I browsed the story mode neighborhood file in SimPE and I found many people who seem to be a beta version of the final sims and their background is blue so they are not available in the game.

It seems the team made the cast but then scrapped them and created them again. Most of the current main natives have an old counterpart and they look quite different. And there's hidden lore

The chief's daughter was adopted?


The teens' parents


Here are the original pre-made castaway heroes, I guess. I wonder why they changed them to a brand new sim for the final game. Even their names were different.


And the old version of the chief couple and the shaman and his female household member have missing faces on their portraits. Just blank nothingness instead of a face.

What happened? I want to find out more about this. So...How can I bring them to life so that I can see what kind of bio they have, if any, and what is their wardrobe etc.? Info I can not gather from their SimPE profile or if I can then I would not understand all those codes. I don't mind if bringing them back corrupts the game since I can do backups and have also transferred some sims into the main Sims 2 to continue their story as if they went home to the modern world. But for these mysterious corrupted people I'd want them to be visible in their original state in The Sims Castaway instead.

For anyone wondering, they are all in the Default household bin when viewed from the Neighborhood Memory Browser (they are not in the Family Information tab).

Regarding Merica Manave, I'm most definitely puzzled. At first, I thought that the developers only slightly changed the final story with Nanihi being native: I thought that in their first version, Merica was the "outsider" that brought plague and that she died and left Nanihi behind. I like how they scrapped that idea and went with the current version, where the plague comes from the ancient culture's totem, but then again, I feel like there's so much unexplained stuff there that I don't worry about Merica at all. (What's that ancient culture? Does it have something to do with the Tuzu staff? Why does placing the totem on the altar open the gates to a random beach? Why does it release the toxin once you put back the gem, instead of removing it?)

But Merica's surname is what baffles me, because the chief and his wife have that surname, so perhaps my suggested "first version" was completely wrong.

I'm a little disappointed that the game designers started making this island by apparently simply moving Sims out and deleting them from the family bin; many Seasons families are also present in the game files (i.e. Ramaswami) and deleted the same way that the "story" Sims are deleted.

Thanks for the explanation on the $Subject died memories! I've noticed them too and never bothered to think that those may be for their parents. I simply concluded that the game is "corrupt" from the get-go and left it at that. I think that in all of my playthroughs, I've never once touched the other castaways; I know it's canon that their helicopter crashed and that they're now stuck on the island, but I love to pretend that they got off the island at last and never came back. Couldn't stand them during the story (amazing how annoying and repulsive the storytellers made them be), couldn't think of how they'd get by living on the island. I guess that the tribe would banish them as they don't really contribute to anything and act like children (the adults, that is).