On The Sims’ 25th birthday, let’s celebrate the weird and wacky original that breathed life into a genre

If, like me, you’ve been playing The Sims since more or less the very beginning, odds are good you were quite a small child when the first game came out, right? It was 25 years ago today, so if you were even old enough to play on a computer at the time you must be 30-ish by now, minimum; and of course there’s the small fact that anyone who came to this series already middle-aged is probably really getting up there in years. Sims in this original outing didn’t age, but we all sure do.

I promise there’s more to this preamble than just a grim memento mori; the point I’m trying to drive at is that kids who grew up with the original Sims often recall being quite scared by the game at times. It’s certainly true for me; much as I fell in love with The Sims from the first time I saw those classic live-action TV ads, I can distinctly remember being upset or frightened playing it sometimes.

I nearly cried the first time one of my Sim children got shipped off to military school for having bad grades (an especially terrifying concept to a 10-year-old), and I’m pretty sure I used to have to get my mum to sit with me whenever the musical sting came on that indicated one of the ghosts in the Goth graveyard was going for a midnight stroll. Others report a primal fear response even now when they hear the music cue which meant a burglar (or, with the Unleashed expansion pack installed, possibly just a raccoon) was approaching their Sims’ home.

But, that’s kids, right? I’m 34 now, with a deep love for all things horror, and there’s no way that The Sims could still unnerve me.

Well. That’s what I thought until I started checking out a few retrospective videos on YouTube ahead of today’s big celebration. Less than five minutes in I saw a child Sim die of starvation and instantly remembered that oh, yeah, Sims 1 was quite harrowing, actually. Even if you can get over the visuals of a Sim in mortal distress, which have remained more or less consistent throughout the series, I’d forgotten just how awful the screams were. Those never really came back in any of the sequels.

The original Sims wasn’t entirely devoid of euphemisms – “punch bowls” and “bubble blowers” already stood in for the kind of hard substances that would get the game slapped with too high an age rating; meanwhile, babies were made through lots of kissing, and your Sims needed to purchase a special item of furniture specifically to “play in” if they wanted to do anything more intimate with their romantic partner. But at the outset, The Sims contained some surprisingly dark and raunchy stuff, too.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from those painfully realistic death throes, you could hire a party entertainer who was so extremely clearly a stripper that all but the most sheltered of pre-teens were guaranteed to get the joke, even if you didn’t technically see more than what’s on display in a bathing suit. (Said “cake dancer”, incidentally, is making their triumphant return to the franchise with The Sims 4’s Blast From The Past event, which launches later today!) Adult Sims could walk around nearly-nude regardless of context and with nary a mod installed thanks to some very revealing default outfits, and I don’t feel like I need to say too much about those go-go cage dance animations for you to get the idea.

A frequent criticism of The Sims franchise as a whole is that it’s become increasingly sanitised as time has gone on, and going all the way back to the beginning, it’s hard to argue with that. Plenty of the original’s general sense of weirdness has been toned right down, in favour of a more idealised and upbeat take on what it means to be “cartoonish”.

Realistically I’m sure there are a lot of reasons as to why this happens over time, but my first thought was that – unlike all of its sequels – The Sims was in the unique position of being developed without a strong sense of who its audience would be. This was, after all, an experimental architecture sandbox that shifted over the course of its development into a life simulator, a genre that hadn’t really taken off up until that point in time. There was no script to follow, and to further compound the confusion, it wasn’t particularly apparent who was going to want to play a video game (a thing allegedly only boys liked) which closely emulated the enjoyment of moving dolls around a dollhouse (a thing allegedly only girls liked). So really, it’s not all that surprising that the humour and aesthetics of the original Sims tended to favour the interests of whichever demographics were programming computer games in California in the late 1990s.

And then, of course, The Sims found its audience. Most seismically, as we now know, it turned out that women and girls actually really like video games that recognise their common interests and lived experience; and The Sims became the best-selling PC game up to that point in time in large part due to its phenomenal success with female players, a marketable demographic that up until that moment hadn’t been seriously entertained by most game publishers. Plenty of guys liked it too, of course, because it’s a great game and because the idea of ruthlessly gendered hobbies is nonsense anyway; give men the privacy of a screen and it turns out a lot of them enjoy playing with digital dolls too, even if the potential for sex and violence is quite limited (although far from absent, as we’ve already seen).

But of course, once you have an audience – especially an audience as hungry for more of what they like as those original Simmers were – commercial considerations kick in. The Sims is most popular with women and children, and even though we know those groups actually thrive on all this darkness and innuendo, you can’t market that to the latter in particular. It becomes a bit of a catch-22, in which EA are fully aware that mods which introduce grimmer and raunchier content are uncontested fan favourites, but there’s no way you can make that sort of thing a core part of the game without drastically reducing your ability to make actual sales. And we might not like to admit it, but without making a game that they can sell, eventually there’d be no Sims left at all.

So, in a way, the best thing to do is just appreciate what we had in The Sims 1: a weird and wonderful little experiment that led to great things, but probably won’t ever be repeated – and certainly not by a company as corporate and small-c conservative as EA. But on the original game’s 25th birthday, let’s take a moment to remember that “cosy” games don’t need to be too wholesome – indeed, The Sims 4 has revitalised its image somewhat of late by turning its attention to the twin matters of sex and death, and although that conversation is far more serious and earnest now than it was in The Sims 1, I still think this just makes my point for me.

I’m glad they didn’t bring back those death rattle cries, though. Yikes.