What's What! Video Game Facts (51/365)

The Sims is the undoubted precursor of the genre of social simulation in video games, created by video game designer Will Wright and published by Electronic Arts in 2000, has sold nearly 200 million copies worldwide, and it is one of the best-selling video games series of all time.

Actually Wright was not new to the video game industry when The Sims was released, because in the decade of the '80s the SimCity franchise had already started, which by the year 2000 was already in its third installment.

The life simulation game introduces the player into a huge sandbox and help him to creates virtual people called "Sims" and places them in houses and helps direct their moods and satisfy their desires. Players can either place their Sims in pre-constructed homes or build them themselves. The Sims takes you to explore your creativity with options that range from being able to personalize your character to pleasure, decorating your house in the way that suits you and even having pets, becoming popular, fulfilling your life goals, and getting married.

Wright an inveterate fan of architecture and sociology, starting from there the development of SimCity whose main goal is to create huge and picturesque cities. However, after some time the designer believed that something more specific was needed a software in which users could build their own walls, place them at their leisure, design their own homes, paint the walls, select floors and more, after losing his home during the Oakland firestorm of 1991 and subsequently rebuilding his house and replacing his other possessions made him think about adapting that life experience into a game.

This program included human beings that functioned only as a kind of filler in the game to give it much more realism, using ideas from the 1977 architecture and urban design book A Pattern Language, American psychologist Abraham Maslow's 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation and his hierarchy of needs, and Charles Hampden-Turner's Maps of the Mind to develop a model for the game's artificial intelligence to grant them their own personality. It was then that Wright thought that these beings were something special, something that had much more potential than just serving as a decoration in the back garden. The Sims were born.