Former Sims 2 Developer Drops Neat Sims Facts on Twitter

The Sims has been around for a while, and for as long as it’s been around, it’s been pretty darn popular among both casual and hardcore gamers. While the first Sims was pretty good, most people agree that The Sims 2 is when the series really picks up and gets a sense of identity, and it remains one of the more popular entries into the franchise to date. Much more so than the Urbz, in any case.

Regardless, over the weekend, the Sims 2’s lead simulation and tools engineer Jake Simpson decided to host a lengthy Twitter thread about the Sims 2, seemingly for no other reason than because he could. But it was an interesting and informative little exploration into the game, and we learned quite a bit about the Sims in the process.

For example:

“The Sims as a franchise tries never to use words in UI, in order that there is little to no localization requirements for the game itself. In fact, that's where Simlish - the made up language for the Sims - came from. Funnily enough, the number one bug report The Sims gets from non English speaking lands is that "I can't set the Sims language from English to my language". People who can't speak English think the Sims are speaking English…

...Note, there is NO linguistic background for Simlish. All those websites that claim there is are absolutely wrong. It was entirely made up, of gibberish sounds, that was made up on the spot by the voice actors.”

He also shared this moderately fascinating nugget about why the Sims can’t have threesomes: there was no time to animate it.

Right at the end of the project, I added a bug into the bug database that "When Sims are making Whoope (Sim Sex, basically), there was no 'invite' interaction". This was a joke - I was making a bug out of the fact that the Sims couldn't have threesomes… This bug went all the way up the chain to the executive producer, Lucy Bradshaw, who marked it "Will not fix", with the comment "Not enough time for animations" :) Maxis didn't say no to threesomes, just, they didn't have time to make the animations and scripts:)

The whole thread has a lot of interesting tidbits, about everything from random Sims laughing at your character to EA’s attempt to stop Sims from pissing themselves. I suggest you give it a read if you have the time.