The Sims was first released on February 4, 2000. By March 22, 2002, The Sims had sold more than 6.3 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling PC game in history; the game has shipped 16 million copies worldwide as of February 7, 2005. Since its initial release, seven expansion packs and sequels, The Sims 2 and the newest sequel The Sims 3 (each with their own expansion packs), have been released. The Sims has won numerous awards, including GameSpot's "Game of the Year Award" for 2000.
Gameplay and Design
Instead of objectives, the player is encouraged to make choices and engage fully in an interactive environment. This has helped the game successfully attract more casual gamers. The only real objective of the game is to organize the Sims' time to help them reach personal goals.
Life Stages
There are three life stages in The Sims: infant, child, and adult. While babies grow up into children, children and adults never age. This means children and adults remain in their life stage indefinitely. Sims, however, can die from various causes (e.g. burning to death in a fire, drowning in a pool, starving, or dying from diseases). The Sims: Livin' Large, the first expansion pack, introduces the Grim Reaper who appears after the death of a sim. If a relative of the dead sim wins against him in Rock, Paper, Scissors, the dead sim will be revived. If the relative loses, the dead sim will remain dead and his/her tombstone will appear and the option of Rock, Paper, Scissors will not be available. The tombstone will stay in its place, unless the player decides to move it to another place, or just delete it.
Build and Buy Modes
Each newly created family will begin with §20,000 regardless of its number of members. These funds can be used to purchase a house or vacant lot, build or remodel a house, and/or purchase furniture. All architectural features and furnishings are dictated by a square tile system in which items must be placed on a tile. Walls and fences go on the edge of a tile and can be diagonal, whereas sims and items cannot be diagonal. Items that are attached to walls cannot be placed on diagonal walls in the same way that items cannot be placed up against diagonal walls. The base game contains over 150 items including furniture and architectural elements.
Sims' Lives
Sims are directed on the basis of instructing them to interact with objects, such as a television set, or other sims. Sims may receive house guests from other playable lots or from a pool of unhoused sims. If enabled within the game, sims can have a certain amount of free will, allowing them to autonomously interact with their world. However, the player can override most autonomous actions. Unlike the simulated environments in games such as SimCity, SimEarth, or SimLife, the sims are not fully autonomous. They are unable to take certain actions without specific commands from the player, such as paying their bills, finding a job, and conceiving children.
The player can make decisions about time spent in skill development, such as exercise, reading, creativity, and logic, by adding activities to the daily agenda of the sims. Daily needs fulfillment such as hygiene maintenance and eating can also be scheduled. Although sims can autonomously perform these actions, they may not prioritize them effectively. Much like real humans, sims can suffer consequences for neglecting their own needs. For example, sims can die from starvation if they do not eat for prolonged periods of time. Needs govern the overall moods of the sims. If the needs are not fulfilled, the sims can become grumpy and unwilling to obey certain player-directed commands, particularly ones that do not fulfill the depleted needs in question. This system follows the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, in which physiological needs must be satisfied before other needs can be attended to.
In addition to fulfilling their needs, sims need to maintain balanced budgets. The most conventional method of generating an income is to obtain a job. The game presents various career tracks with ten jobs (levels of promotion) in each. The original careers include Business, Entertainment, Law Enforcement, Crime, Medicine, Military, Politics, and Science. Sims may earn promotions by fulfilling skill and friendship requirements of each level. These promotions lead to new job titles, increased wages, and different work hours. The Sims: Livin' Large and The Sims: Unleashed introduced additional career tracks including those of Paranormal and Education. Other means of generating an income include creating and selling various items such as artworks and gnomes at home, or growing produce at home and selling them at a nearby farmers' market. The latter option is introduced in The Sims: Unleashed.
The inner structure of the game is actually an agent based artificial life program. The presentation of the game's artificial intelligence is advanced, and the Sims will respond to outside conditions by themselves, although often the player/controller's intervention is necessary to keep them on the right track. The Sims technically has unlimited replay value, in that there is no way to win the game, and the player can play on indefinitely. It has been described as more like a toy than a game.
In addition, the game includes a very advanced architecture system. The game was originally designed as an architecture simulation alone, with the Sims there only to evaluate the houses, but during development it was decided that the Sims were more interesting than originally anticipated and their initially limited role in the game was developed further.
The first game of The Sims has several limitations, most notably that children never grow up to become adults, though babies do eventually become children. Also, adult Sims never age (or die of old age), and there is no concept of weekends. For example, adults and children are expected to go to work and attend school respectively, every day. In particular, adults receive a warning if they miss one day of work, but they are fired if they miss work for two consecutive days. Children can study at home to keep their school grades up.
While there is no eventual objective to the game, states of failure do exist in The Sims. One is that Sims may die, either by starvation, drowning, perishing in a fire, electrocution or by virus (contracted from a pet guinea pig, which can happen when its cage is left dirty). When a Sim dies, a tombstone or an urn will appear in place of him/her. Their remains can be sold, or placed anywhere, inside or outside the building. At night, the ghost of the deceased Sim may haunt the building where it died. In addition, Sims can leave a household (and game) for good and never return; two adult Sims with a bad relationship may brawl, eventually resulting in one of them moving out. If a child has failing grades for too long, he or she will be sent to military school and also leave the lot for good. There are also more complicated ways of killing Sims, including getting them into a pool and deleting the steps, or putting them into a room then deleting all of that room's doors.
The Sims uses a combination of 3D and 2D graphics techniques. The Sims themselves are rendered as high-poly-count 3D objects, but the house, and all its objects, are pre-rendered, and displayed dimetrically.
