Heather and Steve were both early Sims 1 fans who each published their own popular web sites with downloadable objects, met through the Sims 1 modding community, then eventually moved in together and got married, and now they've combined their extreme art and programming talents to make an intricately intertwingled collection of Sims 1 Zombie objects, with a whole lot of original artwork and programming!
One thing that always fascinated me is how Maxis liked to push tools to create custom content for the game, and how content creation tools were even released before the game was released, to allow users to create content that they could use for the game when it was officially released.
When I was younger I spent a lot of time using your The Sims Transmogrifier tool, at the time I didn't know that the tool was created by one of The Sims 1's developers.
Will Wright even talked about the The Sims 1 modding community, and how it shaped the future of The Sims and its expansion packs: https://youtu.be/hLHnmRtqNno
This kind of custom content has always fascinated me.
Do you remember if there was a reason the Edith[0] tool didn’t ship with the original game? It seems like that would have encouraged some interesting mods and variations, by letting players change the interactions between objects in the game
Whoa, this just brought back memories I didn’t know existed. I definitely recognize simfreaks, and it brings to mind another content house called Seven Deadly Sims, which I cannot find anymore. Unfortunate because I remember them having a particularly cool landing page (for the early 00s that is).
(In Professor Farnsworth's voice:) Good news everyone!
I asked Heather permission, and she says it's OK for me to give away the huge collection of custom Sims objects I have that includes an archive snapshot of many classic SimFreaks objects, as well as all the unreleased SimProv Wedding Playset objects that Heather and Donna and Steve and I created years ago but never finished and released, and a whole bunch of other stuff like the Transmogrifier object that randomly changes your body, the Dumbold voting machine that sometimes makes you accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, Satan who shows up when you're depressed and offers to buy your soul, the Crowd Sitter that makes everyone gather together and sit down on chairs, and the Cupid that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood, and the Buddha that makes everyone happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties.
I don't have time to actually support and debug any of this stuff, but at least I recently updated the Cupid to be compatible with the Pets expansion pack, so it now lets you fall in love with any pet in the neighborhood. (You just can't actually marry them -- not that there's anything wrong with marrying cats and dogs, but we didn't have the animations for that!)
If you want to express your appreciation, then please subscribe to Zombie Sims for a $9.99 lifetime membership, and then you can play around with inviting lots of Zombies to your weddings and see how that works! (Or don't invite them, and they will crash your wedding anyway!) But no guarantees or warranties that it doesn't devolve into a bloody mess!
Here's my special collection of Sims 1 downloads, including the unreleased and not quite finished "SimProv" wedding Playset and handy "Cupid" that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood (including pets)!
Speed Dating With Cupid: A demo of Speed Dating with Cupid, part of the SimProv Wedding Play Set for The Sims 1. Programming by Don Hopkins. Graphics by SimBabes and SimFreaks.
To find the Cupid and other Simprov items, go into buy mode, press the last icon of three dots for "Miscellaneous", then press the first icon with a pool table for "Recreation". The main item of the Simprov wedding playset is the "Hope Chest", which has a "Help" item that explains what to do next, and it summons a wedding consultant (who you can dismiss and call back if you don't like her hanging around in your bedroom forever). Then you can click on the hope chest to make other objects like the Cupid, and click on the wedding consultant to make catalogs of other items (most of them are just placeholder programmer art right now, but some of then configure things like what kind of wedding you will have and who will officiate it), but the idea was that you could order lots of items through the catalogs that you couldn't get through the normal shopping interface. But for now most of the wedding items are still in the build mode shopping catalog. The Simprov Wedding Playset video above walks through how to use most of the objects!
Also be sure to check out Donna's beautiful wedding beds, the luxurious buffet with ice dolphin sculpture, gold inlaid glass dining table, fancy dollhouses, elegant dolls, and many other premium objects identified as Simprov, SimBabes, and SimFreaks in their catalog descriptions.
Omg. My childhood is back. The Sims was one of my favorite games of all time. I would spend so many nights playing this game until 4 or 5am, using the free money cheat to trick out my houses and to set my Sims up in horrific situations. I would then have to be up to leave for school at 7:30am and try to explain to my mom why I was so tired, not dare telling her the real reason, lest she remove my PC from my bedroom.
I even used to use my miniDV camera and the FireWire card on my computer to capture game footage to edit it with funny voice overs and edits, similar to the style later known as Machinima. But it was the year 2000 and I didn’t know anyone else doing anything like that.
