Trivia / The Sims

• Awesome, Dear Boy: This is how they manage to get so many musicians to do Simlish covers of their songs for the games, even from genres like punk and metal that you'd never imagine being willingly associated with a game like The Sims. Not only is it cheap, effective promotion, many musicians are Sims fans and consider it an honor to be in the game.
• Creator Breakdown: The game was inspired by Will Wright's getting his life back together after his house burned down in the Oakland Hills Fire.
• Lying Creator: Several times, creators have stated that new installments would include specific features. When the games were actually released, these features were nowhere to be found. For example, that Sims in The Sims 2 would be able to recognize which bed was theirs, which wasn't introduced until 3.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: For years, fans speculated that teens couldn't have a Woo-Hoo option because that'd lead to a ratings bump. The Sims 4 disproved this when a Woo-Hoo-like option was created for teenagers.
• Technology Marches On: The first game (released in 2000) had Sims using landline phones to talk to each other at long distances, a black-and-white television available as the cheapest TV set, and newspapers as Sims' primary means of finding jobs. Computers were boxy desktop PCs only used to play games and look at job listings, while cell phones didn't even exist. By the fourth (released in 2014), newspapers and landline phones were gone entirely, every Sim had a smartphone, cathode-ray-tube color TVs were the dirt-cheap options, and computers (including portable laptops) had a huge array of interactions including online shopping and socialising. Then the City Living expansion, released in 2016, added a Social Media career track, allowing Sims to work in an industry that did not exist in 2000. Going through the series, one can trace the evolution of consumer technology over the course of the early 21st century, and how people have interacted with such.
• Throw It In!: Simlish was entirely created by the game's voice actors on the spot. The voice actors watched the Sims do their animations and said up whatever gibberish came to mind from it. One voice actor said he got inspired for the task by reading words in a magazine upside down.
• Too Long; Didn't Dub: One of the reason for Simlish's existence is because they didn't want to bother doing redubbing for other languages.
• Vaporware: A town-based spinoff called Simsville was cancelled in 2001.
• What Could Have Been: Simsville was announced in 2000 for a 2001 release, then held back to 2002 in 2001, only to be cancelled later that year due to the mediocre reception of the game. Simsville was essentially a combination of Sim City and The Sims 1. You had the ability to design your own town and create your own villagers who would live in a realistic economy. Eventually this concept was revisited, to a lesser degree, in The Sims 3 when it introduced open towns to interact with. Other elements were put into the Hot Date expansion pack and Sim City 4.

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