Graphics Pack 4 is ready for you to download. Inside is a collection of Sims in their Career Skins. After viewing these characters, I can't decide if I want to be a thief or a policeman.
Sims Nieuws
9 dec 1999 - 22:00
3 dec 1999 - 22:00
When we say countdown we are not talking about the millennium. But about The Sims release! The Sims will be shipped the first week of February to a store near you.
2 dec 1999 - 22:00
Ever wanted to decorate your own Sim home? Our new update has got your walls and floors covered. The download of HomeMaster 4.0 will include new surfaces, an export function, and personalization features.
1 dec 1999 - 22:00
We have two changes to our links page. The first being the Fan Site Spotlight and the second our hunt for The Sims fan sites in all languages. Submit your site today and you may find the spotlight on you.
24 nov 1999 - 22:00
The Mini Aquarium is just one of many objects in The Sims, and we wanted to share it with you before the big release.
17 nov 1999 - 22:00
"What is the appeal of the Skinner box that is the home? Security, tranquility, the sense of wholeness that can only come by surrounding yourself with those you love? Nah."
A fantastic article on GameSpot predicts The Sims to be one of five games to change gaming as we know it.
By Robert Coffey
The Sims
Social Darwinism Made Easy
What is the appeal of the Skinner box that is the home? Security, tranquility, the sense of wholeness that can only come by surrounding yourself with those you love? Nah.
I think it's more along the lines of an old Steve Martin routine in which he entertained thoughts of raising a child and teaching said offspring all the wrong words for everything. He relished the thought of a child raising his hand the first day of school and asking, "May I moo dog-face to the banana patch?" This is the appeal of The Sims - the ultimate expression of the entire Sim franchise - a game where you can run amok with the lives of people, without running the risk of jail for child abuse through enforced idioglossia. Maxis, the company that practically created the so-called "software toy" genre with SimCity, is now preparing to deliver the ultimate toy - human lives.
Birth of an Artificial Nation
Seven years ago, Maxis founder Will Wright was toying with an architectural sim, a nice little program that would let people create their own virtual dream homes. But other products (most notably SimCity 2000) distracted Wright and the rest of his team until about two and a half years ago. When production once again resumed on what Maxis had been calling Sim Dollhouse, it was with one significant change - the focus of the game had moved from the aluminum siding of the homes to the lives of the dolls within.
Anyone who's played any of the SimCity games knows just how pesky the virtual people inhabiting those digital metropolises can be; whether moaning about taxes or whining for a sports stadium, the "Sims" were a difficult bunch to manage. Happily, they remain just as challenging in The Sims, thriving only when you tend to the minutest details of their lives. One of the most remarkable things about the game is how the design team has distilled gameplay into three basic functions - building, buying, and living - and yet managed to pack so much of the real world into those seemingly limiting specifications.
Every game starts with creating a new, single Sim and deciding his or her sex, skin, and basic appearance before dividing points among basic character qualities: neatness, outgoingness, activity level, playfulness, and niceness. After that you dive right into the building portion of the game. Since you start with a set amount of money, you can either immediately purchase a model home or create your own. Designing your own home is a remarkably intuitive process, using a simple click-and-drag interface to plop down floors, walls, windows, doors, and anything else you feel your home needs. You will have to resist the temptation to blow all your money on the biggest house you can afford right off the bat, since you'll have to furnish it as well; forget to set aside enough money for a toilet and shower, and life will get very Appalachian very fast.
You Can Buy Happiness
Keeping your Sims content is the primary challenge. While big rooms and lots of windows will make them happy, the chief purveyor of pleasure comes in the form of material goods. Comfy chairs, aquariums, stereo equipment, hot tubs, and state-of-the-art kitchens are just a smattering of the objects that fill up your Sims' living space.
All the objects are programmed with attributes affecting both your Sims' mood and their behavior; this means that as you accumulate more stuff, you also acquire more options in terms of things to do. Entertainment objects facilitate social interaction, giving visitors something to do when they drop by, while quality-of-life improvements, such as plants, just make your Sims happier. Of course, you'll have to maintain all these things - fail to water your plants, and they'll die, bumming out your Sim. This amount of micromanagement may be daunting, so you'll be able to hire gardeners to care for your lawn, while maids will tidy up the house.
