite, not much will.

9 dec 1999 - 22:00

Graphics Pack 4 is ready for you to download. Inside is a collection of Sims in their Career Skins. After viewing these characters, I can't decide if I want to be a thief or a policeman.

Graphics Pack 4

3 dec 1999 - 22:00

When we say countdown we are not talking about the millennium. But about The Sims release! The Sims will be shipped the first week of February to a store near you.

2 dec 1999 - 22:00

Ever wanted to decorate your own Sim home? Our new update has got your walls and floors covered. The download of HomeMaster 4.0 will include new surfaces, an export function, and personalization features.

Download HomeMaster 4.0 (2.4MB)

1 dec 1999 - 22:00

We have two changes to our links page. The first being the Fan Site Spotlight and the second our hunt for The Sims fan sites in all languages. Submit your site today and you may find the spotlight on you.

Fan Site Spotlight

24 nov 1999 - 22:00

The Mini Aquarium is just one of many objects in The Sims, and we wanted to share it with you before the big release.

Download the Mini Aquarium

17 nov 1999 - 22:00

"What is the appeal of the Skinner box that is the home? Security, tranquility, the sense of wholeness that can only come by surrounding yourself with those you love? Nah."

A fantastic article on GameSpot predicts The Sims to be one of five games to change gaming as we know it.


By Robert Coffey

The Sims

Social Darwinism Made Easy

What is the appeal of the Skinner box that is the home? Security, tranquility, the sense of wholeness that can only come by surrounding yourself with those you love? Nah.

I think it's more along the lines of an old Steve Martin routine in which he entertained thoughts of raising a child and teaching said offspring all the wrong words for everything. He relished the thought of a child raising his hand the first day of school and asking, "May I moo dog-face to the banana patch?" This is the appeal of The Sims - the ultimate expression of the entire Sim franchise - a game where you can run amok with the lives of people, without running the risk of jail for child abuse through enforced idioglossia. Maxis, the company that practically created the so-called "software toy" genre with SimCity, is now preparing to deliver the ultimate toy - human lives.

Birth of an Artificial Nation

The SimsSeven years ago, Maxis founder Will Wright was toying with an architectural sim, a nice little program that would let people create their own virtual dream homes. But other products (most notably SimCity 2000) distracted Wright and the rest of his team until about two and a half years ago. When production once again resumed on what Maxis had been calling Sim Dollhouse, it was with one significant change - the focus of the game had moved from the aluminum siding of the homes to the lives of the dolls within.

The SimsAnyone who's played any of the SimCity games knows just how pesky the virtual people inhabiting those digital metropolises can be; whether moaning about taxes or whining for a sports stadium, the "Sims" were a difficult bunch to manage. Happily, they remain just as challenging in The Sims, thriving only when you tend to the minutest details of their lives. One of the most remarkable things about the game is how the design team has distilled gameplay into three basic functions - building, buying, and living - and yet managed to pack so much of the real world into those seemingly limiting specifications.

The SimsEvery game starts with creating a new, single Sim and deciding his or her sex, skin, and basic appearance before dividing points among basic character qualities: neatness, outgoingness, activity level, playfulness, and niceness. After that you dive right into the building portion of the game. Since you start with a set amount of money, you can either immediately purchase a model home or create your own. Designing your own home is a remarkably intuitive process, using a simple click-and-drag interface to plop down floors, walls, windows, doors, and anything else you feel your home needs. You will have to resist the temptation to blow all your money on the biggest house you can afford right off the bat, since you'll have to furnish it as well; forget to set aside enough money for a toilet and shower, and life will get very Appalachian very fast.

You Can Buy Happiness

The SimsKeeping your Sims content is the primary challenge. While big rooms and lots of windows will make them happy, the chief purveyor of pleasure comes in the form of material goods. Comfy chairs, aquariums, stereo equipment, hot tubs, and state-of-the-art kitchens are just a smattering of the objects that fill up your Sims' living space.

