Trivia / The Sims

• Classic Cheat Code:
  • Press Ctrl, Shift, and C simultaneously and type rosebud for money. There are others that can be found easily—one cheat, called, "help" even lists a few of them for you. There are ways to abuse that "Rosebud" cheat code. Typing a series of ";!;!;!;!;!" after that code, without a space, will generate an extra §1000 for each pair of ";!" you have (because each ;! "repeats" the previously-entered cheat). Typing a ":" after the last ";!" string you entered will cause an error and keep the cheat menu from closing, but you'll still get §1000 for each legitimate set of ";!" string. Hold the Enter button and watch your bank account soar. And try not to get bored at the game (since you no longer have to work for anything).
  • Before "rosebud", the original money cheat was "klapaucius". It was changed with the 1.1 patch, presumably because it was too hard to remember.
• Executive Meddling: In a retrospective, developer Jake Simpson mentions that this was an issue with the game's attempts to have Celebrity Cameos. He specifically mentioned that Avril Lavigne's appearance led to a lot of back-and-forth between the Sims developers and her management team who took issue with any possibility that she could be depicted negatively, a tough ask given how open-ended the game's sandbox is. This meant that the actions you could perform with celebrity Sims had to be extremely limited and curated, and also demanded a lot of extra NPC-specific coding that otherwise wasn't necessary.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Being that it's a 20+ year old game that is not available to purchase digitally in any store (not even Electronic Arts's own Origin store), getting a new copy is difficult, to say the least.
• Market-Based Title: Known as Simpeople in Japan to match other Maxis game naming conventions and due to existence of an otherwise unrelated development company called SIMS. After the company went defunct, the second game onwards use The Sims title.
• Promoted Fanboy: The appearance of Drew Carey in House Party was thanks to him being a big fan of the game, letting the Sims development team use him however they wanted.
• Technology Marches On: Going back to the first game nowadays, the use of the Comic Sans font for everything written but the title will probably annoy you a lot more than it did back in the day. As a game produced and set in the late 90s and early 00s, the technology present (such as landline phones and CRT television sets) can often be a blast from the past for players.
  • The most expensive and advanced television set in the game is the Plasma TV. The freestanding version included with the base game costs §3,500 and the wall-mounted version included with Superstar costs §7,999; in real life, a flat-screen TV can be had for well under $1,000 (USD) these days.
  • One free Downloadable Content added a more advanced and expensive PC than the ones available in the vanilla game, touting that it has the "brand new" Intel Pentium 4 processor.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The introductory video has differences compared to the actual gameplay, but one that stands is how instead of the iconic Plumbob, the pointer for the Sims is a simple blocky arrow.
  • It is well known (even though few evidence remains) that the game was originally intended as an architectural simulator. The Sims themselves were only there to test the houses created by the player, but they proved very interesting to play with on their own.
  • Originally, there weren't going to be same-sex couples in the game, with all attempted advances from a Sim of the same gender being met with a slap. Fortunately, developer Don Hopkins objected very strongly to this, pointing out that not only would this be homophobic, having no same-sex couples would be downright unrealistic, which isn't very befitting a life simulator. In the end, Hopkins won out, leading to a portrayal of gay couples that's refreshingly progressive for the era.
    Hopkins: It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest.