The Digital Antiquarian - 07 Aug 2026

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For a while, the two men were allowed to tinker in peace; again, Jeff Braun always prided himself on letting his resident genius do his thing without outside interference. Yet Wright and Doornbos would only be able to ignore the clouds that were gathering outside their blue-sky bubble for so long. As Maxis's financial situation began to look worrisome, the now publicly-traded company's board could hardly fail to note that its star designer hadn't finished an original game since SimAnt almost five years ago, hadn't contributed anything tangible to the bottom line since leading the SimCity 2000 effort. Nevertheless, it was Braun rather than Wright who was dismissed in August of 1996. Wright was then more or less forced by new CEO Sam Poole to take a hiatus from Project X and help out on SimCopter, the long-delayed proof of concept for SimWorld. Pressed to focus on something more realizable and practical than his people simulator even after SimCopter was finished, he spent time drawing up plans for a simulation of, of all things, the infamous German airship Hindenburg. He gave that up, he admits, only because "the Hindenburg had a swastika on the tail. And even if we took the swastika off, a lot of people have this association in their mind of the Hindenburg as a Nazi symbol."

In June of 1997, the struggling Maxis was purchased by Electronic Arts. One might have guessed at the time that this event would represent the final kiss of death for Project X. Luc Barthelet, the manager whom the new corporate overlords sent in, was not at all a blue-sky type. On the contrary, he sounded almost like a caricature of a soulless gaming executive when he insisted that the time of Maxis as a maker of quirky little simulations of unusual things was well and truly over: from now on, he said, they would make only "top-ten" games.

And yet Barthelet surprised everyone by recognizing that Project X could be just that - recognizing it far better, in fact, than anyone had during Maxis's years of independence, including Will Wright himself. He saw that all of the computers that were being sold in the wake of Windows 95 and the dot.com craze were being bought by new demographics with wildly divergent interests from conventional gamers. If you could give those people something fun and engaging to do on the computer when they weren't surfing the young Web over creaky dial-up connections, you could open up and own a whole new market. So, rather than cancel Project X, he put roughly half of Maxis's resources into it, while the other half worked on the safer and more predictable bet known as SimCity 3000. With the injection of employees and resources came a new focus on turning the research project into a product that could be sold; Will Wright says that it was "probably Luc more than anybody else [who] was responsible" for turning Project X into a proper game. It was rebranded simply The Sims, a name that had been used for the anonymous, interchangeable people in the company's simulations since the days of the original SimCity. They would be anonymous and interchangeable no more; they would be the whole point of this latest game.

Whatever else they may have been, Will Wright and Jamie Doornbos weren't touchy-feely guys. They had been and remained all about their algorithms, which had the potential to become the plumbing of a game, but were nothing like the sum total of one. The colleagues who joined them had the assignment of turning a research project into a playable, saleable game. Claire Curtin and Roxana Wolosenko, two women who joined the project in co-designer roles, strove to humanize the algorithms. Ditto the aforementioned Chris Trottier, another woman, who came aboard as an associate producer. The ranks of the team came tantalizingly close to gender parity, in an industry that was at least 90 percent male outside of Maxis's offices. This surely had much to do with how appealing The Sims would become to a wide and divergent swath of folks, gamers and non-gamers alike.

As Maxis's later promotional materials would advertise, the principal facets of the game were building, buying, and living. You made a place for your Sim to dwell, filled it with stuff, then helped her to deal with the fallout of your choices. It quickly became clear to the team that they needed to dial back some of Wright and Doornbos's behavioral algorithms in order to give the player something to do during the living phases. In fact, in the finished game, Sims don't do much of anything on their own volition other than eating. You have to tell them when to go to bed and when to get up, when to wash the dishes and water the plants - and yes, even when to go to the bathroom. If you fail to send them to the toilet in a timely manner, a messy and embarrassing accident will follow. Some future players would find this elevation of the mundanities of life to the heart of the gameplay loop weirdly riveting; others would find it mind-numbingly boring. But no one could deny that it was daringly different.

The Sims would be a lonely experience if it was, like Little Computer People, all about one person alone in a house. It ought to be possible to have friends and families living together, ought to be possible to have outsiders come over for a visit, for barbecues and pool parties - both kinds of pool - and even romantic trysts. At bottom, the game would remain a nesting simulator - there was no possibility for leaving the house and its environs - but at least there would be relationships inside the nest. Indeed, these would become the real heart of the game in the eyes of most of its players. This was no small achievement. Games tend to be good with structured fictional genres like mysteries, the kind that have goals which are never in doubt and are achievable by taking logical, concrete steps. Relationship drama is the opposite of that. Maxis pulled it off well enough to mimic a frothy sitcom or soap opera if not deathless literature - which was more than anyone else had managed.

