The Sims 2
Your Sims could finally grow up, grow old and die, and their kids had their noses. Maxis's September 2004 sequel added aging, genetics, aspirations with wants and fears, a full 3D camera, and alien abductions that could leave a man pregnant. It sold a million copies in ten days, a record at the time, and kept selling expansions through 2008.
Preliminary work began in late 2000, right after The Sims, and EA announced the sequel on May 5, 2003, showing it at E3 a week later and slipping a teaser onto the Makin' Magic disc that fall. Full 3D was considered essential to get people to upgrade. New needs for thirst and stress were tried and dropped when players said they were tired of babysitting basic needs; the existing needs were instead tuned to each life stage. Will Wright said the reception of the first game's expansions decided what went into the base game, community lots among them.
Sims now passed from baby to toddler, child, teenager, adult and elder, and died of old age. Children born in the game inherited their parents' eye and hair color, facial structure and personality instead of being rolled at random. Sims carried an aspiration such as Romance, Family, Knowledge, Popularity or Fortune that generated wants and fears. Create-a-Sim let you sculpt a face instead of picking one, and a Body Shop tool opened the door to custom content. Cutscenes marked a first kiss, a birth and an alien abduction, after which a male Sim could come home carrying a half-alien child.
The Windows game arrived on September 14, 2004 and sold a million copies in ten days, a record then, 4.5 million in its first year and seven million by October 2006; a Mac port came in 2005 and simplified console versions, adults only, that October. Metacritic averaged 90. Computer Games Magazine called it "more of a game and less of a dollhouse" than its predecessor but still "a celebration of the beauty of the mundane." Eight expansion packs and nine stuff packs followed between 2005 and 2008, and later packs had Depeche Mode, Lily Allen and Katy Perry re-recording songs in Simlish. In 2005 the attorney Jack Thompson claimed the game hid nudity behind its pixel blur; EA's Jeff Brown replied that unblurred Sims "appear like Ken and Barbie," and a leftover debug code for the blur was removed anyway.
By March 2012 it had sold 13 million copies across all platforms, more than six million of them on PC. EA ended support in 2014 and offered the complete Ultimate Collection free on Origin for two weeks; a Legacy Collection returned in January 2025 for the series' 25th anniversary. Modders never left: new content still flows through Mod The Sims and the Tumblr "Simblrs."
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Will Wright's dollhouse simulator where you controlled virtual lives, sent them to work, made them fall in love, and then deleted the pool ladder and watched them drown. Launched in February 2000 by Maxis and EA, The Sims became the best-selling PC game of its era—a mania that never ended, spawning sequels that kept the franchise dominant for decades.
SimCity 2000
The city-building game that made zoning feel like destiny. SimCity 2000 traded the original's flat grid for a gorgeous isometric view with terrain elevation, underground layers, and a tech tree capped by arcologies — massive self-contained future cities that could blast into space. For a generation of 90s kids on the family PC, it was equal parts urban-planner simulator and disaster-unleashing sandbox.
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