The Game-Changing History of The Sims

In the year 2000, kids could do chores and frustrate their parents at the same time, thanks to an addictive video game called The Sims. Washing digital dishes and mowing pixelated lawns might not seem like a way to create a pop culture sensation, but creator Will Wright didn’t follow conventional paths. This is a man who once won a cross-country car race by wearing night vision goggles and turning off his headlights to avoid detection while driving over 100 miles per hour.

The Sims is one of the most successful video game franchises ever made, but its journey to PC popularity was as unconventional as its creator. It includes digital ant farms, a brief period when it was known as “the toilet game,” and a real-world house fire that would prove pivotal in The Sims’ quest to redefine gaming.

Growing up in Atlanta, Will Wright dreamed of becoming an astronaut, not just to suit up for NASA but to colonize outer space to address overpopulation. He was also fascinated by architecture and engineering. Wright started attending Louisiana State University at the age of 16, transferred to Louisiana Tech, dropped out, and eventually studied robotics at the New School in Manhattan. He entered robot fighting tournaments and won by having his robot wrap the other combatants in gauze, rendering them immobile—a clever strategy that was quickly banned in competition. Coupled with his knowledge of economics and military history, Wright’s eclectic background laid the groundwork for a unique career in gaming.

After getting married and moving to Oakland, California, Wright decided to try programming a game on his Commodore 64. The result was Raid on Bungeling Bay, a helicopter simulation that tasked players with destroying enemy strongholds on an island. It was a big hit, selling well in the PC gaming market and even moving over one million Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges, mostly in Japan.

While programming this mayhem, Wright discovered something about himself. While the airborne attacks were fun, he was much more interested in writing the code for the buildings that players would destroy. This led him to think about a simulator that would allow users to build buildings and entire cities, acting as a kind of virtual urban planner. Wright was inspired by works like Urban Dynamics, a 1969 book by MIT professor Jay Wright Forrester, which argued that urban development would be better suited for artificial intelligence than humans to avoid intuitive biases.

The game he created, SimCity, allowed players to build roads, erect schools, and manage crime rates. They could adjust over 100 variables, each with consequences. For example, a rise in crime would lead to a decrease in population, and unforeseen events like earthquakes or meteorite showers could disrupt things.

Wright took the idea to Broderbund, the company that had released Raid on Bungeling Bay, but they weren’t interested. They wanted to market games that people could win—games featuring helicopters launching missiles. Fortunately, Wright had a chance encounter in 1987 with Jeff Braun, an entrepreneur who made font software and wanted to enter the video game industry. They hit it off at a pizza party and later co-founded Maxis, which released SimCity in 1989.

The game was a slow seller at first. For months, Wright reportedly handled all the tech support out of Braun’s apartment. However, it began to gain traction thanks to word of mouth, and in June of that year, it was featured in the New York Times, with urban planning professors praising the game and pledging to introduce it to their classrooms. By 1992, it had sold an estimated one million copies and was the vanguard of a new genre of computer games focused on building rather than destruction or battle. As successful as SimCity was, it was Wright’s next project that would make him a gaming celebrity, but it required a significant personal loss.

SimCity led to several spin-off titles for Maxis, including SimAnt, which allowed players to oversee a thriving ant colony in a residential backyard. I played SimAnt at my friend Melissa’s house when we were kids, along with another game called Life & Death II: The Brain, where you would diagnose brain injuries and simulate brain surgery.

While designing SimAnt, Wright was amused to realize that the game’s ants seemed smarter than the lumbering humans who sometimes threatened to step on them. This got him thinking about artificial intelligence in games and its potential.

At the same time, Wright was also developing a concept he named Doll House, which revolved around building a domestic existence with virtual occupants. If SimCity was about citywide planning, Doll House narrowed the scope to a single residence.

Then disaster struck. In 1991, Wright woke up to the smell of smoke and an encroaching wildfire near his home in Oakland. Gathering his wife and a few neighbors, he fled the scene, driving through the spreading flames. When he returned a few days later, his house was destroyed, and his other car was a melted puddle of metal.

There were two bright spots in this stressful event. Wright had taken his code for SimAnt out of his house and into his office two weeks earlier, saving that game from destruction. More importantly, as he began purchasing new household goods, he started thinking about material possessions and their relation to happiness. Losing so many belongings made him realize what he valued most: relationships.

Wright thought the Doll House game could be improved if the focus shifted to the people inside rather than the buildings themselves. How a player designed their environment and nurtured social interactions would determine satisfaction. These principles were influenced by works like A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, Sarah Ihsikawa, and Murray Silverstein, which argued that certain patterns can create satisfying living spaces. Wright also drew from psychological research suggesting that physiological needs were less important than safety, love, and self-esteem. He intended the game to be a satirical take on consumerism.

As time went on, Wright continued to develop his world. The virtual people, dubbed Sims, would spend currency called simoleons, and their purchases could materially affect their happiness. For example, a cheap mattress might lead to discomfort, while an expensive bed would improve quality of life.

It sounded like another hit for Wright and his Sim franchise. Even better, he co-owned a software company, so distribution wouldn’t be a problem. However, the genius of Will Wright was not always easy to communicate. Not long after he pitched the idea to Maxis executives, his Doll House game received a new title—The Toilet Game.

Wright, despite being a co-founder of Maxis, had to convince his colleagues that a game where players bought spoons and hung out in their homes was a good idea. It was a hard sell, even for a company whose flagship title involved laying water pipes and managing zoning issues. The game quickly became known as the one where players would be expected to clean toilets. Executives were also concerned that a virtual doll house wouldn’t appeal to what they perceived as a male-skewing video game audience.

