The Sims

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Sims owes its existence to a disaster. In 1991 a firestorm tore through Oakland and destroyed the home of game designer Will Wright. Starting over meant buying everything again, from furniture to the smallest household belongings. Somewhere in that long errand of replacement, Wright began to see a game in it. He imagined a virtual doll house, filled with tiny digital people living ordinary lives.

  That idea grew into one of the best-selling video game series ever made. Its story raises some odd questions. Why did the people holding the money doubt it? What does a game do when it gives the player no goal at all? How does a series keep reinventing its own world across sequels, phones, consoles and even film? And what happens to the experiments that did not survive?

  12

• 2. Doubters and Borrowed Ideas

  ›

  When Will Wright first brought his doll house to the directors of Maxis, the board was unconvinced. They offered the project little support and almost no financing. Electronic Arts saw something different. It bought Maxis in 1997, and its directors were far more receptive to the pitch.

  Their reasoning was practical. SimCity had been a big success for Electronic Arts, and its executives could picture a whole line of Sim games growing from it.

  Wright has said that the game was meant as a satire of consumer culture in the United States. To build the thinking behind his virtual people, he went looking in unusual places. One source was A Pattern Language, a book on architecture and urban design published in 1977. Another was a 1943 paper by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, titled A Theory of Human Motivation, which is the home of his famous hierarchy of needs. The third was Maps of the Mind by Charles Hampden-Turner. Together they gave Wright a model for how the artificial intelligence inside the game would behave.

  Those borrowed ideas were finally put in front of players in early 2000.

  14649

• 3. The Original Sandbox

  ›

  On the 4th of February 2000, the first The Sims was released for Microsoft Windows. It was drawn in dimetric projection, a fixed angled view of the world. The setting was a suburban area located near SimCity.

  The player created virtual people called Sims, moved them into a house, and tried to keep their moods up and their desires met. Those houses could come ready-made, or the player could build one from scratch. Mostly there was nothing to win. A few later expansion packs and console editions did introduce goals, but the core design was an open sandbox.

  The public took to it quickly. By the 22nd of March 2002, the game had sold more than 6.3 million copies worldwide. That passed Myst, which had been the best-selling PC game in history until then. By February 2005 the total shipped had reached 16 million.

  Seven expansion packs arrived between 2000 and 2003, and each one widened what a player could do with their Sims. The game was also reissued many times in deluxe editions and compilations. On the 31st of January 2025, it came back for Windows 10 and 11 as The Sims: Legacy Collection, a celebration of the franchise's twenty-fifth birthday, bundling all seven expansions.

  The second game in the series would get its own birthday edition on exactly the same day.

  5678

• 4. Sequels Across Time

  ›

  The Sims 2 reached players on the 14th of September 2004, and it moved the whole world into full 3D. Sims now aged through seven life stages, from infancy to old age and then death. A new aspiration system gave each Sim wants and fears based on personality. Fulfilling wants earned aspiration points, and those points could be spent on rewards. The calendar also gained clear days of the week, so children could stay home on weekends and adults could take vacation days.

  The Sims 2 was set some 25 years after the first game. The Goth family had aged noticeably, and Bella Goth had mysteriously disappeared at some point in those years. Because every sprite had become a 3D model, all content had to be rebuilt from nothing. Content from the first generation could not be carried over, though some objects and features were remade. The sequel received eight expansion packs and nine stuff packs, plus more than 400 items through The Sims 2 Store. Its own Legacy Collection arrived on the 31st of January 2025, containing every one of those packs.

  EA announced The Sims 3 in November 2006, and it launched on the 2nd of June 2009. This time the story ran backward. The game was set before the original, and the Goths were much younger. Bella Goth, an adult in the first game, appeared as a child named Bella Bachelor. Some players guess it takes place 25 years before the original, mirroring the gap in the second game.

  The third game offered an open neighborhood with no loading seams between homes, plus better tools for creating Sims. It also introduced wishes and goals, small steps that a player could accept or ignore. It sold 1.4 million copies in its first week, the biggest PC game release up to that point. Eleven expansion packs and nine stuff packs followed.

  Electronic Arts announced The Sims 4 on the 6th of May 2013, and its release date of the 2nd of September 2014 came out at E3 2014. This game sits in an alternative setting and timeline rather than continuing the older ones. On the 18th of October 2022 it became free to play. By February 2026 it had received twenty-one expansion packs, twelve game packs, twenty stuff packs, forty-four kits and eleven creator kits.

  Some features were missing at launch and came later through updates. Basements, ghosts, pools and bunk beds all arrived that way. So did toddlers, and eventually infants.

  910111213

• 5. Handhelds and Phones

  ›

  In 2003, the Sims reached consoles for the first time. The Sims came to the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Nintendo GameCube with a mission-based storyline alongside the sandbox. Completing objectives unlocked new furniture and locations. The Sims Bustin' Out followed in the fourth quarter of 2003 with a mission-driven Bust Out Mode and a Freeplay Mode. Its Game Boy Advance and N-Gage versions let the player directly control a Sim for the first time.

  The Urbz: Sims in the City moved the action to an urban setting, where the player earned a reputation and did tasks for other characters. The Black Eyed Peas appeared in it as non-player characters. The Sims 2 and its Pets and Castaway versions spread across the Wii, PlayStation 2, PSP, Xbox and Nintendo DS. EA also made small Sims games for several iPod models, including The Sims Bowling, The Sims DJ and The Sims Pool.

  MySims arrived in September 2007 on the Wii and Nintendo DS, with chibi-style characters resembling the Wii's Mii avatars. Its newest entry, MySims SkyHeroes, came out in September 2010. A puzzle spin-off, MySims Puzzle Party, was released only in South Korea in January 2010.

