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This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: etc.

"in the Sims, each player has his own story."

"they can only eat and drink Lhasa. How many times do I have to kill this game before I can let it die completely?"

In the late 1990s, after another demo of the Sims to the publisher EA at the Maxis studio, one of the EA executives was furious because he thought it was too mediocre.

Others are equally skeptical. In any field, there is often resistance to achieving new ideas, and the development of the Sims is no exception. Although the Sims, developed by Maxis, was very popular in the 1990s, some conservatives in the gaming industry could not understand the charm of the Sims, a human-centered derivative. Who in the world would want to build a fake house, and then create some dummies, and then. Watching them grow old, sicken and die?

During the long and difficult development process, the Sims has been questioned. However, the small team, led by Maxis founder and lead designer will Wright, remained focused and finally realized its unique potential. The Sims is indeed an outlier, and players like it, especially to imagine their lives in the game.

Wright has made a lot of simulation games, and when the Sims helicopter was developed, he began to form the Sims team. The unprecedented success of the Sims surprised everyone. It has won numerous awards and honors so far, and has become one of the highest-selling and most influential game series of all time. In addition, it greatly broadens the audience of the game and attracts many young female players who are completely different from the traditional group of gamers.

Today, the Sims series has launched four generations of works and a number of expansion films, with cumulative sales of more than 200 million, producing an important cultural influence. Famous pop singers such as Ariana Grande and Jason Druro even use the Simlish language in the game to record songs. In the game, some players pursue prosperity and others pursue destruction: they build luxury houses, but take away ladders from the pool and let family and friends drown alive. This is the joy of the Sims.

EA finally launched the game on October 18, 2000, and the Sims 4 was officially free, and a series of DLC began to be discounted-not surprisingly, the Sims series, outside the body, has always relied on a large number of expansion films and DLC to maintain sales. Taking this opportunity, several creators of the original Sims revealed the story of the birth of the game and the twists and turns in its development process, which may have explained why the game is so enduring and popular with players.

Inspiration Charles London (Charles London, artistic Director): the birth of the Sims originated from will Wright's experience: once, a hill fire destroyed his house, so he had to rebuild it, so he began to think about how to design the house and home improvement. The Sims is will's passion project, but many concepts are so difficult that no one thinks it will really happen. Of course, since will likes to do it, EA has to allow him to do it. He's will Wright.

Claire Curtin (Claire Curtin, designer and voice director): will's original idea was to make a time management game in which players need to move virtual people in the most efficient way. Famous architect Christopher Alexander's book pattern language (A Pattern Language) has a great influence on him.

The Sims is a game between simulation, strategy and role-playing, and sometimes it's hard to generalize and put it into a certain category.

Jamie Dornbos (Jamie Doornbos, programmer): will reads a lot of books and has a lot of ideas. He often talks about Tumako, a kind of electronic pet that is so popular in Japan that people want their electronic pets to survive. One day, will brought a bunch of electronic pet machines to the office and gave us one.

Will came to my manager and asked if he could transfer a developer to the secret project the Sims. I was the first official developer besides will, who had written a lot of code before, and I was inexperienced and almost inexperienced, so I had to do it as I saw fit.

Our relationship is like a student and a teacher. I learned a lot from will and made his code look less rigid and astringent. Will is a design genius and I have a lot of confidence in him, even though I don't know if the game will win the recognition of the players.

Development concept Curtin: we build the animation system of the Sims from scratch, so we can't learn much code from other games. We overcame a lot of difficulties in the development process, and the workload was too heavy.

London: at first, Man was not the center of the game. Will prefers to make an architectural game, but allows virtual people to walk around in the environment, so that players can see whether they have made efficient choices in house design, object placement, and so on. It was not until Claire Curtin and Roxie Vorosenko joined the team that they persuaded will to change his mind and made it clear that the game must put people in a very important position.

Roxie Vorosenko (Roxy Wolosenko, designer): one day will showed me the display tools, and I remember suddenly seeing a group of virtual people, and I thought, who are those people? What is their relationship with each other? I immediately began to personify little things and opened up a whole new way of thinking.

Squeeze the villain fun endless Enbos: will designed the core simulation mechanism, basically eight attributes corresponding to the person's eight core motivations, such as social interaction, hunger, comfort, etc., players can change the parameters at will. At first, we only focused on designing one behavior of the villain, but we always wanted to cover all human behaviors as comprehensively as possible.

Vorosenko: we tried to extract human interaction into something that could be simulated, and it was a huge challenge, and there was no precedent at the time. The whole process has been tried for several years, and there have been a lot of changes in the process.

Later, we added different types of goals. For example, if you want your villain to be an artist, you must let the villain paint, in this way to improve the level of art. All goals in the game are designed to reduce the player's needs or to help players achieve their ambitions. We also considered designing some common goals, such as "how much money do you need to earn", but that's too old-fashioned.

