Top 50 Video Games: Number 7

#7: The Sims
System: PC
Publisher: Maxis
Released: 2000
Players: 1

This is what a party looks like in The Sims.

Will Wright has made his fortune as a game designer by taking things that sound mundane and making them into fun games. He made his mark on the industry with Simcity back in 1989. Playing mayor and managing the growth of a city sounds more like a job than a game, but Simcity was very entertaining. It spawned a whole series of 'sim' games - Sim Earth, Sim Ant, Sim Tower among others. The game he will be most remembered for, however, is The Sims. The Sims is the best selling PC game of all time, attracting people in all walks of life. It has a universal attraction because it's something everyone is familiar with and everyone has their own take on: daily life.

The Sims puts you in control of the lives of little people called sims. You build and furnish their homes and watch over their lives, tending to their needs and overseeing their development. They get hungry, tired, happy and sad and so on. They get jobs where they advance and bring home bigger and bigger paychecks which are used to improve the house they live in. They form relationships, find love and lose it, make friends and lose them. The game can be intensely micromanaged, hands-off, or something in between. While the game has been criticized by many so-called hardcore gamers as being a silly, simple piece of fluff, the truth is that there is plenty of challenge to be had if that's how you want to play the game. Trying to advance your sims to the top of their career ladder is certainly not easy, and managing a full house of 8 people is a challenge if I've ever seen one. You can set goals for yourself, or you can play the game with the goal of torturing and killing your neighbors (nothing in the game encourages this, but it is possible for the sadistic ones out there.) Quite simply, The Sims is what you make of it.

This is the aftermath of a party in The Sims. Art imitates life.

A place where the game really scored a knockout was in the support it got from its online community. Maxis made modding tools readily available, and people embraced them in a big way. The amount of user made skins, outfits, decorations and household objects available online is staggering. People would upload their screenshots online and create photo albums of their sims' lives. The game's enormous popularity (and sales figures) inspired Maxis to release, holy shit, seven expansion packs. Inevitably a sequel had to come along, and The Sims 2 delivered the goods.

The Sims 2 offered a much needed graphical upgrade to the aging Sims game engine. Largely, Sims 2 is more of the same with much prettier graphics, not that it's a bad thing. There are a few major changes this time around, the biggest of which is that your sims age realistically now. Your sims now go from infant to toddler, child, teen, adult, and they eventually die of old age. Sims also pass their genes on to their children, which is a neat feature. Overall, the Sims 2 is a better game than it's predecessor and I'd reccomend anyone who hasn't played the Sims pick up The Sims 2.

The Sims 2: A little slice of gaming heaven.

The Sims is strangely addictive. I found myself thinking about it at work, and staying up into the wee hours of the night watching the lives of my sims play out. The Sims 2 has a permanent place on my hard drive until they release a Sims 3.