Beyond this, objects can also affect who your Sim is: Purchase an easel, and your Sim will start painting, improving the Sim's creativity and opening up new life paths, primarily in terms of employment advancement. As Will Wright explains, the gist of this "behavioral architecture" is that the intelligence is a function not only of the people in the houses, but also of the environment you've provided for them.
That's right, you'll have to get a job. The game will include ten career tracks, each with ten jobs; for instance, you can take a budding actor from a meager waiter job to superstardom, or you can guide enlisted army personnel to the high-profile life of an astronaut.
Life of the Party
The living part of the game is probably the most important - it's undoubtedly the most fascinating, especially when it comes to Sims interacting with their neighbors. Other people will eventually drop by, and it's your job to forge relationships with them all. Ideally, you'd like warm relationships, since you'll need to make friends and influence people in order to reach the higher career tracks - not to mention start a family. It would be easier if you could control the neighbors, but even though they're from families you've created in other parts of the neighborhood, you can't control them once they leave their own home.
While parties, hot-tub get-togethers, and conversations about aliens and other common interests will help you get and keep your friends, you'll really have to work to get a spouse. You'll have to woo someone with back rubs, compliments, hugs, and kisses before you pop the question. Just as in real life, one miscue could foul the whole deal. Once you do wed, you'll then gain direct control of your new partner and can start a family, growing to a maximum of eight - perfect for a very Brady Christmas.
Family Album
Early play testers are responsible for the creation of one of The Sims' coolest features - a built-in screen-capture utility that lets you string together and annotate a series of shots. What Maxis discovered when people played the game was that they instinctively constructed stories around the squabbles, job promotions, and untimely deaths of their pet people. These photo albums can be saved in a very tidy web-page format and posted online, letting people share the stories of their virtual families.
Even better, the families in your neighborhoods are saved in a web-page format as well. This means the Sims' community can go beyond the scrapbooks to actual hands-on experimentation with the populace of other players' communities because you can download the families directly into your game and let them interact with the families already there.
In an odd way, The Sims shares the same enormous potential for self-expression that Black & White does, letting you play the game the way you want, with results that can't be tidily predicted. Maxis is embracing the game's potential for delightful unpredictability, with no better example of this than the proposed Genetic Face Generator. This generator would be used to create the faces of Sim kids, blending the features of their parents to create a unique individual. When you consider that people can use their own faces and/or any 3D skin for their game characters, the possibilities are infinite. In fact, virtually every aspect of the game can be customized: skins, faces, objects, surface tiles, careers - you name it. While Maxis will release new items and careers after the game ships, we expect the user-created material to be the most inventive.
The Sims is pretty much a simple stroke of genius, the sort of idea that makes you slap yourself on the forehead and ask, "Why didn't anyone think of this before?" What's not to love about toying with the infinite possibilities inherent in the lives of people? With such an immediately understandable premise, The Sims seems destined to have an even broader appeal and marketability than the rest of the Sim franchise.
"This game started out more focused on the architectural aspects, but I realized that I needed to stimulate people in the house to really evaluate the designs that the player constructed. So at that point, Jamie Doornbos and I spent about a year and a half getting the Sims to act intelligently. When they started living plausible lives in this world, the whole direction of the project shifted more in their direction.
"For me The Sims represents the most personal of the Sim games. I like to put my house and my family into it and play my life. So in this sense it's a kind of strange, surreal mirror. At this point I've invested as much time on it as all of my work on the SimCity series."
-Will Wright
16 nov 1999 - 22:00
The "Real World" Gone Digital! Will Wright's new game doesn't involve creating streets and shopping malls. The Sims is a home simulator. Players have the ability to manipulate not just the house but the people that live in it. Fill your home with high-tech appliances, create the perfect neighborhood, and watch your family grow to be the next Bradys. Or starve them of social interaction and stimulation and watch them smack the earwax out of each other. Realistic! Check out Spin magazine at a news stand or visit www.spin.com.
