The Sims 1 Series
Celebrate The Sims’ 12th Birthday!
Jan 25th
Use Facebook? Good, because this is for YOU! But make sure your printer is full of ink first. 
Celebrate The Sims’ Birthday!
Simmers Around the World!
Celebrate the upcoming birthday of The Sims by taking a photo of yourself with the plumbob. Share it with your friends or make it your Facebook profile photo beginning today through the February 4th anniversary.
Download a template to make your own plumbob, digitally create a photo using the plumbob, or print a plumbob image to use in your photo.
Origami Plumbob
Photo of Plumbob
To show even more support for The Sims, submit a screenshot of your favorite Sim to The Sims 3 Facebook ‘Anniversary Album’ and your Sim might be included in The Sims anniversary commemorative image! Here’s a tip: zoom in to snap a nice headshot of your favorite Sim.
Upload to: The Sims 3 Facebook ‘Anniversary Album’ between January 24 – February 1 by 5pm PST.
We hope you’ll join us in celebrating the birthday of The Sims!
Sul sul!
The Sims Team
Source: SimsVIP
GameSpot – Classic Sim video reviews
Oct 18th
GameSpot has been uploading their older video reviews to YouTube, and Chry was kind enough to let me know there are videos for The Sims, Unleashed, Vacation, Sims 2, Nightlife, University, Online, and The Urbz (with such an overly-excited reviewer…). Check them all out and you’ll soon tell yourself “Holy cow, I feel OLD”
Progress on The Sims Online Restoration
Sep 20th
It is good to know that the team behind the Restoration of The Sims Online is still hard at work! Below are some of the recent videos they have put out recently. Supposedly it is in the pre-Alpha stage with an estimated closed beta sometime in (late) 2012. Thanks to Frankie and a few others for keeping me updated on this project! Good luck, TSOR Team!
My biggest fear (well other than this project getting scrapped by people losing interest) is when it gets nearer to completion, EA is going to be failing their lawyers around and shutting them down. If that happens, it’s going to be one of my last straws in putting up with them…
Gamasutra – The Replay Interviews: Will Wright
May 24th
While the posted article is new, the interview appears to have been conducted awhile back. Author Tristan Donovan has been interviewing numerous people in the video game industry for his upcoming book Replay: The History of Video Games. The following article is his interview with SimCity and Sims creator Will Wright. Lots of interesting tidbits, I must say!
So how did you keep the project (The Sims) alive?
WW: I was trying to get resources within Maxis, and nobody wanted to spend the resources on developing it. On the other hand, we had this small group in San Mateo that was doing tools and technology for our company, but nobody was using their tools. It was kind of this programmer thing of “not invented here”, and so they were trying to make these code frameworks and things and the department was like, “No, I’d rather bring my own.”
So we were about to pull the plug on this little group, because nobody was using what they were making, but they were really brilliant guys. This was like four guys.
So I said, “Look, just give me those guys over there.” They weren’t even in the same office, and nobody saw them anyway, and so they became my little black ops group. I went over there and they really got it. They worked for the first year trying to bring it up and getting it running, and we were making great progress. That was right around the time that EA came in.
We were on the public market at that point, and EA was doing due diligence, deciding if they wanted to buy our company or not. They were originally thinking they wanted to buy Maxis because of SimCity, but some of the executives at EA saw The Sims and were like, “What’s this?” We didn’t even tell them; nobody mentioned we were working on this project.
They actually felt very excited about it, and it wasn’t longer after that EA bought Maxis. EA’s management that came to help broaden Maxis were so excited by it, at that point there was no problem. I got plenty of resources on the team and it was all downhill from there.
So EA saved it in a way?
WW: Yes. It was like a total Monday, and as soon as Luc Barthelet, the general manager EA brought in, came in he was like, “Yeah, what do you need? Let’s go for it.” He was very into it, and had a lot of contributions in terms of us launching the community around it and all that stuff, so probably Luc more than anybody else was responsible.
