Normal people were digging it, not just crazed obsessives. So I just informed him that, actually, The Sims was actually already receiving a snobbish backlash from actual hardcore gamers, and its fans were in fact non-typical players. He wasn’t interested in the truth – he admitted he’d been provided an angle by his Editor and was working to fulfil it. He was, essentially, looking for a quote saying that it was played by those with no social life to indulge in a surrogate fictional one. It was from a freelancer from help-the-homeless-help-themselves magazine The Big Issue, which wanted to run a feature on The Sims’ runaway success. The third was sparked by The Sims, Electronic Arts’ great success and one of the most popular and groundbreaking games of recent times.Īs much as an article has an origin, it is in one of those calls. Majestic, prompting the second and smallest peak, was publisher Electronic Arts’ great failure – a reality-blurring attempt to commercialise the alternate-reality game before anyone really knew what an alternate-reality game was, which bombed in the States and was never released in Europe.
THE SIMS GAME SEX SIMULATOR
The first and biggest spike in calls was part of the fallout of 9/11 when every journalist in the world needed to ask us whether Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear or Microsoft Flight Simulator could be used to train terrorists to take over commercial airliners. We knew we were being watched at those moments, because every time we answered the phone the same questions came from different missionaries from the Real World Media. There were only three times that we really knew the eye of a media mini-storm was circling somewhere above us. I worked in a cramped games magazine office for just shy of five years.
![the sims game sex the sims game sex](https://sims-online.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/04-27-15_11-55-PMMM.jpg)
The Sims was going to cross over, one way or another. It was the phone calls that made me certain. More from the archives, this time a 2007 piece on the dark eroticism inherent in The Sims, penned by the sorely-missed RPS co-founder and giant of words Kieron Gillen.