The first and trickiest problem to solve in this context was the question of how the Sims should communicate with one another. Maxis wanted to create the impression of conversations without delivering literal meaning; as Will Wright noted, even if they included five CDs worth of voice-acted stock phrases, the conversations would soon start to sound repetitive and moronic, pulling the player right out of the fantasy. Maxis's first idea was to use a language that few of their players would be able to identify, much less understand: they toyed with such tongues as Ukrainian, Estonian, and Navajo. But with them too, familiarity bred contempt, when it became clear that the Sims were repeating the same stock phrases over and over, even if the player didn't know what they meant. Maxis finally settled on a gibberish that has become known as Simlish. Manipulated to suit the mood of an encounter, a fairly small amount of formless mumbling, provided by just two talented improv actors, could be stretched a surprisingly long way.

The speech bubbles convey the broad contours of what is being discussed. Here the topic is swimming.

Maxis created a look and personality for The Sims that were familiar from other forms of media but new to games. In place of the tacky-looking digital Arnold Schwarzeneggers and Pamela Andersons who dominated hardcore gaming, they offered up relatively normal-looking people - idealized to some degree, yes, but possessed of normal proportions and normal sartorial instincts. The people and environments were given an airbrushed sheen that was, if not quite realistic, sanguinely adjacent to real life in the turn-of-the-millennium United States. The aesthetic and the vibe of the game were of a piece with those of a "hangout" television show like Friends or Dawson's Creek. The Sims too was real life, only better, with no truly intractable tribulations to suffer through, with stakes that were big enough to engage but not big enough to make anyone uncomfortable. We might go so far as to call it the first hangout game.

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The music contributed as much as the visuals to making The Sims stand out from the gaming crowd. In place of the bombastic John Williams-inspired orchestral soundtracks and jackhammer metal tunes of other games, it featured perky, pleasant, melodic tracks with a range of inspirations spanning from Antonio Vivaldi to Keith Jarrett. Created by a whole stable of professional composers and musicians, herded by Maxis's in-house sound man Jerry Martin, at its best the music of The Sims transcends the artifact to which it has been attached to become something pure and lovely in its own right. A surprising number of players would go so far as to buy EA's official soundtrack CD, so that they could listen to the music without playing the game; many considered it a fine accompaniment to household chores, which seemed thoroughly appropriate. As Alex Robert Ross wrote in an article for Vice, "it wouldn't be a stretch to say that more people have heard Jerry Martin's minimal jazz than Thom Yorke's measured howls on 'Everything in Its Right Place.'" (This is a reference to Radiohead's Kid A, arguably the most critically acclaimed album to be released in the same year as The Sims.)

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In the spirit of being a welcoming space - real life with the sharp edges sanded off - The Sims broke ground by not just permitting same-sex romantic relationships but thoroughly normalizing them, treating them as just another thread in the fabric of humanity. This makes quite a contrast to Maxis's swift backpedaling the moment the kissing lads of SimCopter were discovered. Gay relationships wound up in this game more by accident than any premeditated effort to stand up for equal rights. Then, once they were there, no one had the heart to take them out. It strikes me that a lot of positive change in the world happens in exactly this way.

The story in this case involves a programmer named Patrick J. Barrett III, who was himself gay. Unlike his predecessor Jacques Servin, who had deliberately inserted kissing men into SimCopter as an act of provocation and been fired for his trouble, Barrett really did do so accidentally, according to his own telling. He joined Maxis in October of 1998, after the decision had already been quietly made not to allow homosexual relationships; this was still a dismayingly commonsense one in the late-1990s United States. But nobody ever told Barrett about it. So, when he was asked to implement some algorithms found in a planning document for handling romantic relationships, he gave them equal weight for everyone. And once they were in the game, it seemed to all of his colleagues too sad and cowardly to even contemplate going back and taking them out. Nobody made a big deal out of it. Everyone "just pretty much ignored" that the rules had been changed, says Barrett. "The topic didn't come up again."

Under the new rules, every Sim started out in the dead center of a spectrum. If you prodded her to direct toward the opposite gender actions that were tagged as "romantic," she would drift toward the heterosexual end; vice versa if you pointed her toward her own gender. If you played your cards just right, you could even keep her poised right in the middle of the spectrum - effectively, bisexual, or asexual if you preferred.

The low-key way in which the game tackled the subject would wind up being more powerfully validating to some of its players than a box festooned with rainbow flags and Pride regalia would have been. Patrick Barrett:

At the time, it wasn't considered "normal" to be gay or lesbian. Some even saw it as dangerous. But in The Sims it was normal and safe to be a gay person. It was the first time we could play a game and be free to be ourselves within. It was a magical moment when my first same-sex Sims couple kissed. I still sometimes wonder how in the world I got away with it.

In keeping with the law of the land at the time, gay Sims could do everything except marry one another and have children. The picture of happy domestic cohabitation the game presented was enough to make you wonder why not - and that, of course, was a potent statement in itself.

