Dear first-time reader. This thread is longer than long now. Please don't allow our accessory verbiage to overwhelm you. Read the welcome index below if you want to be taken to Wonderland all at once!






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ORIGINAL POST (JULY 2018):

Reflective of its innovative and somewhat experimental nature, TONS of things have changed during the building of the first The Sims and because of that it is always interesting and even intriguing to observe the differences between the oldest pictures/videos of it (1996-1999's) until February 2000 and its been, let's say, one of my favorite obsessions and hobbies haha

This seems to be the oldest Sims gameplay footage (1999) we've got available on the interwebs so far, and it's probably shot in, more or less, the same time the picture above was. Shows the characters in a more "cartoon-ish" shape (except the twins), the rubber plant seen in a different perspective and an ARROW taking the place the plumbob does these days! Also, do note the voice acting (like when the man tells the woman a joke) seemed way more uninspired and inexpressive than it is in the final game, almost sounding like muttering



This other one, shot months or weeks before the release of the final version, shows the game almost in the way we're used to see but with some minor changes, like the plumbob behavior (which doesn't seem to spin at all?), the way how the shade of the objects change a little once the mouse hover it, the Sims talking whilst one of them hold a platter and, more impressively, if I'm not mistaken, the Buy Mode song {2:23} sounds a bit different, too.

So, today, I invite you to share some of your favorite beta pictures of The Sims, in case you're also keen on this subject and have something to offer! Gonna be precious for my personal research, haha.

Thank you in advance!

Hi! Quite interesting indeed! I have a bit of an obsession with the beta material of Sims games. I thought I had seen everything, but I was mistaken! You're right, the buy music sounds different; is not a different song, but rather, the same song recorded differently; I believe it's some sort of MIDI. And those cartoony models! Quite odd seeing them with the realistic environement we're used to!

I don't really have anything from the beta of TS1; I used to have an image, a render maybe, of a sophisticated female sim dressed as Bella Goth and with the head of Betty Newbie. Talking of which, it would be interesting searching the original families and how they came to be as they were.

[ MAY 2024 UPDATE!!: This used to be the go-to Sims development timeline post we'd advise you to start off with... but now, y'know, it's been left out unchanged for over 5 years and, as you may expect, contains loads of missing/incorrect factoids. Because of that, we'll leave it the way it is. BUT! Our "pre-release" article on the other website is the way cooler alternative if you want to have fun with the latest + precise info and media on how The Sims was made! For us, by us.]

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Original post:

> You should begin your ventures here. In this post, you get the thread's main gallery (behind the Spoiler tabs!) with some of the gathered pre-release media, hopefully explained with the proper precision. This post is dedicated to the amazing @ed95 guy (ops guess who doesn't know how to mention users), right there;

If you're like us, you probably have a good time while rhapsodizing a little (or too much!) about everything known about everything that been witnessed on the "original" Sims but eventually was thought to be better enhancing, replacing or summarily annihilating them before the game's official release leaving us with the cool task of pondering how different our whole experience would be if all of these discarded prototype/BETA elements were present in the version most of us have in our houses! So, make yourself at home and let us see what we both know:

You are rather likely to read and view some of the things below and think something, like "Hey, this information isn't quite matching with the reality" or you have cool things to say about everything that existed on Sims 1 before, but not after its final version that this stupid poster failed to mention or unknowns about! You are, a hundred percent, invited and welcome to be a member of this discussion, even if you are a Simmer that don't have necessarily something critically-esque to point up and is "just" playing the (also cool) role of the spectator who is first-seeing (or not) all the knowledge below!



Way better than spectating - at the bottom of this post you're getting an appendix with some cool Tools and URLs, so there's no way you are not checking the contents up by yourself!