The subsequent games have been varying degrees of great or meh — Sims 2 was a disappointment to me and while it took me a while to embrace it, Sims 4 is pretty dope (I had very few complaints about Sims 3). But the first game, I remember reading a preview of it in Next Generation magazine in August of 1999 and getting a preorder at my local video game store that week. Six months later, I left school early to get it early.
I can’t wait to play this when I get back home tomorrow.
Why was Sims 2 disappointing to you? I remember it being received well, and I loved that the Sims could finally age and die. I don't see many people who were disappointed in Sims 2 unlike 3 and 4.
They felt less and less sandboxed to me after a while. Like I don't remember Sims 2, but in The Sims 1 you could find a Genie lamp and become a millionaire instantly, and hire a robot butler to take care of the house tasks, simple stuff. Otherwise The Sims feels like a game that takes way more effort than life itself as you balance umpteenth things about your sims life. A lot of the fun was in making ridiculous homes.
Of course, other people play The Sims to live out saddistic gags like my cousins did, they would make "kill homes" as I call them, they would remove doors, windows, and food sources, and make them as miserable as inhumanely possible.
Honestly, I might have confused Sims 2 and Sims 3 in my mind. One of them wouldn’t play well on my laptop at the time, and I thought it was Sims 2, but looking back, I think it was Sims 3. I will admit that some of the magic just wasn’t in the sequels for me, tho I did like that Sims could finally fuck in Sims 2 (it was Sims 2, right?) and I’ve definitely spent a lot of time with Sims 4 over the last six years.
By default The Sims 1 supports only 800x600 or 1024x768, which is annoying since most monitors nowadays aren't 4:3.
There are ways to manually patch the Sims.exe by changing the file with a hex editor, however that causes video artifacts in the game (example: when opening the buy/build menu, the items in the list go outside of the UI) because the original UI images aren't resized to match your resolution. The widescreen patcher automatically patches and resizes those UI images for you.
It also installs DDrawCompat (or DGVoodoo2) for you, which is useful because vanilla The Sims 1 on Windows 10+ is choppy for some reason, using DDrawCompat or DGVoodoo2 fixes the choppiness issue.
So, am I the only one who spent 99% of his time playing in Buy/Build mode rather than actually 'playing' the game? I'm not sure the 'game' part of the game ever really appealed to me, but as a house designer, I kind of liked it.
Fun fact: The Sims was first designed as an architectural simulator with little human figures that could walk around the designed interior. They realised that people quite enjoyed playing with those, and turned the game into what it became. [0]
The Sims soundtrack is an iconic piece of video game music, and the build mode's minimalist new age jazz piano songs are undoubtedly among it's most famous tracks. We spoke to Jerry Martin, the composer of the soundtrack, to find out how and why new age jazz piano became the sound of The Sims.
Check out Jerry Martin's website to download mp3s of the build tracks, piano sheet music, and even original songs at:
I’m not the only one! In addition to the base game I also have the tracks for the expansions as well. My programming playlist also has Sim City 4 and Streets of Sim City on it too.
I also like to listen to SimCopter’s soundtrack on YouTube from time to time. While I like listening to high fidelity audio in my main playlist, hearing the intense compression artifacts and the in-game advertisements makes me feel so nostalgic.
SAME! I was cleaning out an old laptop I found at my parent's house last month so it could be recycled (truly too old for anyone to do anything with and not unique enough to keep around as something for nostalgia) and after waiting an eternity for the slow as fuck HDD to spin to life, I was greeted by Windows XP and a bunch of memories, including DaemonTools and other ISO/cloning stuff. Truly took me back in time to high school.
I do not know why I needed this stuff on my mom's laptop, but I assume I was either installing pirated software on her machine (honestly, that is the most likely reason) or I was trying to troubleshoot stuff and her CD/ DVD drive wasn’t working for some reason. One thing is for certain, she did not put it there! I made her move to a Mac in 2009 or 2010 before I would do any more computer repair for her, so it was truly a blast from the past.