Keina Ryan (Kana Ryan, producer): from a code perspective, it would be easier to make this game if we were gender neutral in some way. We never wanted to make a statement, but I'm glad to see the Sims perform in this respect. This is a game that really allows players to experience life freely, and there is no class or interaction suitable for a particular gender. So, in essence, we have created a level playing field.

Art and Animation London: fortunately, we have a very talented art team. Eric Qin shaped the final appearance of the character, and he is still the chief character artist, working on the Sims for 25 years; Eric Hedman produced most of the animation and incorporated his funny, playful personality; Jamie Baker did most of the actual modeling, and I was in charge of UI.

Around the question of how the game environment should make players feel, we iterated many times over the images and animations of the Sims. Is this a real place? Or is it just a dollhouse? We don't want players to feel omnipotent or walk into the dollhouse, so we focus on a fine painting style, with enough details to let players give up their doubts for a while and immerse themselves in the game world.

There are a lot of things that can be done in the Sims, and the expansion has been expanded many times, and you can try anything, or you can focus on your hobbies, and then we realize that a sense of humor can help us out of all kinds of difficulties. For example, the virtual villain needs to dance, but we can't animate all the dances, so we do a funny dance animation. Some parts of real life are too complex, which may be taboo topics that people avoid talking about, so we have to abstract them with simple, symbolic behaviors and make them as humorous and interesting as possible.

Vorosenko: while looking for inspiration for villain interaction, I remembered a very funny pantomime I saw on Broadway in San Francisco, so I invited two excellent pantomime performers to stay in the studio for a few days. to perform the pages of emotional interaction we created. We filmed the performances of two actors, and those materials later became the basis for us to create a large number of game scenes.

Iconic Green Diamond London: I named that green diamond "lead hammer" because it really looks like it. In order for players to know which character is about to carry out their orders, we need to float something above the villain's head. I made a yellow arrow and stretched it to make it expand and rotate, which took about a year.

Later we found that when all the villains were on the ground floor, and when you went up to the second floor, you couldn't see anything. I tried to lengthen and raise the arrow, but that would make the bottom of the arrow pass through the floor and look particularly stupid. So I made another octagon, stretched it, and folded both ends. Some colleagues said, wouldn't it be cool to use colors to reflect the emotions of villains? I took that suggestion, and then everyone went his own way.

The hammer is everywhere and has become a symbol of the game. One day, executive producer Kenna Ryan came to tell me that he was a little behind schedule and needed to make some decisions not to add any art material to the game. "except for the green thing, I haven't finished yet. Give me some more time." I told her. Her reply was: "Don't change it, that's it."

This experience has taught me that if you see some simple images, don't associate them too much. If you go to EA headquarters, you will find a 5.5ft version of the "lead hammer" hanging from the ceiling of the company lobby. I'd like to brag about myself and tell people how much I put into it and how it shows my talent. But this is not the case.

Music and sound Robbie cock (Robi Kauker, sound engineer): visual effects provide the direction for us to create sound. In terms of music, will and Jerry Martin often talk about the feeling of happiness and pleasure brought about by many family dramas in the 1950s and 1960s.

Jerry Martin (Jerry Martin, audio director and composer): at that time, a lot of game music was very noisy, but I didn't think that kind of music was appropriate, so it maintained a relatively relaxed and humorous style. Writing music for the Sims is the most interesting thing I have ever done. The game has a half-playful sense of humor, especially in music-when music is matched with the game, it tends to produce a wonderful contrastive cuteness. For example, I like to listen to Basanova music while watching small people cooking in the kitchen.

The second and third generations of the Sims worked with "Fruit Sister" Katy Perry at the time. Will gave me some cool tips, one of which was Basanova music. He also proposed to use a piano solo as the theme song of the game, and the effect was so good that players loved it. I also realized many of my ideas, such as creating 1950s-style shopping music for the "Buy Mode".

All in all, I need to write a bunch of songs suitable for the Sims. I made a lot of music in my garage studio, and it worked very well. Of course, if I want to make the music more pleasant, I sometimes hire musicians to perform live.

How was the Simlish language born? Cork: will often throws out some of his ideas, and the inspiration for the Simlish language comes from a question he asked: "how do we make the villain look like he's talking without saying anything?" Then it's our job.

Curtin: we want a language that is incomprehensible and has no rules to follow, and we have done a lot of experiments on it. Will was deeply influenced by the Navajo code interpreter during World War II, so we considered using Navajo, but failed. Roxie can speak some unpopular language in real life, so we have tried to add some sounds and words like that, and the effect is not very good.

Stephen Keelin (Stephen Kearin, voice actor): they took me to a small room in Walnut Creek, California, and asked me to improvise and try to combine Cherokee and Swahili. At first I couldn't do anything, but in desperation, I suddenly thought of an impromptu game called "foreign poet". Some people stepped onto the stage as foreign poets and spoke in their own language, while others tried to interpret their poems. If you play a foreign poet, you have to stand there talking nonsense.

