Latest news with #TheSims1
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Wait! The Sims is a lot bleaker than I remember
When I was growing up, the genre-defining dollhouse sim The Sims was the ultimate escape. I'd build dream homes, cultivate a neighbourhood of weird and wonderful friends and live out a fantasy adult life. So when EA surprise-dropped a rerelease of The Sims 1 and 2 last weekend to celebrate the series' 25th anniversary, with all expansions included (my nine-year-old self's dream) naturally I was compelled to return to my happy place, revisiting my 10-hour pyjama-clad marathon sessions micromanaging the lives of the Newbies, Roomies, and the Goths, and occasionally removing their pool ladders when they were taking a little swim, and only taking a necessary pause for mum's roast dinner. While the familiar chaos of breezy music, tragic pool accidents, and my own personal french maid delivered a powerful dose of nostalgia, there is something else lurking beneath this game's quirky and cheerful exterior, something that I wasn't conscious of when I was a kid. To my surprise, the game now feels less like a chance to live out your dream life, and more like a struggle simulator. (I also forgot how much time my Sims spent playing chess.) Like a Lynchian picket-fence town, I realised, there's a darkness lurking under suburban sheen. The original Sims games were more dystopian than today's perky, brightly coloured The Sims 4. The Sims 1 instead offers a desaturated daily grind. The contrast isn't just the aesthetic – 20 years ago, Sims had no dreams or ambitions. Your virtual families worked long hours for expensive lives, where death – and some of the most gut-wrenching music in game history – lurked behind even mundane everyday tasks. Forget personality, aspirations and tastes. The Sims 1 is a capitalist nightmare where survival trumps self-actualisation. I forgot how much time the original Sims actually spend working. They do boring, dull jobs for little pay, out of your sight – making the simple message that you get when they are promoted (or passed over) strangely impactful. Put that meagre wage packet towards the cheapest oven on offer, and it'll probably catch fire and kill you. This is a game that punishes you for being poor. It means that the rich, like the iconic Goth family, in their still-stunning graveyard-edged stone mansion stay, rich – while the poor stay poor. Social mobility in The Sims 1, I learned, is near impossible. And having a social life? Forget it, at least when you're on the bottom rung of your random career ladder. There's simply no time to make friends, something I didn't remember from my days as a Sims-obsessed tween. I now realise that my neighbourhood's messy EastEnders-level entanglements were largely scripted in my head. Instead, you must chip away at ++ and – – relationship scores until you can finally, anticlimactically 'Play in bed,' thanks to the Livin' it Up expansion pack that provided the world's most basic sex education to a generation of 11-year-olds. There's nothing dark about that expansion's heart-shaped bed. I still want it in real life. Even these moments with the most meaningful loves of my Sims' lives seemed to offer them nothing – they were transactional, serving nothing more than to unlock new interactions. They are performing for my enjoyment, not theirs. Friendship is also bleakly transactional here: you need a certain number of them to climb the ranks at work. Stay lonely, and you'll stay poor, and probably die from having a cheap, spontaneously combusting microwave. It's an especially sad existence for single Sims who live alone. Exhausted from work, if you don't find time to call your friends on the phone for hours – or they decline to come over – your relationships decay rapidly. Like Black Mirror's award-winning Nosedive episode, losing social credibility quickly sees things spiral quickly downhill for your Sims. And nothing flips a millennial's stomach as quick as the music that heralds a terrifying, sudden burglary. It's still horrifying 25 years later, so just hope that you had the foresight to spend your meagre savings on a burglar alarm. That's before we even get into visits from the Grim Reaper, and creepy prank calls. These unexpected callers frighten me just as much now as they did then. Perhaps my new darker perspective on the game comes from the world we live in now. I'm finally living my fantasy adult life – I just didn't realise it would be less lounging in gothic-mansion dream homes, and more feeling overworked, underpaid and on the verge of a spiralling breakdown. In 2025, an era of economic anxiety and burnout, the grind of The Sims feels brutal. For all its existential dread, The Sims 1 is still an escape. Sure, it presents a kind of capitalist nightmare. But, it is a capitalist nightmare you can control. No matter how hard the daily slog got, you can always type in a cheat code and wipe away financial stress with a click – the ultimate fantasy. It's also weirdly accurate: just like in real life, external advantages (and cheating the system) are way more likely to lead to success than grinding away and following the rules. Yes, The Sims 1 was and remains a dystopian suburban treadmill, but it also makes room for humour. It's a world where chaos is funny, failure is temporary, and the worst tragedies could be undone with the click of a mouse. Sign in to access your portfolio