(Unrelated aside, my father refuses to use a Mac and if I gave him a Linux laptop, he’d literally just go buy something overpriced and covered in adware at Best Buy and get scammed into some antivirus subscription, so I begrudgingly had to start agreeing to service his laptop again after he fell for a ransomware scam the second time, not to mention the fact that I got a job at Microsoft sort of made my “no Windows tech support” rule feel wrong (even tho I worked on Linux at Microsoft and had a corporate-issued Mac.) Thankfully, Windows is much easier for me to deal with these days and I’ve set up his machine so I can ssh into it remotely if I have to. )
Readit News
I know one of the key programmers behind The Sims 1, Don Hopkins, is a regular on HN. I hope he knows how much joy his work brought kids like me.
Here’s a video where Don demos an early build of the game: https://youtu.be/zC52jE60KjY
Heather and Steve were both early Sims 1 fans who each published their own popular web sites with downloadable objects, met through the Sims 1 modding community, then eventually moved in together and got married, and now they've combined their extreme art and programming talents to make an intricately intertwingled collection of Sims 1 Zombie objects, with a whole lot of original artwork and programming!
https://zombiesims.com/
Twitch streaming videos:
https://www.twitch.tv/simfreaks_heather/videos
Highlight: Zombie Sims - Beta - Everybody Dies
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1049524221
Check out some of the crazy menus that pop up -- this demo barely scratches the surface!
When I was younger I spent a lot of time using your The Sims Transmogrifier tool, at the time I didn't know that the tool was created by one of The Sims 1's developers.
Will Wright even talked about the The Sims 1 modding community, and how it shaped the future of The Sims and its expansion packs: https://youtu.be/hLHnmRtqNno
Do you remember if there was a reason the Edith[0] tool didn’t ship with the original game? It seems like that would have encouraged some interesting mods and variations, by letting players change the interactions between objects in the game
[0]: http://simantics.wikidot.com/wiki:edith
I asked Heather permission, and she says it's OK for me to give away the huge collection of custom Sims objects I have that includes an archive snapshot of many classic SimFreaks objects, as well as all the unreleased SimProv Wedding Playset objects that Heather and Donna and Steve and I created years ago but never finished and released, and a whole bunch of other stuff like the Transmogrifier object that randomly changes your body, the Dumbold voting machine that sometimes makes you accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, Satan who shows up when you're depressed and offers to buy your soul, the Crowd Sitter that makes everyone gather together and sit down on chairs, and the Cupid that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood, and the Buddha that makes everyone happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties.
I don't have time to actually support and debug any of this stuff, but at least I recently updated the Cupid to be compatible with the Pets expansion pack, so it now lets you fall in love with any pet in the neighborhood. (You just can't actually marry them -- not that there's anything wrong with marrying cats and dogs, but we didn't have the animations for that!)
If you want to express your appreciation, then please subscribe to Zombie Sims for a $9.99 lifetime membership, and then you can play around with inviting lots of Zombies to your weddings and see how that works! (Or don't invite them, and they will crash your wedding anyway!) But no guarantees or warranties that it doesn't devolve into a bloody mess!
Here's my special collection of Sims 1 downloads, including the unreleased and not quite finished "SimProv" wedding Playset and handy "Cupid" that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood (including pets)!
https://donhopkins.com/home/DonsSims1Downloads.zip
Simprov Wedding Play Set: Demo of the Simprov Wedding Play Set for The Sims 1. Graphics by SimBabes and SimFreaks. Programming by Don Hopkins.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwt5LJlrMe8
Speed Dating With Cupid: A demo of Speed Dating with Cupid, part of the SimProv Wedding Play Set for The Sims 1. Programming by Don Hopkins. Graphics by SimBabes and SimFreaks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVUP9OXmHTM
Transmogrify Self: A quick demo of The Sims Transmogrifier personified in The Sims 1. Graphics by SimBabes, programming by SimSlice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsTbs7IL5EI
To find the Cupid and other Simprov items, go into buy mode, press the last icon of three dots for "Miscellaneous", then press the first icon with a pool table for "Recreation". The main item of the Simprov wedding playset is the "Hope Chest", which has a "Help" item that explains what to do next, and it summons a wedding consultant (who you can dismiss and call back if you don't like her hanging around in your bedroom forever). Then you can click on the hope chest to make other objects like the Cupid, and click on the wedding consultant to make catalogs of other items (most of them are just placeholder programmer art right now, but some of then configure things like what kind of wedding you will have and who will officiate it), but the idea was that you could order lots of items through the catalogs that you couldn't get through the normal shopping interface. But for now most of the wedding items are still in the build mode shopping catalog. The Simprov Wedding Playset video above walks through how to use most of the objects!