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The content will be branched into spoiler tabs which (sometimes inaccurately) represent the year the content of the picture is (or might be) from:


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APPENDIX - LIVE THE BETA:
As you can clearly notice after opening all of those Spoilers, we do not have much room left to exhibit the wonders of the Sim 1's universe before its release!! Then, for the sake of covering all of the known bits without transforming it into something more overwhelmingly massive and the opposite of mobile-friendly than it currently is, you're invited to explore and discover the remaining aspects from the game's pre-release content yourself, with the help of the following interesting URLs and programs:



After spending some good hours sorting the contents - oops, - turns out this featherbrained guy here are clueless about how to finish this post. It is almost certain that there are some weird and unforgivable incorrect information, mistakes or typos that only the sands of time will unveil. But, hey, hopefully you, as a fan, will find the images shown above minimally interesting or, who knows, useful for whatever you might be doing with your game right now. Again: the topic shall not end here! Then, every sort of collaboration is going to be extremely well-received and will be an absolute pleasure to read/view/listen and, why not, ponder about them. OK, time for dinner, sul sul you!

That Elvis GUI... Why does every beta GUI in this series always look better than what we get in the release build? Taking away the brain... it was perfect.

Seriously want SIGMUND in the final game. He looks like an awesome character.

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A lot of those sprites of were probably place holders until the final object was complete. The Sink and end table the phone is on look very crude and incomplete to have been finished items.

@LUCPIX

That's an amazing job compiling all these pieces of information and screenshots. I enjoyed reading the timeline of events that occurred and the screenshots and notes accompanying them. A terrific post, thank you for your time in making it.

I think they may have been placeholders or at one time a different art style was considered before they settled on photorealism. Other Maxis games used that kind of an art style as well as the Theme series of games by bullfrog. It was a popular style in the 90s for simulation type games and The Sims has development we know of from at least 1997, but I believe it started much sooner.

Interesting! I love seeing Beta things.

Those very early, extremely cartoony characters though......YUCK! Glad the game did adopt a more subdued aesthetic later on...

And that beige UI from the 1998 doorsofperception screenshot....terrible!....typical, over-designed 1990s UI with the "family portraits" thing for the household members....
Not sure what to think of the brain version, kinda like it, kinda prefer the simpler and clearer version that was released.

Woah they made Quake skins for the game? Were they ever released?

Hey, man, we can kind of use this in-depth picture as an archetype of such awkward transition between the former adopted aesthetic and the one from the game's final version, as though that elder is a totally different kind of human
It is worthy mentioning this cool shot is a part of Press Kit CD's slideshow, a sort of resource material intended to display what was developed so far so the media'd have something to preview/promote the game with! Check the slide where this image is:


^ Every single file has a very precise "When it was last modified" date

It's been ages ever since, but I have a foggy-uncertain memory of spotting in some website (almost certainly archived and unavailable ) a pre-release image on which these 3 Sims were positioned exactly like this which makes me to believe it's a mock-up that uses the game's graphics other than a regular screenshot; and, unless it is supposedly highlighting a character outside the camera, no plumbob/arrow is present above his/her head. Feels convenient to pass a fine-tooth-comb for these pictures... if they're not only existing in my head!



HAhaha, for reals?? In my opinion, the former interfaces are a beauty (specially those with dates/months/years put at but, between you and me, does the average player play in a household in particular during 365, 265, 165 or even 65 sim days??) but none of them manages to somehow reflect 100% of the game's creative, abstractly sandbox-y factor, either because its colors or because its "straight" shape is rather "arbitrary"? And you are right about the brain; however, it'd be awesome if they, at least, inserted that "twinkling" effect somewhere else! That "Sigmund" one does make an actual, shy apparition in game as an relationship panel's thumbnail! Not that your Sim is suddenly "befriending" him, it was just a way the game's staff apparently thought it was convenient to fill the thumbnail room from a Sim whose head is unidentifiable/broken by the engine

About that Elvis picture - you apparently still is fond of S1! I quickly converted the data from the vanilla's Velvet Clown (Velvet Elvis from the future) to make it look like Velvet Elvis (Velvet Clown from the past), based on its sharpest appearance in a screenshot which you might find interesting to be bought for one of your families!