4 nov 1999 - 22:10
A brand new graphics pack awaits you on our tools page. OK, it is not a tool, but it sure looks good there. Pack3 includes three large screen shots from our game and a Sims logo JPG made for tiling.
4 nov 1999 - 22:00
Our own Will Wright was featured in an interview by The New York Times Magazine. Will's best quote? "Well, I like buying toys... I do mean toys literally."
Read the interview.
NOTE: The NY Times Magazine web site requires free registration.
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
QUESTIONS FOR WILL WRIGHT
How to Win at Life
The creator of the hit computer game Sim City discusses his coming masterwork — a simulation of family life, in which players compete for love and happiness. By AMY SILVERMAN
Photograph by Robert Cardin for The New York Times
Sim City, which you created in 1987, has sold about eight million games, in all its various versions. Why does a game about, of all things, urban planning appeal to so many people?
Everybody who plays Sim City is building something that no other player has built. It's like playing with a train set — having this miniature world that's yours to control. These things are an outward expression of what's going on in our heads, running little simulations about what's going to happen next — what if somebody throws a rock at me, where's it going to go? A lot of what makes us intelligent and human is the fact that we can very quickly model hypothetical situations in our head.
So the new game, The Sims, extends this train-set concept? Is that how you approached it?
Originally I wanted to do a game about architecture, how you design a house. And I started thinking about how you would score the game, how you would decide if it was a good or bad house. So I came up with a system for simulating people living in a house, and that became the more captivating part of the game. The strategy comes down to time management. You design a house and furnish it. You purchase items for the people who live in it. You decide their careers and how much time they spend at work and with their friends and family and that sort of thing. The game becomes kind of a scaffolding for fantasy. Less like a train set, more like a doll house.
A doll house? Are you concerned that players, particularly the ones already hooked on the master-of-the-universe experience of Sim City, might find that a bit touchy-feely?
It's entirely up to the player as to how touchy-feely it is. I was showing this to a bunch of 12-year-old boys the other day and the first thing that they asked was, "Can you kill the people in the house?" And in fact, you can. Somebody can start a fire if their cooking skills are very low, or if they have bad repair skills they can be electrocuted repairing the television. Or they can starve to death.
Did their eyes light up when you said that?
For them, it had more to do with, "Is this game going to force me to do this, that and the other, or will it let me go where I want to go?" I saw the same thing with Sim City. I would show people the game and they would say, "Oh, that's cool," and then I'd show them the bulldozer and they'd start running it all up and down the downtown area with this maniacal laugh. They just loved it. These were adults, 30-year-old adults at software companies. But they'd get that out of their system within 5 or 10 minutes, and then they'd realize that the interesting part was rebuilding it.
So causing violence is people's first impulse when they sit down to play a computer game, even one that is explicitly nonviolent. Why do you think that is?
I don't think it really has a lot to do with violence. It's about exploring the dynamics of the system. When they start an earthquake in Sim City and see fires and rubble, they see how how alive and fragile the system is. It builds the illusion in the player's head that the simulation is real.
Is it more than a coincidence that you created The Sims after you'd made a lot of money and got married and had a kid? Did your own life influence the game?
Yeah, partially. You gain a different sense of the value of time when you have a child. You know, they grow up. And either you spend time with them now or you don't, and that time will pass and never come back again. So it tends to make you think more closely about it. And that's really what the game is about, making you consider all those unconscious decisions about what you actually do with your time. As far as money goes, the easiest way to make the characters in the game happy is to buy them new objects. But as you accumulate more and more stuff, more things go wrong and pretty soon these things are just sucking up all your time. In my own life, money is important to me mostly because it buys time. That's the one resource that you really have to spend wisely, that you get no more of.
So buying a lot of stuff doesn't make you happy?
Well, I like buying toys, which turns out to be a rather cheap vice. I do mean toys literally. People come to our house and they say, "Your daughter has so many toys," and I have to explain to them, "No, those are my toys."
