On February 4, 2024, The Sims franchise will turn 24 years old. During this time, the most popular life simulator has grown into several generations. Many people spend their leisure time in it for days on end, because everyone who has played it knows that once you have entered it, it is already very difficult to exit The Sims. How many times have you spent an entire day in a game trying to find a cool set of outdoor furniture for your Sim’s home?

Today we will talk about the phenomenon of The Sims game and why, at a time when the whole world was a fan of action games, the project of a little-known developer was able to shoot up the whole world.

Will Wright

The creator of The Sims, Will Wright, was a very talented person from childhood. He used his design mind very well on the computer – then computers were just beginning to penetrate modern life. The game designer decided to create a simulator of social interaction with the ability to build a house and choose indoor and outdoor furniture – tables, chairs, sun loungers, and so on. This is exactly how The Sims came about. And there were many innovations.

Furniture as part of the gameplay

Home and outdoor furniture have become one of the main features of the game. Many interior and exterior items from the game migrated to real furniture collections and vice versa. For example, the next update of the game added, depending on trends, either a fashionable bedroom set, an outdoor dining table dubai style, or a barbeque grill zone. Players spent hours and days furnishing their dream home with their favorite home, outdoor and garden furniture – tables, chairs, beds, armchairs, and so on. To buy the piece of furniture you liked, the character in the game had to go to work and earn in-game currency – just like in life.

Game realism

After the release of The Sims, the game gained both fans and ardent opponents, who immediately branded the game as uninteresting, a doll’s house and entertainment for housewives whose interests are limited to garden furniture magazines. However, the fact remained: games where the user could create a character with certain qualities, decide his fate, furnish his home with cool indoor and outdoor furniture of any style, and live an almost real life with his protégé while taking into account the social processes that the player faced everywhere, the world has never seen. The characters in the game met each other, visited each other at a barbeque grill, got married, and had children.

People even tried to copy some furniture styling from the game and found ideas to decorate their houses in real life. At the peak of its popularity, players used The Sims as a virtual designer to decorate their own homes – they could draw a design, try on the color of wallpaper and walls, zone the garden, and arrange outdoor furniture.

It is worth noting that The Sims is the first game released with money from the publisher Electronic Arts, which has just included Maxis. The newcomer studio, led by Wright, fully justified its trust: the project was beyond any doubt commercially successful and secured the title of the best-selling game for many years.

Will Wright created a real masterpiece in the world of video games, and even more than that: he was able to improve it in the second part. Alas, after the release of The Sims 2, he was carried away by the development of another project, and soon he left the gaming industry altogether. After his departure, the game began to acquire more and more cosmetic changes, but progress in the most important thing – the psychology and personality of the characters – was minimal. It’s difficult to say what the fourth and fifth parts of The Sims would look like now if Wright had not left the project. It is quite possible that pixel people would be more humane than you and me.