The SimsAll the objects are programmed with attributes affecting both your Sims' mood and their behavior; this means that as you accumulate more stuff, you also acquire more options in terms of things to do. Entertainment objects facilitate social interaction, giving visitors something to do when they drop by, while quality-of-life improvements, such as plants, just make your Sims happier. Of course, you'll have to maintain all these things - fail to water your plants, and they'll die, bumming out your Sim. This amount of micromanagement may be daunting, so you'll be able to hire gardeners to care for your lawn, while maids will tidy up the house.

The SimsBeyond this, objects can also affect who your Sim is: Purchase an easel, and your Sim will start painting, improving the Sim's creativity and opening up new life paths, primarily in terms of employment advancement. As Will Wright explains, the gist of this "behavioral architecture" is that the intelligence is a function not only of the people in the houses, but also of the environment you've provided for them.

That's right, you'll have to get a job. The game will include ten career tracks, each with ten jobs; for instance, you can take a budding actor from a meager waiter job to superstardom, or you can guide enlisted army personnel to the high-profile life of an astronaut.

Life of the Party

The SimsThe living part of the game is probably the most important - it's undoubtedly the most fascinating, especially when it comes to Sims interacting with their neighbors. Other people will eventually drop by, and it's your job to forge relationships with them all. Ideally, you'd like warm relationships, since you'll need to make friends and influence people in order to reach the higher career tracks - not to mention start a family. It would be easier if you could control the neighbors, but even though they're from families you've created in other parts of the neighborhood, you can't control them once they leave their own home.

While parties, hot-tub get-togethers, and conversations about aliens and other common interests will help you get and keep your friends, you'll really have to work to get a spouse. You'll have to woo someone with back rubs, compliments, hugs, and kisses before you pop the question. Just as in real life, one miscue could foul the whole deal. Once you do wed, you'll then gain direct control of your new partner and can start a family, growing to a maximum of eight - perfect for a very Brady Christmas.

Family Album

The SimsEarly play testers are responsible for the creation of one of The Sims' coolest features - a built-in screen-capture utility that lets you string together and annotate a series of shots. What Maxis discovered when people played the game was that they instinctively constructed stories around the squabbles, job promotions, and untimely deaths of their pet people. These photo albums can be saved in a very tidy web-page format and posted online, letting people share the stories of their virtual families.

Even better, the families in your neighborhoods are saved in a web-page format as well. This means the Sims' community can go beyond the scrapbooks to actual hands-on experimentation with the populace of other players' communities because you can download the families directly into your game and let them interact with the families already there.

The SimsIn an odd way, The Sims shares the same enormous potential for self-expression that Black & White does, letting you play the game the way you want, with results that can't be tidily predicted. Maxis is embracing the game's potential for delightful unpredictability, with no better example of this than the proposed Genetic Face Generator. This generator would be used to create the faces of Sim kids, blending the features of their parents to create a unique individual. When you consider that people can use their own faces and/or any 3D skin for their game characters, the possibilities are infinite. In fact, virtually every aspect of the game can be customized: skins, faces, objects, surface tiles, careers - you name it. While Maxis will release new items and careers after the game ships, we expect the user-created material to be the most inventive.

The Sims is pretty much a simple stroke of genius, the sort of idea that makes you slap yourself on the forehead and ask, "Why didn't anyone think of this before?" What's not to love about toying with the infinite possibilities inherent in the lives of people? With such an immediately understandable premise, The Sims seems destined to have an even broader appeal and marketability than the rest of the Sim franchise.

The Sims"This game started out more focused on the architectural aspects, but I realized that I needed to stimulate people in the house to really evaluate the designs that the player constructed. So at that point, Jamie Doornbos and I spent about a year and a half getting the Sims to act intelligently. When they started living plausible lives in this world, the whole direction of the project shifted more in their direction.

"For me The Sims represents the most personal of the Sim games. I like to put my house and my family into it and play my life. So in this sense it's a kind of strange, surreal mirror. At this point I've invested as much time on it as all of my work on the SimCity series."

-Will Wright

16 nov 1999 - 22:00

The "Real World" Gone Digital! Will Wright's new game doesn't involve creating streets and shopping malls. The Sims is a home simulator. Players have the ability to manipulate not just the house but the people that live in it. Fill your home with high-tech appliances, create the perfect neighborhood, and watch your family grow to be the next Bradys. Or starve them of social interaction and stimulation and watch them smack the earwax out of each other. Realistic! Check out Spin magazine at a news stand or visit www.spin.com.