Also be sure to check out Donna's beautiful wedding beds, the luxurious buffet with ice dolphin sculpture, gold inlaid glass dining table, fancy dollhouses, elegant dolls, and many other premium objects identified as Simprov, SimBabes, and SimFreaks in their catalog descriptions.
I even used to use my miniDV camera and the FireWire card on my computer to capture game footage to edit it with funny voice overs and edits, similar to the style later known as Machinima. But it was the year 2000 and I didn’t know anyone else doing anything like that.
The subsequent games have been varying degrees of great or meh — Sims 2 was a disappointment to me and while it took me a while to embrace it, Sims 4 is pretty dope (I had very few complaints about Sims 3). But the first game, I remember reading a preview of it in Next Generation magazine in August of 1999 and getting a preorder at my local video game store that week. Six months later, I left school early to get it early.
I can’t wait to play this when I get back home tomorrow.
Of course, other people play The Sims to live out saddistic gags like my cousins did, they would make "kill homes" as I call them, they would remove doors, windows, and food sources, and make them as miserable as inhumanely possible.
It was really my daughter who played it with her friends and I got sucked in because I had to install the expansions and made sure it ran.
I mostly remember the godawful load times.
And woo-hooing the mail carrier with cheats.
By default The Sims 1 supports only 800x600 or 1024x768, which is annoying since most monitors nowadays aren't 4:3.
There are ways to manually patch the Sims.exe by changing the file with a hex editor, however that causes video artifacts in the game (example: when opening the buy/build menu, the items in the list go outside of the UI) because the original UI images aren't resized to match your resolution. The widescreen patcher automatically patches and resizes those UI images for you.
It also installs DDrawCompat (or DGVoodoo2) for you, which is useful because vanilla The Sims 1 on Windows 10+ is choppy for some reason, using DDrawCompat or DGVoodoo2 fixes the choppiness issue.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/20...
I never stopped listening to the build mode songs from this game, they are the best tracks to get me full nostalgia mode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Martin_(composer)
https://www.last.fm/music/Marc+Russo
https://soundcloud.com/kirk-casey
http://www.jerrymartinmusic.com/the_sims_g1.php
>The Sims: The music in The Sims is in a huge variety of styles. Most of it is kind of "tounge-in-cheek" and adds a lot of humor to the game.
How The Sims Made New-Age Jazz Piano the Soundtrack of Our Lives
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LpVUi9TQ8U
The Sims soundtrack is an iconic piece of video game music, and the build mode's minimalist new age jazz piano songs are undoubtedly among it's most famous tracks. We spoke to Jerry Martin, the composer of the soundtrack, to find out how and why new age jazz piano became the sound of The Sims.
Check out Jerry Martin's website to download mp3s of the build tracks, piano sheet music, and even original songs at:
https://boombamboom.com
The Untold Story of 'The Sims,' Your First Favorite Jazz Record
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qveqew/the-untold-story-of-t...
Music in The Sims
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Music_in_The_Sims
I also like to listen to SimCopter’s soundtrack on YouTube from time to time. While I like listening to high fidelity audio in my main playlist, hearing the intense compression artifacts and the in-game advertisements makes me feel so nostalgic.
I do not know why I needed this stuff on my mom's laptop, but I assume I was either installing pirated software on her machine (honestly, that is the most likely reason) or I was trying to troubleshoot stuff and her CD/ DVD drive wasn’t working for some reason. One thing is for certain, she did not put it there! I made her move to a Mac in 2009 or 2010 before I would do any more computer repair for her, so it was truly a blast from the past.
(Unrelated aside, my father refuses to use a Mac and if I gave him a Linux laptop, he’d literally just go buy something overpriced and covered in adware at Best Buy and get scammed into some antivirus subscription, so I begrudgingly had to start agreeing to service his laptop again after he fell for a ransomware scam the second time, not to mention the fact that I got a job at Microsoft sort of made my “no Windows tech support” rule feel wrong (even tho I worked on Linux at Microsoft and had a corporate-issued Mac.) Thankfully, Windows is much easier for me to deal with these days and I’ve set up his machine so I can ssh into it remotely if I have to. )
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UT0HX3cO4xLft2KozGypU_N7...
Still working on getting it (or a similar release) working in a Wineskin for macOS. But it works great on Windows 10.