So I started to do the same, recording several sounds in a row. I remember Claire and Robbie leaning over and hinting to me the next words as if they were satisfied with my performance. After a while, they suddenly asked me, "do you know any female friends in this field?" Before they finished asking, I said, "Gerry. Gerry Lawler."

Over the next 11 years, Gerry and I recorded character dubbing for all the Sims expansion packs. Whenever I pick up Gerry at the railway station, she is often already in character. Gerry is my golden partner. I couldn't have done the job alone without her. She inspired me to do my best.

Killingcock at work: Stephen and Gerry dare to take on any challenge. They are great. Everyone is looking for a good feeling, not a specific result, it's like an impossible task. It was they who made it possible.

In retrospect, the dubbing work we did at that time was crazy. We spent a whole year cutting languages while keeping them in touch with each other. For some important words in the game, such as "sul sul" or "nooboo", the dubbing actors do not say it so clearly, or even sound like some other meaning, this is not intentional!

Resistance from EA Vorosenko: EA has invested a lot of research and promotion money on the Sims, which is a good thing. But as far as the game itself is concerned, we have to fight the company because the core values of the two sides are different. They want the Sims to be more playful, and they want us to try to make it sexier in some way.

Maxis is a small company that operates in a completely different way from EA, and it feels like we often need to fight some kind of battle to refuse something they ask to do. To be honest, there is a cultural conflict between the two companies.

Ryan: the enemy. I hate to say this, but EA has vetted us too much. In company meetings, we often feel that we have to do our best to live one more day. Of course, this is a good rallying cry for a team.

London: our biggest challenge is to get EA executives to understand what kind of game we are making and why it should be done. People tend to think that successful games allow players to escape from reality, play other people, or have powers that no one else has, but the Sims is just the opposite.

Every time Development Director Jim Makrez presents the Sims to EA executives, he gets similar reviews. It says, "well, it looks interesting, but it's not a game. The next time we see it, there'd better be A, B and C in the game."OK, we'll do it." Interestingly, Jim will tell us when he gets back to the company, "it doesn't matter, let's not do anything." Then we will add X, Y and Z to the game. It was a pretty cool experience.

Martin: for a while, several executives at EA didn't even want to release the game. However, when the Sims began to make a lot of money, many people on the EA side took credit for themselves, pretending that they were also involved in the development. This is complete nonsense!

Unexpected success London: people didn't hear about the Sims until 1999 at E3, when we were sitting behind a machine in the EA booth. In order to watch the trial, the audience lined up all the way to the center of the venue. Since then, everything has changed. Seven years after the low-key development of the Sims, we became famous overnight!

Curtin: female players like it very much. I think at that time, some traditional gamers were interested in the Sims because it came from the Sims series. Even if they don't like the Sims, it doesn't matter, because many new players who have never touched the game will buy the game.

Vorosenko: we didn't aim to attract female players from the beginning, we just wanted to make a game that we found interesting. In those days, the Sims had fun and depth that many other works did not have.

The Sims later released some derivative works, such as the Sims Online and the Sims: medieval Dornbos: many games are based on destruction, but Sims City takes construction as its theme. In the Sims, we also allow players to start families and observe their daily lives. In a sense, it touches a part of the player's mind that has never been touched by the game before, that is, empathy and recognition of others.

Killeen: the success of the Sims is beyond everyone's imagination. People at Maxis Studios tell us that every minute, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Gerry and I are heard somewhere in the world.

The Legacy of the Sims Curtin: the Sims have a soul, and you can see its importance in the lives of players. In the game, players will perform their real life, or the life they want to have.

Killeen: the Sims can take players into another world and experience another life safely. At some point, we all need another world. I'm honored to be involved in the dubbing of the Sims, and it feels great, especially when someone talks about how important the Sims are to their childhood.

Cork: it is completely different from other games. There is no so-called correct play, no one will score you, and no one will judge you. Like a sandboxie, here, the story you want to tell, the ideas you put forward, your sense of humor and your choices are all important.

London: I think the real charm of the Sims is that it allows players to play the roles of both the narrator and the audience. At the same time, the Sims' development team has launched a large number of new content over the years, making it unable to find any competitors in the market. In the past two decades, the Sims have almost become their own category.

Ryan: few games have such an enduring popularity. I think the Sims series has a special appeal to people, especially the original works. It is one of the first real casual games, it brings a new way of playing, and everyone can easily use it. In the Sims, each player has his own story.

Live happily together this article is compiled from: https://www.vice.com/ en / article / wxn44z / sims-game-an-oral-history

Original title: "The Oral History of 'The Sims', the World's Most Enduring Game"

Original author: Sean Cole

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