The Sims, or the game an EA executive kept trying to kill
In October 1991, Will Wright watched his house burn. The Oakland Hills firestorm took nearly three thousand homes in a single afternoon, Wright’s among them. What followed was, for Wright, an unexpected experiment in consumer psychology: which objects do you replace first, how do you rebuild a life, what does a home actually mean to the people inside it. He carried those questions back to Maxis, his studio in Walnut Creek, and began building what he called a “virtual dollhouse.”
Maxis had spent the 1980s and early 1990s letting players redesign cities (SimCity, 1989), ant colonies (SimAnt, 1991), and ecosystems. Wright’s new idea was smaller in scale and stranger in design: a simulation not of systems but of people. The player’s job was to move simulated residents — the Sims — efficiently through a house, keeping their needs met: hunger, hygiene, fun, social contact, sleep. The game had no win state and no end. It just kept running, like a Tuesday.
Electronic Arts, which had acquired Maxis in 1997, did not know what to make of it. One executive repeatedly asked “How many times do I have to kill this game before it will die?” — a fair question, given that focus groups in 1993 had greeted the concept with indifference, and Wright had been developing the project quietly in the background for nearly seven years. EA pushed for scores and objectives, for something they could put in a category on a shelf.
Then came E3 in June 1999. A single demo machine on EA’s show floor drew a line that stretched for most of the day. Attendees were standing in that line not to shoot things or race things or manage civilizations, but to rearrange furniture and watch a pixelated person eat breakfast. The response was unsettling enough that EA let the project ship.
The Sims launched February 4, 2000, and sold 1.77 million copies in its first year — the best-selling computer game in America. By 2002 it had surpassed Myst as the highest-selling PC title in history. Nearly 60 percent of its players were women, at a time when the games industry treated female audiences as an afterthought. The game had not targeted them deliberately; designers Roxy Wolosenko and Claire Curtin had simply insisted that the Sims themselves — not the architecture — be the emotional center of the game, and that turned out to matter to an audience no one had been counting.
The Simlish spoken by those Sims — that burbling non-language that somehow sounds exactly like genuine conversation — was the result of its own failed experiments. Voice actor Stephen Kearin first tried recording dialogue in Navajo, then Ukrainian, then Cherokee. None of it felt right. He eventually improvised a gibberish technique borrowed from improv theater, and the result became one of the most recognizable invented languages in popular culture.
The Sims entered MoMA’s collection in 2012 and the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2016. The franchise has sold over 200 million copies and was generating approximately $420 million annually for EA by 2023 — from a concept the same company had tried to cancel for most of a decade.
The game that started with a fire turned out to have the largest latent audience in gaming waiting for it. They just hadn’t been counted yet.
Sources
- The Sims — Wikipedia — release date, development timeline, Wright’s Oakland fire inspiration, sales milestones, MoMA and Hall of Fame induction.
- The Oral History of ‘The Sims’ — Vice — EA executive quote, Simlish creation via Kearin’s improv experiments, E3 1999 demo, designers Wolosenko and Curtin.
- The Sims Turned Mere Mortals Into Gods — Smithsonian Magazine — female playerbase, EA skepticism, lifetime franchise sales and annual revenue.