News

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.

The Sims

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 Sims The Sims The Sims

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.

The Sims The Sims The Sims

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.

The Sims The Sims The Sims

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.

The Sims The Sims The Sims

"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.

29 Oct 1999 - 23:00

Sim Talk has been upgraded to Chatter Box. Check out our tools section for this latest conversation toy. New voices included!

Remember to right click and choose save here.

22 Oct 1999 - 23:00

Check it out at www.game-interviews.com, or click read more to read the interview on our website.


Roxana Wolosenko, a Designer of The Sims at Maxis/EA

You've been mayor, you've built towers, driven copters and who knows what else but have you ever designed a family? The Sims makes that possible. From the creator of Sim City comes what looks to be another massive hit for EA. You can do everything from designing your house to throwing parties and holding a job. What to know more? Without further delay here's our long awaited interview with Roxana Wolosenko!

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, what your role is on The Sims, and what the team's ultimate goal for this project is?
Roxana Wolosenko: My name is Roxana Wolosenko and I've worked at Maxis/EA for 7 years. I am one of the designers on The Sims. The team's ultimate goal is to create a game that can stand proudly on its own but has an open design that allows it to be transformed by upcoming additions from Maxis as well as by new content from players.

For those unfamiliar with The Sims could you give us a brief synopsis of the premise?
RW: The Sims is a simulation of people in their most familiar environment, their home. The Sims have basic "human" needs and desires: hunger, energy, fun, social, etc. You first have to figure out how to get them to satisfy all their needs so that they stay in a good mood. When you master that, you start to have a little time left over in the day. Then you have to choose whether you want them to pursue money (get a job, work on getting promoted) or develop social relationships (friends and romance) by having neighbors come over for dinner or parties. Or balance the two which, as we all know, is quite challenging.

What do you think the attraction is to The Sims? Is it the control, the voyeurism, or something else entirely?
RW: I think that people are fascinated by the idea of watching other people and being able to control them, trip them up and torment them. What's even more fun is modeling your own household, complete with characters that look and possibly act like you and then trying to make certain social situations happen. The magic is in the unexpected that happens all the time in The Sims.

The AI is obviously the one of the most important aspects in a game like this. What research has been done to ensure that The Sims will react as humans would?
RW: Humans are incredibly complex and so we can really only attempt to simulate a tiny fraction of real emotion. The Sims are driven by a complex interplay of their eight needs: Hunger, Hygiene, Bladder, Energy, Social, Fun, Comfort, Room (environment) and five personality traits: Nice, Active, Neat, Playful and Outgoing. We read a lot about the different theories of how people perceive the world and what really motivates them and then we used our own personal experience of being human in deciding how to apply these theories.

The Sims seems to have an incredible amount of depth. Can you explain the game's interface and how you've made it easy for players to find out where they stand in relation to friends and family, etc.?
RW: We've iterated the interface more times than we'd like to admit because it is so crucial to the gameplay experience. There's so much information that is critical in the game but we have tried to design it so that the information is delivered in layers. When you need the info, you can easily get it but it's not in your face all the time.

Life is often unpredictable; what random events have been incorporated into The Sims?
RW: Stuff breaks, events happen at work, calls with good and bad news come in. And there are other surprises too.

I don't think anyone expects The Sims will simulate all aspects of life (even just at home) so what have you chosen not to simulate for gameplay reasons or otherwise?
RW: Sex. Birth. Teenagers. Growing Old. Dirty clothes. Dustbunnies. Grocery shopping. Driving. Seasons. Sickness. Roaches. Glass ceilings. Religion. To name a few.

Can you tell us how the architectural aspect has been incorporated into The Sims? What can and can't you build (as in the number of floors, items such as doors, columns, etc.)?
RW: You can build a one or two story house. Beyond that it's up to you. You have at your disposal walls and wall coverings, doors, windows, columns, staircases, fireplaces, pool tools and outdoor landscaping plants. There are tools for players (on the Web now!) that allow them to create their own floor and wall patterns and even some of their own furniture.

18 Oct 1999 - 23:00

Except for the final and ship dates, few dates inspire as much awe and terror as a product's Alpha date. The Sims met its Alpha date with flying colors and is steaming towards final! What is "Alpha"? Alpha means all features are in the game and the game just needs to be fully tuned and tested. Expect to see The Sims on store shelves in early 2000. To learn more about game development visit Gamasutra.

13 Oct 1999 - 23:00

Want to hear what a conversation between two Sims will sound like? We bet you do. Just download this self extracting file, double click it to install, open the SimTalk folder and double click the SimTalk shortcut to start the toy. Then click the button to hear the Sims talk!

Download SimTalk (1.6 megs)

12 Oct 1999 - 23:00

That's right. He used to make paintings. Now he tests the painting importer code for the HomeMaster tool for The Sims game while consuming mass quantities of Oreos.
Shane E. Downing gets an exclusive look into the reclusive world of an assistant producer driven mad by years of video game testing.

Click here to read the interview with Sean Baity.

7 Oct 1999 - 23:00

Strategy Gaming posted an Interview with Luc Barthelet, general manager of Maxis.
Read the interview with Luc on Strategy Gaming, or click read more below this post to read it here!


The Sims:
From Will Wright, the creator of SimCity™, comes a new strategy game that really hits close to home. You are in charge of a neighborhood of Sims and it is up to you to show them that they're livin' in your world now! Force them into a life of crime or help them live life in the fast lane. Build them a sprawling mansion or dump them into a dilapidated shack. Let them party like swinging singles or fall in love, get married and raise a family. They can live out your wildest dreams or experience your worst nightmares. It is up to you to decide... their fate is in your hands.

