THE SIMS IS BACK (THE ORIGINAL ONE)
One night in early 2002, I dreamt that I was controlling the mind of a bald, bearded man, making him climb up and down stairs in a little suburban house. He went about his day, doing normal, mundane things. He could feel that someone else was in charge of his movements.
The next day, I went over to the house of my neighbour who was moving away. She was leaving behind a bunch of her things, and decided to give some of them to me. Two of those items reset the trajectory of my entire personality.
One of those items was the novel Anne of Green Gables.
The other was a copy of The Sims.
Imagine my bewildered fascination when I loaded this game up on our Windows 2000 machine and saw that I was...controlling a bald, bearded man as he went about his day doing mundane things.
I had no idea what to make of my apparently prophetic dream. I still don't, really. But some part of it felt like kismet. That day began a lifetime of a genial love of the Sims and all the joy that Will Wright's dollhouse chaos brought me.
Between Jerry Martin's stellar soundtrack (that is still on my Spotify playlist, and which I've been attempting to learn on piano) and the game devs' Simliciously morbid humour colouring every element, I was obsessed.
I've missed the original games desperately since they became obsolete on newer machines. 80% of the reason I got the PC I do now was so that I could install all the rigging needed to play Sims 2 with all its expansions and mods. But the Sims 1? That's been lost to me since 2009.
And now they're bringing it back!!
EA is rereleasing Sims 1 and Sims 2 (the best of the lot) for Windows 10/11 later today, and I couldn't be more thrilled. (They probably finally realised that they're missing out capitalising on Sims 2's giant, still-active fanbase.)
They've even got a whole website to celebrate The Sims' 25th anniversary, and it's bringing us right back to 2000 in all its Comic Sans glory.
(One of my great childhood sadnesses was that I couldn't afford the Sims Makin' Magic expansion pack. You bet that's the first neighbourhood I'll be playing in today.)
EA may have gotten many things terribly wrong with their marketing for Sims 3 and Sims 4, what with ripping off the community with expensive broken releases and overpriced expansion packs. But now, finally, they're doing something (W)right.