  The Sims 3 went to iOS, Android, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Wii and Nintendo 3DS, where it was a launch title for the console. For The Sims 4, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions came out on the 17th of November 2017. Unlike earlier console ports, this one matched the PC and Mac version feature for feature, and it shared the same packs and kits.

  The Sims FreePlay was the first free-to-play Sims game. It launched worldwide on the 15th of December 2011 for iOS and reached Android on the 15th of February 2012. Later it spread to Kindle Fire, BlackBerry 10 and Windows Phone 8. Unlike its siblings, it runs in real time, so actions take real minutes to finish. Players climb 55 levels and can create up to 34 Sims. Social Points come from visiting neighboring houses or adding Facebook friends.

  The Sims Mobile was announced on the 9th of May 2017 with a launch trailer and a soft launch in Brazil. It went worldwide on the 6th of March 2018, mixing multiplayer with story elements. On the 19th of October 2025, EA announced that it would close on the 20th of January 2026. The game vanished from the Apple App Store and Google Play two days after that announcement, though people who already owned it could keep playing.

  2223242527

• 6. Online Experiments and Cancellations

  ›

  In December 2002, EA released The Sims Online, built by Maxis and later renamed EA Land. It turned the Sims into a massively multiplayer game where real people met each other. Reviews were lackluster, and many compared it to an enormous chat room. EA Land was shut down on the 1st of August 2008.

  Other experiments fared differently. The Sims Stories ran in 2007 and 2008 on a modified Sims 2 engine tuned for weaker machines like laptops. It added a linear story mode with goals alongside classic Free Play, and three games appeared in the series. The Sims Carnival was a casual brand with two lines, one of crowd-sourced web games and one of packaged titles. The Sims Medieval, released in 2011, was an action role-playing game built on The Sims 3 engine. It received one expansion, Pirates and Nobles.

  The Sims Social, made by Playfish for Facebook, launched in August 2011. EA announced its move from beta to live on the 23rd of August 2011, and the game was removed from Facebook on the 14th of June 2013.

  Some games never shipped. SimsVille was announced in August 2000 as a fusion of Sims life simulation and SimCity city building. A year later, in September 2001, it was canceled over quality control problems. The team worried that play became "less compelling" once cities were built.

  Another cancellation came much later. In October 2024, footage of an unannounced mobile game called The Sims Labs: Town Stories leaked from a playtest. It was set in a town called Plumbrook, and players finished quests and match-3 mini-games to gather resources for building houses. It soft-launched in the Philippines, Australia and South Africa in November 2025. In March 2026, former designer Franci Dimitrovska revealed that its worldwide release had been canceled and the team laid off.

  1921282933

• 7. Project Rene

  ›

  On the 18th of October 2022, the same day The Sims 4 turned free to play, Maxis announced its next installment under the code name Project Rene. It is designed for solo or collaborative play, with cross-play between platforms. Even the build mode is multiplayer, so several players can reshape the same buildings at once. Furniture offers more customization options than in The Sims 4.

  As of July 2024, development was continuing. Maxis floated the idea of "closed invites to small public playtests or early access options." It also said Project Rene would live alongside The Sims 4, with both receiving ongoing work. Earlier installments had typically replaced the one before.

  The game will be free to play. Maxis promised it would not need a subscription, a core game purchase or energy mechanics. It will still have in-game purchases. The studio described the plan this way: "basic weather may be added to the core game for free, for everybody." It added that lowering barriers to play and sharing the broadest systems with everyone would be the strongest foundation for growth.

  In September 2024, EA vice president Kate Gorman confirmed that Project Rene is not a direct replacement or sequel for The Sims 4. It is a separate project within the franchise. The Sims 4, she said, would keep receiving updates and content for years.

  Gorman would soon have another project to talk about, and this one was bound for cinemas.

  1516171814

• 8. Records and Screens

  ›

  As of 2017, Guinness World Records had awarded the series several titles, including Most Expansion Packs for a Videogame Series and Best Selling PC Game Series, with sales estimates ranging from 36 to 50 million units. Counting every entry, the series ranks tenth among the best-selling video game franchises, at over 200 million. All Sims games together have earned lifetime sales of more than US$5 billion.

  On the 17th of July 2020, the TBS network premiered The Sims Spark'd, a four-episode reality competition made by EA with Turner Sports and BuzzFeed. It was filmed from the 9th to the 14th of December 2019. Twelve contestants, chosen because they featured The Sims in their online gaming channels, built characters and stories inside The Sims 4 around themed challenges. The judges were YouTube personality Kelsey Impicciche, singer and songwriter Tayla Parx, and EA Maxis developer Dave Miotke. The winner took home US$100,000, and the host was Rayvon Owen, a finalist from American Idol season 14.

  A live-action film has taken far longer. In 2007, 20th Century Fox bought the film rights, with Brian Lynch to write and John Davis to produce. It stayed in development hell for years. In 2019, after Disney acquired 21st Century Fox, the film and many other game adaptations at Fox were canceled. In April 2020, Legendary Entertainment announced films based on The Sims and SimCity, with Mike Rosillio writing the SimCity script.

  In March 2024, LuckyChap Entertainment and Vertigo Entertainment were announced as producers of a Sims film. Kate Herron is set to direct and to write alongside Briony Redman. EA confirmed in September 2024 that the film was being made with Amazon MGM Studios. Gorman cited Barbie from 2023 as an inspiration, saying EA wants to "make an impact the size of something like a Barbie movie." Margot Robbie, who starred in Barbie, is a co-founder of LuckyChap Entertainment.

  3436434445