When Barrett joined the company, in October, 1998, he was unaware of the decision. “It felt to me like a fear thing.” After going back and forth for several months, the team finally decided to leave same-sex relationships out of the game code. really didn’t want to begin with,” Barret told me. “No other game had facilitated same-sex relationships before-at least, to this extent-and some people figured that maybe we weren’t the ideal ones to be first, as this was a game that E.A. But there was also fear about how such a feature might adversely affect the game. If this digital petri dish was to accurately model all aspects of human life, from work to play and love, it was natural that it would facilitate gay relationships. The game wasn’t even displayed on the large screen with the other title’s trailers.” But, within hours, an unplanned, illicit kiss between two of the game’s background characters made The Sims the talk of the show.ĭuring The Sims’s protracted development, the team had debated whether to permit same-sex relationships in the game. Barrett III, one of the game’s programmers, told me. “We all knew that if we couldn’t generate any interest at E3 that year, then the game would be cancelled for good,” Patrick J. But replicating the mundane dramas of the living room in game form had proven to be a tall challenge: The Sims was almost abandoned numerous times. The game had been in stammering development since 1993, when Wright first had the idea for a simulation that would model human behavior, not from the bird’s-eye viewpoint of his earlier game but from the ground zero of domesticity. For E.A., The Sims, the latest from Will Wright, the celebrated designer of 1989’s city-planning game SimCity, was a legacy project, inherited when the company purchased its development studio, Maxis.

The sims 1 stories