DOWNLOAD



I agree with you - most of the objects from the final version had a rawer similar from the past (with some exceptions, such as the design from the former television which is definitely prettier than the final version ones IMO, although the game's staff could argue the latter ones suggest some more "universality", if that makes sense?), "placeholders" as you said, but sometimes I wonder if they were immediately put in game meaning to be replaced to "better" versions later; In fact, they felt like enhancing them, especially because, as the dvd man has spoken, the game's production, kinda with the same engine and same aesthetics we know today, started at least 3, 4 years before 2000 [u](both of game's unused lots' database mentions the year 1996)[/ul] and this was a relatively brief period in gaming when it's happened some massive, cellular progression on how an average commercial game looked like, if we think about the earliest uses of the anti-aliasing (firstly on consoles), dynamic lighting, etc!! We can take a good example of it by checking what changes, graphically, in the 4 first Tomb Raider games (1995-2000) and, obviously, if we check the Sims' 1995 shots from this thread's PDF at the appendix:





Chris Sawyer may have thought "What if I insert some Roller coasters on it?", ha




It's interesting how you listed all of the Sims 1's songs (even Sim Online's) and catalogued them according to their names and composers/reproducers (That's funny because now I'll be trying to extract something "If You Really See Eurydice"-esque behind that that was merely a "Welcome to our Premiering Residence"-themed song, ha
You're welcome man



You're right Hahaha Hey, it's not 100% ugly! However, you know, whenever I think how it could behave in game, it always gets an astringent, but comprehensibly old-fashioned vibe, like one of those games you click at one UI button, for example, and then an uncomfortable 2-second sound effect regarding the button's function plays until you get weary of it and shut the game up



Prolly just for themselves!

I wonder how the music sounded like during beta production, if there was any at all. Those cartoony looking Sims remind me of the Ren & Stempy cartoon music, which explains the '50s style neighborhood music.

Source.


Definitely. All these years have gone by but TS1 is still my favourite of the series. Thanks for the Elvis Velvet photo!

Something that we can listen to by ourselves, in practice, we still cannot go much in depth about it but, hey, we never know! If you're up to a vague example of an OST from the game that used to sound only 'that much' differently, check this video, it'll warp you to the sound's moment! Just for orientation, there's a such upbeat flute going on with the other regular instruments, which has been eliminated or just undermined at least one month later



IDNEZ.CZ , JULY/1999
^ Good news! The aforementioned supposed similar of @dvdgamer2000 's attachment has been found, yeah it actually wasn't just an hallucination and confirms it as a montage, since the only thing that makes it different is the environment surrounding the sims and the counter set! To those interested in more pictures, it is brought by a very old Czech website whose author previewed Sims, and at least half of its media is known by you, if you also read the third post of this thread!



Also, this thread's IMAGES/2000 spoiler from the #3 post received a cool update containing a massive amount of media straight from the game's User Manual with high-quality of content which shows us different perspectives from what used to be just blurry pixels until now. Now we can confirm that that Michael Ryan dude lived at SimLane as a pre-made character, sharing street with the Goth household, until the game's last moments of production, before his definitive removal, and how our known pre-made characters were curiously pigeonholed as "Difficult and Easy", for example;

I pulled mine from a Throwback Thursday on The Sims facebook page. I've attached the version I originally edited as well as another prerelease picture.





Additionally, the game ships with data for a lot number 11. I was able to force the game to load it and I did a video on it a while back. I'll include the link to that below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P10iMJvoMNI

@LUCPIX (here another user that doesn't know how to properly tag anyone) that's freakin' amazing all you've got there! Intereseting how they went for 'Bullfrog-Simcity 300-y' aesthetic before settling on the one they ended up using. It would have been interesting seeing the game with those graphics (especially after seeing the 1998/1999 'Simutrans' pic of the Neighbourhood), but the style we ended up seeing is much more unique. Those first models of the sims themselves look pretty uncanny, though; as there's no woman character, I wonder if they couldn't make a cartoony women desing work, and that's why they opted out of it. The objects designs seem to have been made after the design of the characters and environment, wich is pretty funny considering the game started as a building simulator; I wonder if they had a full assortment of build and buy objects taht they had to throw away and started from scratch. It sure looks like it, as every pic with objects shows a similar style, even with objects that didn't make it to the final product.

