When I used to be rising up, the genre-defining dollhouse sim The Sims was the last word escape. I’d construct dream properties, domesticate a neighbourhood of strange associates and dwell out a fantasy grownup life.
So when EA surprise-dropped a rerelease of The Sims 1 and a pair of final weekend to have a good time the sequence’ twenty fifth anniversary, with all expansions included (my nine-year-old self’s dream) naturally I used to be compelled to return to my completely satisfied place, revisiting my 10-hour pyjama-clad marathon classes micromanaging the lives of the Newbies, Roomies, and the Goths, and infrequently eradicating their pool ladders after they had been taking slightly swim, and solely taking a crucial pause for mum’s roast dinner.
Whereas the acquainted chaos of breezy music, tragic pool accidents, and my very own private french maid delivered a robust dose of nostalgia, there’s something else lurking beneath this sport’s quirky and cheerful exterior, one thing that I wasn’t acutely aware of after I was a child. To my shock, the sport now feels much less like an opportunity to dwell out your dream life, and extra like a battle simulator. (I additionally forgot how a lot time my Sims spent taking part in chess.) Like a Lynchian picket-fence city, I realised, there’s a darkness lurking beneath suburban sheen.
The unique Sims video games had been extra dystopian than immediately’s perky, brightly colored The Sims 4. The Sims 1 as a substitute affords a desaturated every day grind. The distinction isn’t simply the aesthetic – 20 years in the past, Sims had no goals or ambitions. Your digital households labored lengthy hours for costly lives, the place loss of life – and a few of the most gut-wrenching music in sport historical past – lurked behind even mundane on a regular basis duties.
Overlook character, aspirations and tastes. The Sims 1 is a capitalist nightmare the place survival trumps self-actualisation.
I forgot how a lot time the unique Sims really spend working. They do boring, boring jobs for little pay, out of your sight – making the straightforward message that you simply get when they’re promoted (or handed over) unusually impactful. Put that meagre wage packet in direction of the most affordable oven on supply, and it’ll in all probability catch hearth and kill you. This can be a sport that punishes you for being poor. It signifies that the wealthy, like the enduring Goth household, of their still-stunning graveyard-edged stone mansion keep, wealthy – whereas the poor keep poor. Social mobility in The Sims 1, I discovered, is close to unattainable.
And having a social life? Overlook it, no less than whenever you’re on the underside rung of your random profession ladder. There’s merely no time to make associates, one thing I didn’t bear in mind from my days as a Sims-obsessed tween. I now realise that my neighbourhood’s messy EastEnders-level entanglements had been largely scripted in my head. As an alternative, you should chip away at ++ and – – relationship scores till you possibly can lastly, anticlimactically ‘Play in mattress,’ due to the Livin’ it Up enlargement pack that supplied the world’s most elementary intercourse schooling to a technology of 11-year-olds. There’s nothing darkish about that enlargement’s heart-shaped mattress. I nonetheless need it in actual life.
Even these moments with essentially the most significant loves of my Sims’ lives appeared to supply them nothing – they had been transactional, serving nothing greater than to unlock new interactions. They’re performing for my enjoyment, not theirs.
Friendship can be bleakly transactional right here: you want a sure variety of them to climb the ranks at work. Keep lonely, and also you’ll keep poor, and possibly die from having an inexpensive, spontaneously combusting microwave. It’s an particularly unhappy existence for single Sims who dwell alone. Exhausted from work, in case you don’t discover time to name your folks on the cellphone for hours – or they do not want to return over – your relationships decay quickly. Like Black Mirror’s award-winning Nosedive episode, shedding social credibility rapidly sees issues spiral rapidly downhill on your Sims.
And nothing flips a millennial’s abdomen as fast because the music that heralds a terrifying, sudden housebreaking. It’s nonetheless horrifying 25 years later, so simply hope that you simply had the foresight to spend your meagre financial savings on a burglar alarm. That’s earlier than we even get into visits from the Grim Reaper, and creepy prank calls. These sudden callers frighten me simply as a lot now as they did then.
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Maybe my new darker perspective on the sport comes from the world we dwell in now. I’m lastly residing my fantasy grownup life – I simply didn’t realise it might be much less lounging in gothic-mansion dream properties, and extra feeling overworked, underpaid and on the verge of a spiralling breakdown. In 2025, an period of financial nervousness and burnout, the grind of The Sims feels brutal.
For all its existential dread, The Sims 1 continues to be an escape. Certain, it presents a type of capitalist nightmare. However, it’s a capitalist nightmare you possibly can management. Regardless of how arduous the every day slog received, you possibly can at all times sort in a cheat code and wipe away monetary stress with a click on – the last word fantasy. It’s additionally weirdly correct: identical to in actual life, exterior benefits (and dishonest the system) are far more prone to result in success than grinding away and following the principles.
Sure, The Sims 1 was and stays a dystopian suburban treadmill, nevertheless it additionally makes room for humour. It’s a world the place chaos is humorous, failure is momentary, and the worst tragedies may very well be undone with the clicking of a mouse.
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