Even if you don’t play The Sims, you almost certainly know someone who does. The series is one of the most popular in video games, but it’s often overlooked by huge swaths of the gaming audience (which surely has nothing to do with the series’ audience being around 60 percent women). Yet even those who ignore The Sims have felt its influence on gaming, as it popularized the life sim genre that was relatively unknown at the time, but dominates the indie scene in particular today.
The Sims kicked the massively popular series off on February 4, 2000. For all its good-natured goofiness, the game that’s been a comfort to so many players over the years grew out of tragedy. In 1991, the Oakland-Berkeley Firestorm ripped through California’s Bay Area, burning homes along its path. One of those homes belonged to Will Wright, creator of SimCity, and later The Sims.