Speaking of wich, thanks for the 'Elvis in Velvet' portrait. Wonder if they would have made an Elvis character similar to the Tragic Clown (Tragic Elvis? haha). It would definitely be interesting if someone could mod that into the picture!

Also, I see if I can find a document I saw once about the research behind The Sims 1; I remember it quoting the famous Manslow Pyramid, explaining the decisions tath led to the personality system... all pretty interesting.

Man, @dvdgamer2000 , what's with the missing saving button, though?? As it seems, the engine update brought to us by Hot Date/Unleashed (specially Unleashed considering you are using its houseseholdless "edit Residential lot" mode) hasn't digested their outstanding complexity

Anyway, complementing your cool video (I'll eventually give a proper answer to your unused sounds video's comment), both of the lots that ironically is placed in the top/bottom of the used ones like a burger (House00.iff and House11.iff) are a thing we can take note of and use since the vanilla game! I can't immediately take a screenshot of it currently because my game now has LL and HP installed (and that's more than enough by now!!) and it caused a slight difference to their "last modified in" date but, as I can recall, they haven't been edited since late 1999. However, with the addition of the mentioned EPs, the update responsible for the existence of the "UserDataX", "poly-hood" system, their "last modified" date has changed, although remained playable ("playable").

>Allow me to give you a screenshot-flooding example of how the unused lots behave when they're forced to be read by a former Sims 1's engine and check what changes or what is similar from your case<


First off, it's worthy to note there is a former neighborhood layout of our knowledge which contains the ONLY street placement that would suit well the House11 you have guided us!


Adding up the passive-aggression of previous' image lack of sharpness, the placement of any of the 2 unused lots causes the game to pop-up this inputting message which SEEN BY THE SURFACE doesn't provoke any visible changes


A test house proudly built with House11's roots, weeks ago! A couple things about this lot's gameplay:
- The Visitor NPCs walking itinerary is rather confused (Service NPCs, like Nancy, come as well), taking the characters outside the crosswalk until the disappear in the asphalt boundaries (see the walking girl from the picture)
- Calling multiple neighbors for a massive HP's gathering is a possibility, but they will not leave their starting position tile unless you "move_objects on" them next to your home; a weird conflict goes on, and the game tends to slow down a bit
- Nancy normally brings the newspaper and you can purchase a computer, then you can find a job; On the other hand, the cabs/buses will not naturally come due to a easily-solvable absence of a CarPortal controller object!
[To be complemented]

Sooner or later I'll upload a video showing a (hopefully!) fluid and effective gameplay with a 8-Sim household living inside the elusive House00.iff !! It was kind of impossible until I realized I could compensate the non-existence of mailboxes and garbage cans by... buying new ones! And some other essential elements that will bring a different sort of life to that sandbox-esque property. Thank you man

@dvdgamer2000, that's a really great video, it even features in the Cutting Floor article on The Sims 1 if I'm not mistaken!
@LUCPIX What's happening in those screenshots? Hah, the expressions 'Developers think of everything' applies completely to this! So there's a lot surrounded by the street that we can access from the game, huh? But I want to know, how does it exactly work? It properly interacts with other lots? Is it accessible from the Nhood screen? Pretty interesting!

Couple things I want to say...

The Sims 1 originally wanted to generate thumbnails where sims had facial expressions for their mood. There's redundant thumbnails in the sims 1 that are all identical. I think they scrapped it because they were too small to see anyway lol.

As for the save button... My best guess is that lots depend on a UI event to say if the player is permitted to save. Pre-unleashed loading an uninhabited residential lot was not possible. I suspect there was an update to 'prime' the lot data to handle that case which was not rolled into the lot 11 file because it was unused.

I think between that and the below info I addressed everything... if you have more weird questions tag me or give a shout.