Will Wright at Inventing the Future of Games
Apr 19th
Keynote speaker Will Wright is the award-winning creator of Spore, The Sims, and SimCity. The head of the entertainment think tank Stupid Fun Club, Wright is widely acknowledged for creating the simulation video game genre.
Innovators in technology and design continually reimagine computer games. User-generated content for commercial games (Spore, Little Big Planet), social network games (Farmville), vast simulation worlds with their own economies (World of Warcraft), games using mobile phones to augment reality (Ghostwire)–ten years ago these were dreams, and now they’re part of the cultural fabric. As the imagined becomes real, the question of “what’s next?” confronts both academic researchers and the game industry.
“Inventing the Future of Games,” a day-long symposium April 15 in Silicon Valley, aims to explore the possibilities of the next decade of gaming innovation and technology. Sponsored by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media, the symposium will gather some of the brightest minds of academia and industry to discuss the advancement of game design and technology.
The inaugural symposium, which starts at 8:30 a.m. at the India Community Center in Milpitas, Calif., will feature keynote speeches by Sims creator Will Wright, Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble (Second Life), and Michael Mateas, co-creator of Facade and director of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media. Tickets are $100 for the general public and $30 for UC Santa Cruz students.
“We’re looking forward to starting conversations between academics and industry professionals on where the field of computer games might go,” said Mateas, an associate professor of computer science in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering. “Moving toward games that truly pay attention to the player’s actions and generate dynamic responses would allow games to create new types of experiences. It would open up new approaches in interactive storytelling. Multi-player missions and quests could be adapted to specific social play styles. A whole new world of games waits to be discovered.”
The symposium will include four sessions: exploring the relationship between games and cinema, making self-generating games, the future of games and culture, and creating new forms of character and dialogue.
Session speakers will include Jordan Mechner (Prince of Persia), Emily Short (Galatea), Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech/A Slow Year), Tracey Fullerton (University of Southern California/The Night Journey), Robin Hunicke (thatgamecompany), and UC Santa Cruz game program faculty members Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Marilyn Walker, Arnav Jhala, and Jim Whitehead. UC Santa Cruz’s John Funge, Warren Sack, Soraya Murray, and Sri Kurniawan will moderate the panels.
For more information, visit games.soe.ucsc.edu
Sims 1 Downloads fully online
Feb 8th
After a month of prepping preview items, I have just finished adding all of my old content that I created for The Sims 1. I do believe I am missing a few items – I know I made a Jurassic Park gate as well as some very, very old objects back from 2000 and 2001, but this is the bulk of the content I had backed up on CDs. Anyhow, it’s not much exciting for those that don’t play the original Sims game (I would recommend getting the complete collection because it’s a must if you never experienced the original series), but for us old timers….well there will always be a place in our hearts for the game that started it all. Plus, I’ve been wanting to have my works all in one place to begin with.
Anyhow, check out the Sims 1 Downloads page here. Now that this huge task is finished, I can focus on the poll (tomorrow, hopefully), and try to give each game page their own unique design.
The Sims 11th Anniversary
Feb 4th
Year 11 for The Sims, and it’s still going strong! EA Netherlands sent out a number of press releases that includes fun facts, highlights, and a timeline of the games below. Thanks to Sims Nieuws for reporting!
Summary
The Sims™ franchise, the wildly popular game series that allows players to create and live a virtual, simulated life, skyrocketed to the top of the charts when it began shipping to stores in February 2000 and quickly became a universal gaming and cultural phenomenon. The critically-acclaimed franchise celebrates an impressive over 125 million units sold to date and is translated into 22 different languages and available in 60 different countries. The Sims has inspired two more base games, The Sims 2 and The Sims 3, numerous expansion packs for PC and Mac, titles for all major console gaming systems, and games for the iPhone, iPod touch, and mobile phones.