Interviewer: Anthony Micari
Luc Barthelet, the General Manager of Maxis

1. Maxis' line of Sim games have been known for their deep strategic gameplay combined with easy to use interfaces. How will The Sims go about providing a similar experience?
The Sims uses an object oriented interface. For most of the actions, the user clicks on objects like the Fridge or the TV and select an action from a pie menu. The other overall interface is a mode selection between "Build", "Buy" and "Live". I think this is the best UI to date for Maxis. As for the depth of the simulation, I like to think that we re building sandboxes, and that we mostly work on defining the physical properties of sand. The more interesting the properties, the longer the users will play. I think we have some real innovation in this game and I will describe some of them as I answer some of the questions below.

2. "Life" simulation games in the past, such as Dogz, Catz, and Creatures, have been viewed by many as mere novelties. How will The Sims elevate itself above that status, and provide a unique experience that will have gamers coming back for more?
The Sims is about people and relationships. I learned through the development of this game that when you create an environment with representations of human beings, and make those humans behave in a familiar fashion, that the user cannot help but create a story in his head to explain their behavior. I am convinced that people are more interesting that domestic animals.

3. The history of artificial intelligence has been a rocky one. Some games have been criticized for their lack thereof, while others have provided solid AI that really challenges players. The Sims, however, is trying to simulate the emotions of humans, something that is new to games. Has this been a great challenge for the development team?
One problem we had for a while was that our characters were too smart. They knew exactly what was best for them, and anything the user would do would lead to a negative impact. It took us a while to make the characters a bit dumber, but in a way that would be fun.

4. How much input will the player have in determining the events of the game? Will we be able to tell the characters what to eat? When to sleep, perhaps? Or does one just make bigger decisions and see how they turn out?
The user can choose among many options to feed its sims. Most of them are accessed by clicking on the fridge, but you can also order Pizza by selecting it from the menu on the phone.

5. What I have been wondering about the most is how the player goes about winning the game? Is there an end? Or do you just go on playing similar to SimCity 3000?
The Sims is like SimCity, you can play it forever.

6. Maxis' past titles have been appropriate for all ages. Will The Sims be the same? Or is there material that is recommended for older players?
It is for all ages.

7. This game has been in the works for quite awhile. As it nears completion, what has been the greatest challenge?
They were so many I have a hard time selecting which one. Probably turning the game from a set of interesting tools into a cohesive gameplay experience.

Thank you taking the time to answer these questions for our site. Your generosity is much appreciated.

29 Sep 1999 - 23:00

By B.S. Battle.
Walnut Creek (SimCity newswire) - The Sim City Central Intelligence Agency said Wednesday it had set up a fashion company headed by a computer-game artist to help speed up its development of state-of-the-art disguises.
The venture capital company, called Qool Qlothes, takes its name from "Q," the Ian Fleming-created master gadgeteer who supplied the fictional James Bond with lethal clothing and cars.
The company was formed to ensure the SC-CIA a pipeline to the best video game art talent to solve the most pressing fashion problems, said William Wallow, the agency's chief spokesman.
Qool Qlothes will invest in start-ups or partner with companies like MAXIS to help solve the spy agency's suit and skirt processing needs, said Gilman Gaggula, the 39-year-old chief executive officer of the new company. "Our first job is to find out what cool skins exist today in The Sims," he said in a telephone interview. "We're going to create a baseline of today's best character skins."
He said the company aimed to solve SC-CIA problems in working with agents that really don't know how to dress themselves. Along the lines of a normal private sector video game model, this would create "shoes-off value" for those working with Qool Qlothes, who could then take attitudes back to market.
"Most of our agents just don't know how to dress cool or even naturally.", says Gaggula. "But after we sat them in front of The Sims game for a couple hours, and let them see the new skins and cars they could use, they, like, freaked out." Maxis has agreed to release a preview of some of the newest, secret in-game character skins created by Eric Chin and some of the cars The Sims will be able to take to work.

Available here: Download Graphics Pack 2

15 Sep 1999 - 23:00

By Tex Chure.
With headphones cocked on either ear and Kraftwerk blaring in the background, Sean Baity was in good company Tuesday.
The SimShow preparedness director and officials from all three groups that serve The Sims jostled last-minute preparations before powerful SimsSkinsTutorial.zip barrels through the internet early next week.
"We're hoping for the best tutorial for making skins and preparing for upload," spokesman Jeff Charvat said. The SimWatch news letter serves 300 customers directly in Berkeley, Georgetown and various other counties in 38 countries through website cooperatives. In addition, the news will be posted on all available message boards.
"People need to understand that after the tutorial, there will be a lot of skins on the sites," assistant producer Sean Baity said. "Don't take it for granted that the lines are not hot just because you think the power is off...Oh wait a minute....I mean that it is a step by step tutorial with lots of pictures in HTML format."
People who want to make skins but are mystified by the process should download the tutorial and follow the examples. Its as simple as downloading the zip file and extracting it to a directory.
"You just point and double click on the TheSims Skin Tutorial.htm file and it just opens," said one astounded tester. "Its like...SO easy."

Available here: Download Sim Skins Tutorial

2 Sep 1999 - 23:00

This just in......renegade French programmer Franck "Animal" Le Ouay has just completed a much awaited update to HomeMaster........new code allows users to create paintings out of JPG and BMP files......see included readme for further details.....Download HomeMaster DX5000

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