--- Some of the info below is not 100% relevant to the topic but I feel it is very interesting nontheless. ---

I don't think House 00 is a real lot. The game will accept any lot number between 0 and 99. Actually, using a patch that enables debugging cheats I got it to load lot 100 once but this would not be practical under any meaningful circumstance and it caused a ton of object errors that would need to be accounted for. A bit of trivia is that in the final game each lot has a street number which is the number after house in the iff file. This means that 1 through 10 Sim Lane are House01 through House10 dot iff. This means that some lot numbers are unused. Hot Date's downtown lots begin at 21 I believe. Somewhere I made a text file with all the lot oddity quirks of zero through 99. If there is no lot data for a lot the game is forced to load it will just generate a template lot. It does this if a lot becomes corrupt. However I think if there is a version in the patch folder it will load that if a lot is absent instead. I need to double check. Lots 32 through 39 are unused entirely with no data.

The game has a Generic Sims Call for testing lot zoning type for lots that are Old Town or Sim lane. This-- and maybe the creepy hallow magic town lots-- is/are the only place this call is used. If you use Global From Simulation with 0xA0 or 10 you can check the current house number. Every other global for "Is lot a [place] lot?" uses these checks. The quirk here is that some unused lot numbers are seen as these lot type and initialized properly for them for the proper controllers and NPCs and if you use an object to take the sim to the lot and have a house##.iff for it in the userdata it CAN be used. (I was working on a hack to allow you to take your sims to work which would use these 'unused' lots.) All lots not listed below will load as a residential lot, but if you edit zoning.iff for the Sim Lane and Old Town lots. There is a zoning.iff for Magic Town but editing it seems to do nothing, though I suspect it may be used by the generic lot zoning call for this area since the creepy hallow lots are blocked out to validate as "magic lots" in the global.

Also yes that video was on TCRF page I originally made it for the page! I added a lot of other regional info and differences but due to staff drama it ended up off the page.

--- Lot assignments from the global checks if anyone is interested ---

Lots...
21 through 31 are blocked for Downtown. (I think two are unused.)
40 through 49 are vacation lots. (One is unused.)
- 40, 41 and 42 are snow
- 43, 44 and 45 are forest
- 46, 47 and 48 are beach
- 49 is unused, but loads with the standard grass so I suppose it is functionally a forest lot.
- 50 through 80 are used for the Old Town lots
- 81 through 89 are studio lots
- 90 through 99 are magic lots (99 is used as the 'above the beanstalk' lot)

Double posting to get the thread back on topic...

Found these on tumblr, not sure of the source or validity. It shows a version of the family select screen I don't think I've seen before.

Hi dvd @damondamore if, with "House00 isn't a real lot", you meant there wasn't probably any intentions of making a formal use of them after its condition as a 'prototype', 100% agreed with you; by all means, absolutely "nothing" happens inside, in spite of its abstract grass design and, when it comes to how it's noticed on Gamestar's preview, the mailbox/garbage cans are there at least; the emptiness we can spot at lot 00.iff may be healed just after the manual insertion of the main controller objects and, for the sake of making it to belong with the rest of the nhood and not make it polluted and overwhelmed outside, a quick use of "map_edit" cheat to determine the boundaries, etc. If anything, its exceptionally massive size is what makes it interesting and unique to handle

About the "tumblr"'s neighborhood screen -- ???????? You theoretically should have seen it before because yours truly has gathered and edited these pictures with the CAS faces and put them behind the IMAGES/ NHOOD spoiler, at this thread's third post, hahahah. Hey, you are missing out so much of this thread's context by not checking this gallery, which explains why you sometimes spoke a trivia or two as though it hasn't been previously mentioned! Just out of curiosity I'd love to see what tumblr post it is and, it's your lucky day, our neighborhood gallery has even more info than these two, and somewhere inside the "links" section there is the website we've gotten these screenshots from. Have fun and later!