Wright pressed on. When focus groups arranged by Maxis vetoed the idea, he focused on projects like SimCity 2000. In 1996, however, he decided to enlist a programmer to work on the Doll House game covertly. While he continued his SimCity spin-offs, Wright never stopped pursuing what would soon be referred to as The Sims.

His big break came in 1997 when Maxis was purchased by video game giant Electronic Arts. EA was a powerhouse thanks to their sports titles, including the Madden NFL franchise. Despite their reputation for action games, EA was more receptive to The Sims and allowed Wright to continue working on it.

The Sims flourished during development. Wright assigned key traits like hunger, hygiene, and even bladder relief that would factor into a Sim’s happiness. While commerce was important and Sims should work for their money, Wright also liked subverting the commerce-driven nature of the game by building in cheat codes that granted players thousands of free simoleons.

Wright wanted his Sims to converse with one another. Originally, they were going to speak a language unfamiliar to most players, like Navajo or Ukrainian. However, when audio engineers recruited actors from the Bay Area to record the dialogue, they struggled with the unfamiliar words. Instead, the actors, who had an improv background, suggested using nonsensical words to tell a coherent story.

The resulting babble became known as Simlish. It has some word-for-word translations—like “sul-sul” for “hello”—but is largely gibberish. Simlish later became so popular that musicians like Katy Perry and the Black Eyed Peas re-recorded some of their hits in the language.

Not all language in The Sims is total nonsense. Play the game long enough, and you’ll pick up on a few recurring words. For example, “nooboo” means “baby,” “badeesh” or “vadish” means “thanks,” “blursh” means “get out of my way,” “dooby zession” means “detonation,” “awasa poa” means “I’m bored,” and “minicule” means “cat.”

Wright spent years developing and refining The Sims to be as immersive as possible, with many activities available in real life also available to his Sims. However, the game’s programmers were still concerned that Maxis and Electronic Arts could cancel it at any time. The success of the SimCity franchise led to worries that the so-called Toilet Game could damage its reputation. It would take an unexpected moment during an electronics convention to allow The Sims to move forward.

When it came time to showcase the game during the 1999 Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, California, Electronic Arts didn’t offer much support. Amid the convention’s pageantry, The Sims was tucked into a small booth and hardly registered with attendees.

That changed with an unexpected kiss. When Wright was developing the game, there was internal discussion at Maxis about whether it should depict same-sex relationships. Sims could date and show affection, and even get married, but LGBTQ advocacy had not yet reached the video game industry. Maxis had received unwanted attention after firing a gay programmer in 1996, leading to concerns about potential backlash.

Then something unexpected happened. A programmer named Patrick J. Barrett III was asked to work on coding related to the game’s social interactions. By this time, Maxis had decided not to pursue same-sex relationships in The Sims, but Barrett was given an old version of the guidelines.

A short time later, Barrett was told to prepare three scenes from the game to display at E3. One scene consisted of a wedding between two straight Sims. However, there were so many attendees that programmers didn’t have time to prescribe every background character’s actions, including two female Sims seated next to one another. In front of a gathering crowd at E3, these digital women decided—via the game’s artificial intelligence—that they enjoyed each other’s company enough to kiss.

Despite being showcased in a small booth, The Sims quickly became the talk of E3. The kiss also dismissed any talk of Electronic Arts canceling the game. It was now on the radar of a video game industry that was developing a real curiosity over what Will Wright was up to.

Prior to The Sims being released in February 2000, Wright thought it might be popular enough to sell one million copies, but he also believed it might only sell 50 copies. There wasn’t much precedent to gauge how the PC gaming market would respond to a game that attempted to simulate a typical American life.

The Sims quickly exceeded all expectations, going on to sell 16 million copies and becoming the best-selling PC game in each of the four years following its release, eclipsed only by its sequel, The Sims 2, in 2004.

Rather than damage the existing SimCity franchise, The Sims built a brand-new one. Expansion packs started being released regularly, opening the world of The Sims to include house parties, dates, vacations, and more. The Sims 3 followed in 2009, and The Sims 4 in 2014. Players began sharing custom houses and characters with others, building online communities on top of their virtual communities.

So why did The Sims work? For Wright, it was about people seeing reflections of themselves. It was captivating to watch this human ant farm unfold on computer screens, with behaviors dictated by how well players took care of their characters. There was pleasure in the virtual pursuit of happiness. Unlike many first-person shooters popular at the time, The Sims featured regular people, who, while being silly and speaking in gibberish, had charm.

That E3 kiss may have foreshadowed another important aspect of the game. The Sims world was inclusive. The series introduced gay marriage with its third installment in 2009—a time when only a handful of states in the U.S. permitted same-sex unions. In 2019, the first pre-made non-binary character was made available.

The Sims franchise has now sold over 200 million copies worldwide. It has also been part of a Museum of Modern Art exhibition and regularly releases expansion packs to broaden the scope of The Sims universe, which effectively began with ants. As for Wright, he went on to develop a game titled Spore, released in 2008, which followed a single-celled organism to world domination. Wright once said if the entire game was explored to its fullest, it would take 79 years, without rest, to complete.

But his best-known creation remains The Sims, which is interesting. The kid who once dreamed of solving overpopulation ended up contributing billions of virtual members to society. Then again, they do take up less space. Thank you for watching!