The Sims, and the little lives I kept building

I will say this straight out, before any of the details: I loved this series. I loved playing these games, and I have never fully let go of them. So this is going to be a long one, a pack-by-pack walk through The Sims and what each of those eras actually felt like, mixed in with a little history of the game itself for anyone reading this years from now. And because the expansion packs came out almost exactly one per school semester, this also turns into a strange little record of me growing up. The Sims and I went through middle school together.

I was already a simulation kid

The Sims did not come out of nowhere for me. By the time it arrived I had already put real hours into the SimCity games. I never played the very first SimCity, but I played SimCity 2000 and SimCity 3000 a ton, and later SimCity 4. I played a lot of SimTower too. Building things, running things, watching a little system tick along on its own: that was already my idea of a good time.

And every Sim game came with the same quiet itch. You would be up there at city scale, zoomed way out over your roads and your power plants, and at some point you would think, I wonder what it is actually like down inside one of those houses. What are these little people doing in there, and why? SimCity 4 eventually leaned into that with its My Sim feature, where you could drop an actual Sim into your city and follow them around, but the wondering came way before the feature did. A lot of us had that exact thought. The Sims was the answer to it.

A box the size of a cereal box

This was right around the first time I had my own computer, sitting in my own bedroom, which mattered more than it sounds. I was in sixth grade. Back then software did not come in a slim case. The Sims came in a big box, basically the footprint of an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper and an inch or so thick, the size of a cereal box. The good ones came with a real printed booklet inside, and of course it was all on CD-ROM by then. There was something about that format that made a game feel like a serious purchase.

I got the games the way a lot of kids did, by going to Best Buy with my dad. That was practically a hobby for us. I would walk the aisles and play with every laptop on display, because I desperately wanted a laptop and could barely afford a desktop, so I just dreamed about them. I would look at computer parts I could not buy yet. Honestly the hardware always inspired me more than the games did. But The Sims was the game everyone was suddenly talking about, and after SimCity 2000 and 3000 it felt like the natural next thing to pick up. So I bought it. And then I am not sure I remember playing much else for a while.

The original, and what I actually did with it

The Sims launched on February 4, 2000, in the back half of my sixth-grade year. It was made by Will Wright and Maxis, the same people behind SimCity, and it became a genuine phenomenon. By March of 2002 it had sold over six million copies and passed Myst as the best-selling PC game ever made, which is wild for a game with no points, no winning, and no story.

That last part is exactly what got me. There were no story components at all back then. The game handed you a plot of land, a pile of money, and a family, and the rest was your imagination. A lot of people remember The Sims for the cruelty, the classic move of walling a Sim into a room or pulling the ladder out of the pool and watching them drown. I did that once in a while, sure. But that was never really my game. I was a builder. I spent enormous amounts of time making homes, making families, and inventing entire backstories in my head for who these people were and what they wanted. I would grind their skills up, get them the best careers, keep them fed and happy and well taken care of.

Looking back, it was pretty clearly a simulation of the life I wanted. I was eleven, imagining the whole adult arc, getting married, having kids, having pets, a garden, going out on dates, a real house. The Sims let me actually see that and move it around with my hands. That was the pull.

I was never much of a cheater, either. Everyone around that time will reminisce about the money cheat, typing “rosebud” and then chaining ”!;!;!” over and over to print Simoleons as fast as the game would let you. I think I did it once or twice, but it always felt like it defeated the point. What was the fun in playing if you just handed yourself everything? I took pride in starting a brand new family with almost nothing and grinding them all the way up to the biggest house, the pool, all the furniture, the works.

And I followed the official site, TheSims.com, almost like a daily news habit. Every so often they would post a new downloadable object: an old-fashioned jukebox, some new plants, a new couch. It was never a flood, just a trickle of little official things, and I loved them. Fan sites started making their own furniture too, but to be honest about ninety percent of it looked terrible, the perspective wrong, the shading off, and I was always hesitant to drop third-party stuff into my game because it wrecked the look and feel. I wanted the official objects. I really loved the official objects. That turns out to matter, because the whole expansion-pack era was about to begin, and I had never even heard of an expansion pack before.

The expansions, one box at a time

Livin’ Large (August 27, 2000)

The first expansion, and it landed the same month I started seventh grade. I bought it in another full-size box and I was so excited, mostly about one thing: it came with a robot. That was Servo, who would just work, for hours, doing every chore in the house, taking out the trash, clearing dishes, making beds, watering plants. It also added five new career tracks and a pile of new objects. But come on. A robot that does your chores. That was the sell.

House Party (March 28, 2001)

House Party came in the spring of seventh grade, right around the time I turned thirteen. It was all about throwing parties, and what I remember being thrilled about was the music. New songs, a DJ booth, a dance floor, the ability to basically be the DJ, plus a bunch more official objects and jobs. Anything that added real official content, I was in.