2 nov 1999 - 22:00
CNET's GameCenter reports that "...the Sims is the most intriguing game to come around since SimCity." But you already knew that, right? Check out the excellent preview at Gamecenter Sneak Peeks. You can also read the preview by clicking read more below this post.
Inside word: Some might call it SimFamily, but the Sims is the most intriguing game to come around since SimCity. That's no surprise, because it's the brainchild of SimCity creator Will Wright--and it's already one of the most anticipated games of next year.
By Jason Ocampo
(10/29/99)
The Sims is one of the most anticipated games in years, but when you ask people to talk about it, you'll hear a variety of descriptions, as if no one can quite pin it down. It's a virtual dollhouse, one person might say. It's Tamagotchi, says another. No, says someone else, it's SimFamily. You get the idea. Part of the problem is that The Sims is all of these things--and more.
What we do know is that The Sims is the pet project of designer Will Wright, the man who gave millions of people Guiliani-like powers with the spectacular SimCity games. Now Wright has set his sights on a more intimate setting: the inner workings of a home.
We sat down with Wright in Maxis's offices in Walnut Creek, California, in a gleaming building of the sort found in SimCity (in fact, it made a cameo in SimCity 3000). There, we spoke at length about The Sims and watched as he gave us a grand tour of his neighborhood.
Won't You Be My Neighbor?
Wright admits he's fascinated with how people interpret what he likes to refer to as "big piles of numbers" into stories. In essence, he describes games such as SimCity and The Sims as basically mathematical models attempting to simulate something far more complex. Still, people are drawn into these games and give these models personality. He saw it happen with the SimCity games. And he expects to see it with The Sims. "It's more of a structure into which people can weave their own fantasies," Wright said.
The first step is to create a character. Character creation in The Sims is highly customizable, in terms of both personality and character appearance--you can choose from both genders and a variety of races, for starters. There are approximately five parameters, such as neat or outgoing, that influence the mood of the character and his or her interaction with others.
For his demonstration, Wright created a new male character--let's call him the Bachelor--and started the game. The Bachelor has just moved into a small house, and because he's fresh out of school, the house is quite spartan. So your first task is to buy the basic furnishings he needs to survive. Apart from the actual character creation, this is the first moment when The Sims becomes a wide-open canvas upon which your personality and tastes preside. What kind of furniture should you buy for him? What job should he seek? What relationships should he make? It's all up to you at this point.
Wright showed us that this particular character didn't have any cooking skills, so he usually used the phone to order pizza. He's a bit slovenly and his domicile tends to become cluttered. As a result, he has a cleaning lady come by every few days to tidy up. Because pizzas and cleaning ladies aren't cheap, the Bachelor needs to get a job. So Wright had the Bachelor go out to his front lawn, get the paper, and scan the want ads.
There are a variety of jobs in the game, and depending on which one you want, your character may have to study up in order to get it. Perhaps there's a chef position you're interested in, but your character doesn't have the right skills. No problem--just mosey to the bookshelf and pull out that cooking book. After a lot of studying, your character will improve his cooking skills. Armed with his culinary knowledge, he gets the job, securing some much-needed cash flow. As an added bonus, the increased cooking skill vastly decreases the odds of your character starting a catastrophic kitchen fire.
Taking Wright's Bachelor character a bit further, you might look at the house next door and realize he has an attractive female neighbor. So you could throw a backyard barbecue, invite her over, and see what happens. Sex and nudity are handled subtly. As far as the former goes, the most graphic it gets is heavy making out. If a couple wants to have a child, the game will just fast-forward to the end product, the baby. As for nudity, The Sims uses the amusing television technique of pixeling out body parts. So you'll see someone's head floating above a box of changing pixels, with his feet sticking out at the bottom.
Though you can give directions to all of the characters in the game, you don't necessarily control them fully. While you're focused on one character, all the others will go about their business. They won't make any monumental decisions when you're not watching, but they won't stand idly about, either. If you give a command to a character, he or she might not be in the mood to obey it. The character could be tired, hungry, or just depressed, so part of your job is to keep your characters' spirits up and make sure you don't push them too far. In many ways, it's similar to your role as mayor in SimCity, in which you tried to foster an environment that kept your sim citizens happy and content, so they would go out and build a gleaming metropolis for you.