The Guardian
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Wait! The Sims is a lot bleaker than I remember
When I was growing up, the genre-defining dollhouse sim The Sims was the ultimate escape. I'd build dream homes, cultivate a neighbourhood of weird and wonderful friends and live out a fantasy adult life. So when EA surprise-dropped a rerelease of The Sims 1 and 2 last weekend to celebrate the series' 25th anniversary, with all expansions included (my nine-year-old self's dream) naturally I was compelled to return to my happy place, revisiting my 10-hour pyjama-clad marathon sessions micromanaging the lives of the Newbies, Roomies, and the Goths, and occasionally removing their pool ladders when they were taking a little swim, and only taking a necessary pause for mum's roast dinner. While the familiar chaos of breezy music, tragic pool accidents, and my own personal french maid delivered a powerful dose of nostalgia, there is something else lurking beneath this game's quirky and cheerful exterior, something that I wasn't conscious of when I was a kid. To my surprise, the game now feels less like a chance to live out your dream life, and more like a struggle simulator. (I also forgot how much time my Sims spent playing chess.) Like a Lynchian picket-fence town, I realised, there's a darkness lurking under suburban sheen. The original Sims games were more dystopian than today's perky, brightly coloured The Sims 4. The Sims 1 instead offers a desaturated daily grind. The contrast isn't just the aesthetic – 20 years ago, Sims had no dreams or ambitions. Your virtual families worked long hours for expensive lives, where death – and some of the most gut-wrenching music in game history – lurked behind even mundane everyday tasks. Forget personality, aspirations and tastes. The Sims 1 is a capitalist nightmare where survival trumps self-actualisation. I forgot how much time the original Sims actually spend working. They do boring, dull jobs for little pay, out of your sight – making the simple message that you get when they are promoted (or passed over) strangely impactful. Put that meagre wage packet towards the cheapest oven on offer, and it'll probably catch fire and kill you. This is a game that punishes you for being poor. It means that the rich, like the iconic Goth family, in their still-stunning graveyard-edged stone mansion stay, rich – while the poor stay poor. Social mobility in The Sims 1, I learned, is near impossible. And having a social life? Forget it, at least when you're on the bottom rung of your random career ladder. There's simply no time to make friends, something I didn't remember from my days as a Sims-obsessed tween. I now realise that my neighbourhood's messy EastEnders-level entanglements were largely scripted in my head. Instead, you must chip away at ++ and – – relationship scores until you can finally, anticlimactically 'Play in bed,' thanks to the Livin' it Up expansion pack that provided the world's most basic sex education to a generation of 11-year-olds. There's nothing dark about that expansion's heart-shaped bed. I still want it in real life. Even these moments with the most meaningful loves of my Sims' lives seemed to offer them nothing – they were transactional, serving nothing more than to unlock new interactions. They are performing for my enjoyment, not theirs. Friendship is also bleakly transactional here: you need a certain number of them to climb the ranks at work. Stay lonely, and you'll stay poor, and probably die from having a cheap, spontaneously combusting microwave. It's an especially sad existence for single Sims who live alone. Exhausted from work, if you don't find time to call your friends on the phone for hours – or they decline to come over – your relationships decay rapidly. Like Black Mirror's award-winning Nosedive episode, losing social credibility quickly sees things spiral quickly downhill for your Sims. And nothing flips a millennial's stomach as quick as the music that heralds a terrifying, sudden burglary. It's still horrifying 25 years later, so just hope that you had the foresight to spend your meagre savings on a burglar alarm. That's before we even get into visits from the Grim Reaper, and creepy prank calls. These unexpected callers frighten me just as much now as they did then. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion Perhaps my new darker perspective on the game comes from the world we live in now. I'm finally living my fantasy adult life – I just didn't realise it would be less lounging in gothic-mansion dream homes, and more feeling overworked, underpaid and on the verge of a spiralling breakdown. In 2025, an era of economic anxiety and burnout, the grind of The Sims feels brutal. For all its existential dread, The Sims 1 is still an escape. Sure, it presents a kind of capitalist nightmare. But, it is a capitalist nightmare you can control. No matter how hard the daily slog got, you can always type in a cheat code and wipe away financial stress with a click – the ultimate fantasy. It's also weirdly accurate: just like in real life, external advantages (and cheating the system) are way more likely to lead to success than grinding away and following the rules. Yes, The Sims 1 was and remains a dystopian suburban treadmill, but it also makes room for humour. It's a world where chaos is funny, failure is temporary, and the worst tragedies could be undone with the click of a mouse.
