Retro Focus: The Sims

I had played Sim City until I ran out of campaigns just like most people. I did this even though the graphics were terrible and it wasn't very clear as to what made what happen. I made poor decisions as far as my electrical grid was concerned and wiped out entire residential areas without even realizing that I had accidentally cut 1000 houses power an hour ago. Sim City went on to make many more reboots, but I never played any of them for some reason (college.) But when The Sims came out it was tough to ignore because this game was absolutely fantastic.

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Electronic Arts must have been at a loss of what to produce after the interest in Sim City started to wane. To be honest I don't even know if they were responsible for the original game but they certainly were responsible for this one and it later went on to be one of the most successful franchises of all time selling over 200 million copies.

I paid for my first one, and while I don't remember exactly it was around $30 or so. Let's imagine that 1/4 of the total sales paid around that much... this is a huge amount of money, that's for sure.

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The Sims needs no introduction really... everyone knows what it is all about and it stayed so interesting because it was simply very well-made. Your ability to progress and make money depended entirely on how you managed the various aspects of your players' lives. There were many attributes such as physical fitness, knowledge, and other things that contributed to your overall happiness and therefore, financial success. You needed to keep a close eye on the clock because if you exercised and practiced the piano all night in order to try to progress your career, your character would be wiped when it came time to go to work.

Housework, washing the dishes and interaction with neighbors is essential to overall happiness and once again, personal success.

I found some of the scenarios quite funny in that there were some neighbors that simply were not going to like you it seemed no matter what you did and their disdain for you was evident in the telephone conversations that you would have or their excuses when you would invite them over.

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I don't know about you, but I would "waste" and extraordinary amount of time on this game. Other games had boss fights, The Sims had you eventually dominate the neighborhood, eventually purchasing the largest property on the map at the top of the screen.

This is also one of those games that I ruined it by looking up some cheat codes that would give you unlimited money. Once you do that, there is no reason to try to get ahead in your professional life and therefore make more money. It completely negated most of the reason for playing the game and at that point you just start inviting people over in order to invite them to a room in the back, leave them there, and then start it on fire.

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There are a lot of ways to torment the people in the game and I think for everyone this eventually became the ultimate objective: To see the glorious and horrible ways that you could torment the various characters. That was until the expansion sets introduced romance into the game, then it just became my objective to hook up with everyone in the neighborhood.

The original game came out of nowhere in 2000 and it went on surpass Myst as the best selling game of all time. They would also eventually make 7 expansion packs for The Sims and unless I am missing something, other than MMO's I don't think that any game has been able to hang on and upsell that many times over the courst of the game's lifetime.

I think I already know the answer to this but just out of interest: Did you play Sims? Because if you were alive and at all interested in gaming in the early 2000's, I think there is a better-than-average chance that the answer to that question is "yes."