Build It, and They Will Come
In 1993, Wright noticed that some of the biggest software applications on the market were home design packages, which are themselves lightweight CAD programs. Although such programs sold hundreds of thousands of copies, Wright figured out that only a small percentage of users were using the home design programs to actually redesign their houses or landscape their yards. "A lot of people buy these things as toys," he said, explaining that such programs allowed people to play fantasy architect. "That's what kind of interested me."
One of the main projects in The Sims is the design and furnishing of a house. The game will offer some standard houses to choose from; however, you can build a house from scratch or remodel an existing one. Expecting a baby? With a little clicking and dragging, you can add a nursery to the structure.
You can build a new house, or tinker with an existing one; the only limit is the amount of money the characters have. The Sims takes place in a neighborhood of up to ten houses, so you can have up to ten households if you want, with the inhabitants of all these homes interacting with each other.
There's a Trojan Horse in That Monkey
Furniture and equipment usually come in several versions, representing different price ranges. As an example, you can buy an inexpensive but modest television, or you can shell out a small fortune and go for the big-screen monstrosity that's every red-blooded consumer's dream.
Aside from just looking pretty and taking up space in a house, furniture plays an important role in the game. Through furniture, the designers can modify individual behavior, even after the game is finished. Every object, including the ones that Maxis plans to release on the Internet after the game has shipped, will contain all the instructions necessary for the sims to use them. "You can download a tennis court, and all of the sudden they can play tennis," Wright explained. That way, you can extend the life of the game by making objects that broaden the activities and interests of your characters.
Moreover, objects are also the way by which the designers can introduce random elements, such as illness. So if the designers ever want to inject the plague into the game, they might make available a pet monkey for download on the Web site. The monkey would carry a disease that would trigger at some random moment, making the characters in the game sick. Obviously, the designers won't inform gamers that the objects they purchase might have some unintended side effects. Objects can also affect the mental state of your character. If you have a married couple, you'll discover that the husband wants to watch his action movie, but the wife wants to watch her romance movie. The winner will obviously be much more content than the loser.
Take Pictures...Further
As it did with SimCity 3000, Maxis plans to support The Sims extensively through the Web. Besides downloads for the game, one new feature that was added relatively late in development will also take advantage of the Web. The development team decided to add a snapshot feature to the game, allowing you to take in-game photos of what's going on, then crop them to suit your needs. Once that's done, you can add captions to illustrate the image.
What's more, The Sims will feature a one-button publishing feature that will build an HTML page with the photos and captions; and, if players want, it will upload the page to The Sim's official Web site for others to download and enjoy. In this, Wright sees a way for players not only to share their game experiences with others, but to tell a story as well.
"Some people might approach this as a sitcom director would," he said, explaining that players might want to add clever captions or a punch line to describe a situation. Wright himself described one neighborhood he was working on: it was built around the houses and casts of popular sitcoms. He explained that he created the Gilligan's Island cast and built three huts for them. Then he let them loose, and watched as the Mr. and Mrs. Howell Sims spent their time dancing away.
As for Internet support, Wright imagines that future versions of The Sims will have some form of multiplayer capability. In addition, he forecasts that they might even make it so that players could upload their neighborhoods into an online virtual city, in which the inhabitants would interact with inhabitants of other player-created neighborhoods. Maxis has already released a skin tool, which allows players to create their own customized skin and face textures for the game. The team also plans to release an object editor, which would allow players to create their own furniture objects and more.
Our House, in the Middle of Our Street
There's so much to The Sims that it's hard to touch on every element in a single preview. The range of the game's creative possibilities is almost staggering. Certainly, part of the appeal of the game is its almost voyeuristic view of life. Some people will be drawn to The Sims because they can create models of themselves and play the great game of "what if...." Others will view their sims with the same affection they had for the cities they built in SimCity. Whatever the case, there's no doubt that by the time the game ships in February or March, Will Wright will have once again come up with something that's sure to fire up our imaginations.