Somewhere right around here the whole industry shrank the boxes. The big cereal-box format gave way to something much smaller, maybe six by seven. I was a little bummed, because by then I had started collecting the boxes. I am a millennial, and collecting boxes is apparently in our blood. (See also: the stack of Apple boxes currently in my basement.) I honestly am not sure I still have all the Sims boxes. I suspect I do not. There is a whole category of stuff from that era I never thought to save and absolutely should have. If I go dig through the basement and find them, I will come back and add a photo here.

Hot Date (November 14, 2001)

Now I was in eighth grade. Hot Date was a big deal, because it introduced Downtown, and that was the very first time you could take your Sims somewhere other than their own home lot. Restaurants, shops, parks, a whole dating scene. I was excited about the idea of it. But honestly this is the first time I felt the game getting a little less fun than it used to be. The loading screens were endless. Getting a Sim out on a date and then back home again was a slog to manage, and it rarely felt worth the trip. The thing that kept me going was the same thing as always: more objects to play with.

Vacation (March 25, 2002)

Vacation came out in the spring of eighth grade, my last real stretch of middle school. It let you send your Sims away to a getaway, and that one clicked with me, specifically because my Sims were always little worker bees. I loved the idea of finally sending them to the beach, or somewhere snowy. Half-pipes, camping, fishing, digging in the dirt. After all those hours of grinding careers, giving them a real vacation felt right.

Unleashed (September 23, 2002)

Unleashed showed up right as I started high school. Freshman year had just begun, and this one might have been my favorite of the bunch, because you could finally have pets. Cats and dogs in the house. It also seriously expanded gardening, which I was into, and added a big new neighborhood. More animals, more plants, more objects, and the whole thing just felt richer and more alive. What I did not clock at the time was that this was the last expansion I would be all the way in on, because the same fall I started high school, I also started going online for real.

Superstar (May 12, 2003)

Superstar came out at the very end of my freshman year, right after I turned fifteen. It was about fame, with a whole celebrity career and a Studio Town to chase stardom in. By this point, though, I can look at the calendar and basically watch my attention start to wander. The Sims was starting to feel a little redundant to me, and other things were pulling hard at my free time, which I will get to in a second.

Makin’ Magic (October 28, 2003)

And here is the one I never bought. Makin’ Magic landed in the fall of my sophomore year, added magic and spellcasting, and it looked genuinely cool every time I saw it on the shelf. But I could never justify buying it, because the truth was I just was not as into The Sims anymore. It was the first one I let pass, and that one skipped box tells the whole story of where my head had gone.

The wait that felt longer than it was

Here is something that genuinely surprised me when I lined up the real release dates to write this. In my memory, the gap between expansion packs was enormous. It felt like I waited years for each new one. I did not. Maxis was shipping these things once or maybe twice a year, basically a pack every school semester, seven of them in a little over three years. That is a wild pace, and I never once felt it as fast.

What I felt was the anticipation. The second I heard a new pack was coming, I would start counting down. I read everything I could find about what it added, and by the time it finally turned up at Best Buy I was practically vibrating. Every single one, Livin’ Large to Makin’ Magic, I was completely, genuinely excited for. The waiting was half the fun, and it turns out I was only ever waiting a few months.

Why I drifted away

Here is the honest arc of it. The Sims was a middle-school love. It carried me the whole way through sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, one box every few months, and it was perfect for that age, a quiet solo world I could disappear into in my own bedroom.

Then high school started, and so did the internet, basically at the same time. In that 2002 and 2003 stretch I started playing first-person shooters online, I got sucked into The Sims Online, I fell in with an Enemy Territory clan, and not long after came World of Warcraft. That was the real reason. A single-player sandbox, no matter how much I loved it, just could not compete with a living world that had actual people in it. The Sims asked me to imagine the characters. The online games handed me real ones. There are only so many hours in a week, and the multiplayer worlds took all of mine. Superstar caught me already drifting. Makin’ Magic, the box I left on the shelf, was the proof that I had gone.

Where the series goes next

The original game and its seven expansions are really one complete era for me, the middle-school years, 2000 to 2003. The series kept going, and so did I, but those later chapters earned their own spots on the timeline instead of getting crammed in at the bottom of this one. So I gave them their own pages: The Sims 2, which caught me back in high school in 2004 with a whole new engine, and The Sims 4, which has been reeling me back in on and off for years. (The Sims 3 I famously never touched, and I get into why over in the Sims 4 post.) And The Sims Online, the strange multiplayer cousin of all of this, is its own story too.

I love The Sims. I always have. It started as an eleven-year-old’s daydream about the adult life I wanted, and more than two decades later I am still building little houses for little families and still, somehow, just as into it. But this, the cereal-box years and the families I built from nothing, this is where it started.