The Sims had its coming-out party at the E3 trade show in May of 1999. It caused a buzz there that belied its modest booth in a back corner of the show floor. That E3 took place in the heart of Hollywood, and seemed to many attendees to mark the opening of a new chapter in gaming culture's relationship with the rest of pop culture. Rock star David Bowie was there, exuding relaxed cool as he signed autographs, gave interviews, and even put on a concert, all to mark the inclusion of his songs, voice, and visage in the upcoming Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Despite bearing no surface resemblance whatsoever to Omikron, The Sims seemed somehow to be part and parcel of the same trends that had landed Bowie at this gathering. Indeed, taken purely as games, The Sims actually stood out far more than Omikron. It had no dragons, no spaceships, not even any guns. It struck many as an argument for the vitality and relevance of the medium that was even more convincing than cameos from an aging rock star.

Chris Trottier's memories of the show are of near-pandemonium: "There were just rows of people, and we were just trying to project our voices. We were completely hoarse. That was the turning point." Two female Sims kissed there on the screen in front of the assembled crowd on the very first day of the show. This provoked more excitement than controversy: "You might say that they stole the show," says Patrick Barrett. Given the demographics of the attendees, it was probably for the best that the kissers were two women rather than two men: "I guess straight guys that make sports games loved the idea of controlling two lesbians."

After that E3 show The Sims, which had heretofore received little outside attention, became a fixture in the gaming press. Some of the hardcore set reflexively kicked against it for watering down their hobby in some amorphous way, but most looked forward to seeing how it would turn out.

Just as had happened the previous year to SimCity 3000, The Sims wasn't quite ready to go in time for that Christmas buying season. For the second year in a row, Luc Barthelet had the unenviable task of convincing his bosses at EA to choose quality over timing. And for the second year in a row, he succeeded.

The Sims shipped in February of 2000, exactly one year after SimCity 3000. It immediately became clear that, while SimCity 3000 had been a massive success by all of the usual metrics, The Sims was going to blow all of those same metrics right out of the water. It was exactly the right game at exactly the right time, feeding a latent demand from all of those new purchasers of personal computers for something absorbing and engaging, but also lighter, more approachable, less zero-sum, and less "gamer dark" than the industry's standard fare. In many ways, it was the fulfillment of a dream that the games industry had been flirting with since Trip Hawkins founded EA back in 1982, with only localized and intermittent signs of success. This was the moment when digital games went fully and irrefutably mainstream, the moment when mothers and sisters, shopkeepers and hairdressers joined their nerdy brothers, sons, and husbands in the hobby. Most of these folks would never self-identify as gamers, but they played. Boy, did they play.

You start out by creating your Sim, giving her an appearance, a gender, and a personality profile defined along five continuums. In keeping with a game that is proudly goalless, the emphasis is not on making the best character, as in many CRPGs; it's on making the character that you want to play.

Next you need to build a house for your Sim to live in. You only have $20,000 to start with, so you have to economize. Note the bar graphs of her current needs. These lie at the heart of the gameplay loop. Your goal is to never let them drop any lower than they have to. Yes, this means that going to the toilet is as important as love and friendship. Perhaps this is more true to life than most of us would like to believe...

Now you need a job. You can advance along ten different career tracks in the original game, more if you've installed expansions. You don't actually follow your Sim to work, but her performance on the job is dictated by how well her needs are being met at home. Send her to work tired or hungry, and she'll under-perform and eventually get fired; send her out in tip-top condition, and a promotion could soon be coming, with the requisite higher salary attached. (This is where criticisms of the game as a consumption simulator can begin to take root...) In one of the game's more baffling omissions, there are no weekends. Your Sim needs to go to work every single day. How's that for a capitalist treadmill?

The Sims may have seemed like a kinder and gentler game by the standards of its time, but it's much more unforgiving than its sequels. Your Sims can die in a housefire or even starve to death. Public assistance doesn't exist in its dog-eat-dog economy, but one type of social worker does - the type who can carry off your Sims' crying children if they aren't being properly cared for. Predictably enough, some players found their fun after they got bored with being nurturing in making life hell for their Sims, from bulldozing their houses to killing their pets.

Naked Sims are discreetly blurred out, and there is no explicit sex.

Sex is certainly implied, however, through home accessories like a "vibromatic heart bed" well-suited to "play." This is contrasted with the more conventional "mission bed"; the folks at Maxis were winking and nudging so hard they must have developed permanent twitches. Sims can have extramarital affairs, or even engage in openly polygamous relationships. In retrospect, it's a wonder more people didn't notice and complain about this stuff.

The commercial trajectory of The Sims was unprecedented in the history of computer games. It shifted a million units within its first few months. It duplicated the achievement of SimCity 3000 by becoming the best-selling computer game of its release year; then it duplicated that feat again in 2001, all in an intensely novelty-driven industry where most titles went in and out of print in well under a year. In 2002, the two-year-old The Sims officially snatched the title of best-selling computer game of all time away from the nine-year-old Myst. It just kept on keeping on from there. Its total sales reached 16 million copies by 2005, numbers comparable to those an upper-echelon pop star could expect to put up with a hit album, a product with a far cheaper price tag and a far lower technological barrier to entry. Only four albums released in 2000 managed to sell as many or more copies than The Sims (and no, the critics' darling Kid A was not among them.)

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Original: https://www.filfre.net/2026/08/the-life-and-times-of-maxis-part-3-the-sims/