User:Simsilikesims/The $ims

The $ims is a video game series by EA games which stands for Extra money paid by you for A way for us to make way more money than our company could ever need.

The Beginning

It all started with a house fire. The man whose family home caught on fire was Will Wright. The aftermath of the fire got him thinking: Exactly what items do people really need in their home to actually live and meet all their needs? And what exactly should those needs be? How should the game characters react to their needs being met or not met?

So eventually Will Wright took his ideas to a very small video game development studio called Maxis. It was so small, that the idea of creating a game that did not require winning (unlike everything else that was previously released) was acceptable. There were no "levels" to beat, and very few achievements. There were just pixel people (known as Sims), and homes for them to furnish and live in.

Around Y2K, the year that the world was originally scheduled to end but the apocalypse appointment was cancelled, a game titled The Sims was released. And so the very first life-simulation game was born.

This was not the end of the world, but the beginning of the end.

Gameplay

Needs

It was decided that the needs of the characters of this original game should be Hunger, Sleep, Hygiene, Comfort, Fun, and Room. This would be depicted as a visual scale. It was decided the game characters should react to well met needs by happily going about their business normally, and by breaking the 4th wall and complaining to the player when needs were not being met, and then refusing to do anything useful that might meet those needs in the long-term like, say, earning money or keeping their place neat and insect-free. Even when the carpool was right there outside their door honking for an hour before leaving. The most critical needs were hunger and sleep: As with humans, lack of sleep causes the pixel people to collapse from exhaustion and lay there for some time before waking. Also, as with humans (but in only 5 days of their pixellated lives/about 3 hours of our lives) hunger killed Sims of starvation if not fed in time.

Life Stages

The game had 3 life stages: Infant, child, and adult.

Hidden Features

• Cheat codes: Cheating in The Sims, since it was designed from the beginning as an off-line, single player game, was encouraged rather than discouraged. One of the most common cheats used was to add Simoleons to your pixel people's household funds. Another commonly used cheat maxed your pixel peoples' moods without you having to make your pixel people take the specific individual actions that would improve all of their moods.
• Online website gifts:
• Official helper programs: Helper programs became available as the game developed. The first programs helped players create their own custom

Sounds great, right? Well, that wasn't all: Here's where the real fun begins.

Fan created content

Custom content

• Fan websites and sharing
• New walls and floors
• New Sims heads and faces
• New Sims bodies and uniforms
• New furniture, appliances, electronics and decorations
• New themes for all of the above (Grim Sims)
• Mailing lists
• Shared lots
• Shared screenshots

Object mods

• Functional encyclopedia set
• Readable Bible with special functions
• Worshippable items
• Fruit bowl override from wax fruit bowl to edible fruit bowl.
• Toilet bush

Helper programs

• The Sims File Maid
• InTeenimator
• Paladin's Place

Paid fan sites

• Mall of the Sims
• SimFreaks
• Donation gifts
• The re-gifters
• More sites started charging as internet bandwidth traffic prices increased.
• Ads everywhere, the million dollar ad banner page
• Sponsorship and referral circles

Expansion Packs

After seeing the wealth of content that fans had created themselves for the game, and seeing that players were willing to pay for additional content, something happened. The developers became envious, and Sims slowly began its transition into The $ims. The first expansion pack, adding additional paid content for an existing game, (now known as DLC), was released.

Stuff Packs

• Branded content (hamburgers, etc)

Conclusion

• To be continued....