Yahoo
04-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Remember 'The Sims'? Brains Behind Viral Game Spill Secrets on the Memorable Music — and How 'Simlish' Came About (Exclusive)
Since the first game in The Sims franchise was released in February 2000, there have been three new installments, dozens of expansion packs, a few spinoff titles and millions of players indulging in the game at various stages of its lifespan. The video game has become a staple for many, even those who wouldn't consider themselves 'gamers,' building their own characters in-game and either subjecting them to a ladder-less pool or creating a messy love triangle. All of the drama that unfolds in an individual's save file is done entirely in Simlish, the game's own made-up language. Though Simlish is made up of plenty of recognizable phrases — 'sul sul' and 'dag dag' used interchangeably as 'hello' or 'goodbye,' 'lurve' for 'love' and many other things romance-related, and 'nooboo' for 'baby' — Simlish does not have a one-to-one translation. In fact, most of the dialogue in the game is completely ad-libbed. 'We quickly realized that English or any other real language would get super repetitive very quickly, and that led us to go, 'Okay, how else can we show the communication?' ' Chief Sound Designer Robi Kauker recounts exclusively to PEOPLE. 'Because really at that time, what they were saying didn't matter — it was how they were saying it.' The development team for The Sims 1 tried a variety of different non-language sounds to play in place of dialogue in-game. 'We tried all sorts of silly things. We tried music instruments. We tried a silly kind of Charlie Brown, 'Wah wah wah,' type ideas,' Kauker says. Ultimately, it was a week-long recording session with some local improv actors that produced the sounds Sims players know and love today. The sounds improved in the recording booth were then edited to fit the game's needs, with much of the original recordings becoming unrecognizable. But it's also where some of the game's best-recognized phrases originated. 'They were amazing giving us pieces of words and things that we could stitch together … dag dag and sul sul came from those [sessions] — neither of which were actually really said as dag dag and sul sul,' Kauker says. 'It was all about the emotional intent. That was really the goal.' As the Sims celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, it does so with a long roster of musical collaborations under its belt. Artists like Aly & AJ, Natasha Bedingfield, Paramore, My Chemical Romance, 5 Seconds of Summer, Soulja Boy, Rita Ora, Lizzo and Carly Rae Jepsen (just to name a few) have covered their own songs in Simlish for the franchise's various games. For many of these collaborations, the musical artists expressed an interest in contributing to the game. Related: Margot Robbie Is Making a Sims Movie After Producing Record-Breaking Barbie (Reports) '[EA's] worldwide music team is great at having all these connections and they'll be talking to a band about being in Madden or EAFC, and the band wants to talk to them about being in The Sims,' Kaurker recounts. 'That's where we're at our happiest. We have so many players who have grown up with us who want to be a part of our world.' Jackie Gratz, the games' voice director, works closely with the musical artists to help them prepare their songs for a Simlish translation. She is, as Kauker says, the closest thing the developer has to an English-to-Simlish dictionary. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. 'It's been interesting to see how [the process has] evolved over the years because now it's almost the opposite of what happened in The Sims 1, where [now] we train the actors and we really work with the actors so that the performance they're giving is filled with the emotion and using the words to emote with,' Gratz says. When an artist expresses interest in covering their song for The Sims, Gratz will listen through the song and then create a draft of Simlish lyrics for the artist to riff off of. Her main goal is trying to maintain the emotion and lyrical style of the track more than creating a direct translation — and the artists are often encouraged to improv once in the studio. 'When I get the English lyrics I really like to preserve the lyrical style. So I'm absorbing the Simlish into the vibe that the lyrics already have,' she explains. 'I pick out the kind of lyrical techniques that are being used — so rhyming, alliteration, repetition, things like that — and then I try to preserve those.' Most of the Simlish lyric writing is done 'on the fly,' Gratz says, singing along to the made-up words as she writes to ensure it won't be too difficult for the artist to record. She says the biggest challenge is working with K-pop or J-pop artists, as she's often translating the original lyrics to English before doing the Simlish translation. Related: Catherine O'Hara Teases Her The Last of Us Character Has 'Odd Relationship with' Pedro Pascal's Joel 'That's when I feel like my job is the weirdest, where I'm literally taking lyrics that are in a language I do not understand, and I'm translating them into another language that I'm making up,' she laughs. 'We give them free rein to change the words if they need to, especially if it helps them with the singing part of it.' 'This kind of flexibility allows it to always be about the emotion without the players going and hearing the same thing over and over again,' Kauker adds. A personal favorite of Kauker's was The Last Dinner Party's Simlish cover of their song 'Nothing Matters.' He admits he took eight months tracking the band down 'because I love that band so much.' 'It's such a great song already — [it's] a brilliant song,' Kauker says. 'To hear it in The Sims, you're like, wow, nothing's really lost in it, but it became more open and gave us a lot of range. It's one of those brilliant things.' Read the original article on People
Buzz Feed
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
I Made A Celebrity "Sims" Generator, And The Results Are Genuinely Good — You Can Make Your Own, Too
Hold onto your hootas 🎩, because The Sims 1 and 2 will be re-released for PC to celebrate the game's 25-year anniversary and this is the best news for me personally, in well, a loooooooong time. So to celebrate this momentous event, let's transform some celebrities into their Sims persona. Our BuzzFeed Celebrity Sim Generator below will let you transform any star into a classic Sims 1 or Sims 2 character — pixelated nostalgia and all. Feel free to put them in some weird and wacky scenes. Will Timothée Chalamet strut around in low-res glory? Can Jennifer Coolidge survive a Sims 1 pool with no ladders? There's only one way to find out.... Share your creations below and add a heart on all your favorites! ❤️