“At first, no one believed that a videogame about people and social interaction, without shooting, driving or what passes for action, could be published successfully,” said EA President and CEO John Riccitiello. “Today this game, The Sims, has evolved to become the world’s most successful PC game and a global multi-platform success. The Sims has incredible appeal among teens and young adults, and especially among female players, has broken all the old established rules about videogames.”
The Sims franchise continues to be on the top of the charts throughout the world and is enjoyed by a wide audience of men and women from teenagers and beyond. It’s the only franchise that truly allows you to play with life.
TSO Restoration – A plan to bring back ‘The Sims Online’
Jan 3rd
The Sims Online was a game well before its time. It was a shame to see EA pull it from their servers back in August 2008, when it was re-branded earlier that year as EA Land. A number of fans still played the game when the doors closed, so it’s to no surprise there is interest to re-create the game and to introduce it on private servers. That’s the purpose of TSO Restoration. How does one reverse engineer EA’s platform? The answer to that (and many other questions – including the legal aspects of the game) can be read from the following interview conducted by The Alphaville Herald:
Urizenus: How does one do something like this, especially now that the original TSO is no more? Do you reverse engineer EA’s platform?
Ghost: Unfortunately, because the TSO servers are no longer online – we’re unable to gather any more packets. This means we’re no longer an “emulation” project. Everything except perhaps the art and graphics is being recreated by our team.
Urizenus: So you are building it from scratch. Will it be aesthetically identical to the tSO we remember?
Ghost: Yes, our goal of the project is to make it look and interact exactly as the original TSO.
Urizenus: So the same motives then. What about all the usual interactions? tickling, dancing etc?
Ghost: You will be able to do all of the interactions. In fact, there is no reason we can not have more than just the original interactions. Our team plans on not only providing the same TSO experience for free, but also adding improvements to the game. What is to stop us from supporting unicode with special characters? Why not raise the tile limit and have size nine or ten lots? These are just a few of the ideas our team has in making the game more enjoyable.
Urizenus: What about the possibility of having users provide custom content and custom animations?
Ghost: As we saw in EA-Land, the TSOClient definitely has the potential to support such endeavors. We will pursue such capabilities in the future. I can’t promise you that custom content will be in our first release though.
How SimAnt inspired The Sims
Nov 9th
During an IGDA Leadership Forum dinner held last Friday, both Will Wright and the creator of Doom, John Romero, were able to conduct an interview between the two. Will shared with John that his classic work ‘SimAnt’ helped inspire and set the foundation for The Sims due to the behavior of the ants and Sims:
“The basic engine for The Sims really ends up being one of any pheromones. Every object in the environment is sending out an ‘advertisement’ of pheromones in a particular flavor. The flavors are the eight basic needs of the Sims. So they can advertise ‘food,’ ‘energy,’ ‘fun,’ ‘social,’ ‘hygiene.’ Every object is described in those terms, being the collection of pheromones that it broadcasts,” Wright explained. “A Sim is always sitting there, smelling all of the pheromones around it saying, ‘oh I need to be clean, or I need to be fed’ — whatever — so they follow that pheromone trail to the closest object that’s producing it. The advantage of that — the whole point of that — was that we could add new objects into the game later without the Sims having any foreknowledge of what the objects were, as long as they had these pheromones.”
You can view the full article from JoyStiq if you wish
MCV – Future of The Sims – Interview with Rod Humble
Oct 4th
InfiniteSims picked up a new interview with Rob Humble by MCV highlighting the future of The Sims Series:
THE SIMS MAY BE TEN YEARS OLD, BUT HOW WILL IT EVOLVE DURING THE NEXT DECADE? REED ASKS HUMBLE…
Where do you see The Sims brand going over the next few years? What do you have to do to maintain its success?
The team sees The Sims evolving through theme, time and space. We also continue to maintain quality of gameplay as our North Star. The series has already seen a vastly significant evolution over the last decade, what with so many expansions and things like MySims.
Loading ...
Master Suite Stuff
Sims 3 Showtime
