The Sims

The Sims arrived with an idea that on paper sounded like a recipe for a flop: a game with no enemies, no score, and no ending, in which the player looks after ordinary people in an ordinary suburban house. The result was one of the most successful titles of its era and an entirely new genre in its own right. The player creates characters, assigns them personality traits, builds them a house, and then organizes their lives: cooking, sleeping, hygiene, work, friends, hobbies, and relationships. Hovering over all of this is a set of need meters that must be kept in balance, because a tired and hungry Sim won't get anywhere at work and, in the worst case, will lose their job.

The other half of the game is building. The house-building tools are surprisingly deep, the player draws walls, changes flooring and wallpaper, adds floors, pools, and gardens, and furnishes the interior with furniture where the more expensive pieces are noticeably better at satisfying needs. It's precisely this tension between a career, which brings in money, and the time a character needs for food and sleep, that forms the core economic loop. The Sims speak their own made-up gibberish language, so scenes work in any language and the player fills in the story themselves, which is the key to why playing so often turned into telling one's own little stories. Technically it combined three-dimensional characters with pre-rendered isometric environment graphics, which ran even on ordinary home computers, with the ability to rotate the view and zoom in on the scene.

The success was enormous, followed by a long line of expansion packs and an entire series that made The Sims one of the strongest brands in the industry. Its influence on the genre is clear, the game showed that a simulation of everyday life could have mass appeal and that a large part of the audience was looking for creation and storytelling rather than challenge. Today the first game feels raw and some of its mechanics are unforgiving, but its charm and dry humor remain.