20 years.
-----
Poor Goopy: all these years and still alone. I'll have to do something about it.

Hey, alone just means he has the whole cake to himself!

20 years ... wow.

20 years and it has more players than ever, and about a million terabytes of custom content!

This also means that Modthesims is officially 20 years old (although it existed before game release day). @Tashiketh 's profile is dated 12 May 2004.

And it's all in my Downloads folder (or at least it feels like it lol).



I never knew that. Happy Birthday MTS and thanks to Tashiketh for sticking with us for so long!

In case anyone hasn't worked out the significance of this, it's because The Sims 2 was first released on 14th September 2004. So our game is 20 years old today!

Happy Birthday Sims 2!

Who here has been playing since release day? For me in the UK, the game wasn't released until the 17th Sept (Friday- it was released on Tues 14th in the US). I was working that day (new job! ) so I had my husband go to purchase a copy for my daughter and I; later we had two copies as we played on seperate rigs.

I installed the game as soon as I had it in my grubby little hands- and also proceeded to download loads of top notch content from the Sims 2 exchange. I was on MTS2 before the game was released (on my dial up connection!) and didn't pluck up the courage to make an account until the following year. I remember it being very exciting to read about the development of the tools and utilities we all use today to mod the game, and I downloaded the early content and mods that were released on this site. I remember names such as RGiles, Aobh, Numenor, WesH, Watto, DarkMatter, Phervers, Karybdis, Carrigon... loads more who contributed to the fabulous amount of knowledge we know have about the game. Even a few Maxoids (Maxis developers) talked on here!

I think the first mod was this one:
https://modthesims.info/d/30401

This is what the site looked like on 20th September 2004:
https://web.archive.org/web/2004092...odthesims2.com/

@Tashiketh (formerly known as Delphy) had to make a lot of changes to that early site- all of the simmers downloading and uploading files necessitated many software changes and several hardware upgrades in those early months!

Fun fact, back then (in October 2004), somebody actually got my private number somehow and phoned me up to complain about MTS being super slow. We where running e107 and switched to vBulletin soon after. I remember having to make a LOT of changes to e107 to make it not creak under the load - some of those even made it back into the codebase for that software!

OMG! Back in those days of course, we could find out people's names and addresses and phone numbers from a domain name search.

The game comes from an era where having a phone was optional (the Has Phone? checkbox in SimPE/real life example). And now, the internet is all around us just like the radio waves used to be before. Crazy...

Thank goodness they didn't show up at your door. :O

I had already played Sims 1, so I would have got Sims 2 as soon as it came out, but I didn't join MTS until 2009. I actually played vanilla at first; seems unbelievable now. Didn't make my own first CC until 2013.

I've been playing since I bought it, but I don't know the date; I remember pestering my favorite shop and they called me back when it finally arrived. (I loved roaming that shop; it's long gone now.) I managed to find the original box; everything is still inside but no bill. I guess I did not expect that I would still be playing the game twenty years later.

I remember buying games from my local Electronics Boutique. It was always fun to go in and browse. It's all online now.

I was born exactly a month after sims 2 came out, started playing at around the age of 7 in 2012 and never stopped since. I can pretty much say that this game is my life

Has it really been that long a time?

Oh, Happy Birthday Sims 2 and MTS!

May they both last forever..

I remember having gotten 2 just after I really started playing 1 and I was blown away by the incredible upgrade.

I'd stated before that I would never leave 1 but of course I lied.

I gave it away to a friend of mine and never looked back.

Good ol' The Sims 2. The game I'm playing today was installed from the same discs that my older sibling bought all the way back when. Though at some point we lost the manual with the installation code so I also have an old library receipt from 2006 or so where a friend of mine (we're still close friends today) wrote down the installation code from their manual for us :D

I'm playing on my old discs, too!

I spent many (almost) sleepless nights playing Sims 2 back in my days as a student. Those were the days XD

Haven't played since the start, but got hooked quite early on, just after Christmas back in -06 (bought my first laptop, which technically was for school, but really was for simming - bought BG+Uni around the same time and been hooked ever since).

I've got all the packs (singles), but these days I use the Origin UC. Was easier that way on a laptop without a disc drive.

I can remember when my local library in Lancaster, Ohio would get games as soon as they came out. I was lucky enough to get to play it on disc for about a week before I had to return it back. Mind you, this was arguably the best year for gaming so I simply got Need For Speed or SimCity? Either way, since then I was completely hooked and never entirely stopped playing save for life events of my own.

And I still love Goopy

I still have all my discs, but I find the UC much more convenient and easier to make work on a newer computer and I also like the repair option, meaning that I might not have to reinstall if my objects.package gets corrupted somehow (I do have it on read only).

I'd give the Sims 1 another go if I could make my Complete Collection work, but mainly just for a nostalgia hit.

Darn, I missed the Sims 2's 20th anniversary just two days ago. I knew it was coming, although I also knew that EA wasn't going to acknowledge the game's special occasion and maybe that's for the best. We can celebrate our beloved game just fine.

Now nostalgia is smacking me in the face as my brain is playing the neighborhood theme. Time to listen to the entire soundtrack on Youtube now!

I remember when my sister introduced me to the game when it was new, while I was still into the original Sims. Today, I own her hard copy of the base game but no expansions. Not sure why, but I feel I have identical memories for both games, coming home from school to play for hours on end. Unfortunately, I can't remember any families I had then, only during my more recent experience since 2015 when I got the UC. Long after the special Sims 2 event ended in 2014, I was still able to get the UC for free by providing my hard copy's serial code to EA support.

Wishing a late happy birthday to this game which has provided entertainment for countless hours. I didn't play it on release (it would be very strange for a 3-year-old to play a Sims game, after all), but I used to watch my sister play it all the time by the time I was 6 because I distinctly remember being excited when she installed Bon Voyage. By the time Apartment Life came out I was playing it and I remember being the one to ask our parents for the expansion. We never owned the base game, my sister borrowed it from one of her friends, so when our old computer broke we couldn't reinstall the game, I had to ask a friend of mine who did own the base game and the expansions we were missing for her disks. The Celebrations CD is still somewhere around the house, for some reason that one was left behind and we kinda lost contact since so I don't think I ever returned that one... oops. Sometime in the late 2010s, I want to say 2017, 2018?, I finally asked EA for a copy of the Ultimate Collection, I was really nervous but the staff member who was chatting with me was nice and I finally got the UC - I no longer had to worry about the expansions I didn't have, plus some new content in a handful of stuff packs I didn't have.

I find it interesting that I've been playing the game for most of its lifespan, despite being roughly the same age as me. I feel simultaneously young and old. I still remember the old launcher with the ads for the website, I got the licensed cars like the Ford Focus from there.