Maxis enjoyed great success with the original SimCity games, but there was always something impersonal and bureaucratic about virtual urban planning and digital building work.
Spinoff title The Sims took a refreshingly different approach to the original world creation series, holding a magnifying glass to the city’s inhabitants and placing emphasis on humour and personality.
Developed by Will Wright and his team at Maxis in 2000, The Sims gave players the opportunity to play god to a small group of pint-sized beings and had them cater for their every whim.
While this included such basic needs as eating three square meals a day and answering the call of nature, it wasn’t as banal as it might sound.
The eponymous Sims were fascinating beings, oozing personality and representing a giant leap for artificial intelligence in PC gaming at the turn of the millennium.
There was rarely a dull moment watching your characters’ lives unfold and seeing them encounter the same trials and tribulations that we face every day, plus hearing them babble away in their native tongue of Simlish was always endearing.
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