4 nov 1999 - 22:10

A brand new graphics pack awaits you on our tools page. OK, it is not a tool, but it sure looks good there. Pack3 includes three large screen shots from our game and a Sims logo JPG made for tiling.

Download Graphics Pack 3

4 nov 1999 - 22:00

Our own Will Wright was featured in an interview by The New York Times Magazine. Will's best quote? "Well, I like buying toys... I do mean toys literally."

Read the interview.
NOTE: The NY Times Magazine web site requires free registration.


THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
QUESTIONS FOR WILL WRIGHT

How to Win at Life

The creator of the hit computer game Sim City discusses his coming masterwork — a simulation of family life, in which players compete for love and happiness. By AMY SILVERMAN

Will Wright

Photograph by Robert Cardin for The New York Times

Sim City, which you created in 1987, has sold about eight million games, in all its various versions. Why does a game about, of all things, urban planning appeal to so many people?
Everybody who plays Sim City is building something that no other player has built. It's like playing with a train set — having this miniature world that's yours to control. These things are an outward expression of what's going on in our heads, running little simulations about what's going to happen next — what if somebody throws a rock at me, where's it going to go? A lot of what makes us intelligent and human is the fact that we can very quickly model hypothetical situations in our head.

So the new game, The Sims, extends this train-set concept? Is that how you approached it?
Originally I wanted to do a game about architecture, how you design a house. And I started thinking about how you would score the game, how you would decide if it was a good or bad house. So I came up with a system for simulating people living in a house, and that became the more captivating part of the game. The strategy comes down to time management. You design a house and furnish it. You purchase items for the people who live in it. You decide their careers and how much time they spend at work and with their friends and family and that sort of thing. The game becomes kind of a scaffolding for fantasy. Less like a train set, more like a doll house.

A doll house? Are you concerned that players, particularly the ones already hooked on the master-of-the-universe experience of Sim City, might find that a bit touchy-feely?
It's entirely up to the player as to how touchy-feely it is. I was showing this to a bunch of 12-year-old boys the other day and the first thing that they asked was, "Can you kill the people in the house?" And in fact, you can. Somebody can start a fire if their cooking skills are very low, or if they have bad repair skills they can be electrocuted repairing the television. Or they can starve to death.

Did their eyes light up when you said that?
For them, it had more to do with, "Is this game going to force me to do this, that and the other, or will it let me go where I want to go?" I saw the same thing with Sim City. I would show people the game and they would say, "Oh, that's cool," and then I'd show them the bulldozer and they'd start running it all up and down the downtown area with this maniacal laugh. They just loved it. These were adults, 30-year-old adults at software companies. But they'd get that out of their system within 5 or 10 minutes, and then they'd realize that the interesting part was rebuilding it.

So causing violence is people's first impulse when they sit down to play a computer game, even one that is explicitly nonviolent. Why do you think that is?
I don't think it really has a lot to do with violence. It's about exploring the dynamics of the system. When they start an earthquake in Sim City and see fires and rubble, they see how how alive and fragile the system is. It builds the illusion in the player's head that the simulation is real.

Is it more than a coincidence that you created The Sims after you'd made a lot of money and got married and had a kid? Did your own life influence the game?
Yeah, partially. You gain a different sense of the value of time when you have a child. You know, they grow up. And either you spend time with them now or you don't, and that time will pass and never come back again. So it tends to make you think more closely about it. And that's really what the game is about, making you consider all those unconscious decisions about what you actually do with your time. As far as money goes, the easiest way to make the characters in the game happy is to buy them new objects. But as you accumulate more and more stuff, more things go wrong and pretty soon these things are just sucking up all your time. In my own life, money is important to me mostly because it buys time. That's the one resource that you really have to spend wisely, that you get no more of.

So buying a lot of stuff doesn't make you happy?
Well, I like buying toys, which turns out to be a rather cheap vice. I do mean toys literally. People come to our house and they say, "Your daughter has so many toys," and I have to explain to them, "No, those are my toys."

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