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Hello, @ed95 (mentioning via "arrobas" {@} is an effective but silent processes, shall we take note of it) and I am very happy you have read (and got fond) of it since, you know, you were the target, no pressure intended, ha. Indeed we can't see a female at those old(er) images, the polygonal graphic standards back then definitely ruined any of the slim chances of capturing their beauty; the most obvious example we can mention is Lara Croft on her first year of existence!! Just saying :-P
Thank you and, hey, that makes you think a little. What if Elvis' picture actually has made its way to the final version (don't matter how random it is to display an IRL's personality right there, although it ironically makes total sense when it comes to Superstar EP's criteria!!) and Livin' Large would provide us, instead, a Presley NPC whose function is appearing out of nowhere once you're in a super good mood and he'd sing songs, play with your Sim's electric guitar and dance with you and the rest of the household? Hahaha, looks like one of those butterfly effect situations; But one's always pondering. If you fancy purchasing Elvis made of Velvet as a fancy decor to one or two of your families, I'd love to check it and, who knows, discover where is the best place to place it in a home since it's a kind of tough call, right here. Don't wrinkle your nose in case the Tragic Clown appears!!! It's a very rustic object conversion (at least by now). And it'll be frigging nice to read this PDF, do not be afraid! Later, dude
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AH, about the House11 lot - Yes, it does "interact" with the neighborhood without major issues, the Neighborhood screen displays it without making it look "out of place" (because those three street corners, although they technically don't belong with the nhood's street layout, they get covered and unseen since the main screen are meant to ignore any of the lot tiles which is considered "out of bounds" by the Buy Mode (streets included) if that makes sense? Then the only thing that looks slightly out of place is the asphalt driveway, inherently present on this lot since the beginning and, yeah, make us to wonder also "could we drive in-game". Let us know if you want to learn how to access and make this lot minimally functional to you :-)

I think House00 was either (1) a lot the developers used to test which was not meant to be used in the final game or (2) a 'reserved' lot number that they could give sims who were not yet moved into a lot. The game tries hard to cope with missing and corrupted files so I think it's just generating the lot from some kind of generic template, possibly not even explicitly for that lot number. It's also possible that they included it just as a failsafe in case somehow the player loaded it, or possibly it is used as an 'error' lot if a sim's house number can't be read. The games has a LOT of ways it tries to cope with things fairly intelligently.

I will say I read most of the posts but sometimes my brain is just like... OK let's explain it this way. I admit I didn't have time to check everything, though. My bad.

Also I will say that every lot has a thumbnail generated when you save the lot. If a lot's thumbnail is corrupt, missing or invalid the game will generate a new one when it is needed. For this reason no lots should have issues on the neighborhood screen. Also I will say that I think which tiles are used in the thumbnail (and for the lot outline-- some lots have "holes" in them!) is based on which tiles are editable. This can be changed with the map_edit cheat.

I that that cars were something I read they thought about but ultimately scrapped because without anywhere to drive to (well, only work) there wasn't much point to them. The base game was balanced around the idea sims never really left the lot. I think they revisited the idea of cars for hot date, but I can't recall if they said why they didn't really take the time with them. Or it is possible that carpools could idle in the driveway or service NPCs could drive onto the lot and park (similar to sims 2) and could make use of a driveway.

Or perhaps it was for decoration to go with the basketball hoop. We may never know.

Bridging the topic, why don't we come and try and abuse of some of the mentioned might from the engine to automatically generate lot's thumbnails, faithfully based on somebody's >very latest< experience with an X household:


- Running the executable with the shortcut suffix "-nodx6" is a B Plan-esque way of making the game to run, advised for the old-school computers whose most recent drivers are powered by DirectX 5, which was already showing its age when TS was born! A potentially effective medicine against lack of compatibility. However, there's a price! Players are pre-warned by the READ-ME file: The game won't be able to draw roofs - and this is how they look like in-game, even when the mouse cursor is hovering something else other than the lot in question


- We have at our disposal a series of cheat codes that demands the engine not to draw any pieces of floor/walls/objects/props/characters/terrain/etc; If you desire going wild, we can ask it to do all of it AT ONCE! In this case, all we're ever seeing is a bit of the latest drawn frame, stationary, the source of patterns drawn with as your camera pans...


...Yet, a thumbnail will it try




- This time, with only the walls asked to be unseen


- The told "map_edit" tool doodles a new tile arrangement to make it obvious to us which ones of the floors, among the lot's area, are claimed as boundary and, if we save the game with map_edit turned ON, its tiles are clearly seen from the bird-eye-vision screen


- Justly because the lot's streets are by default set as boundary (therefore invisible in the NHOOD screen), we don't see the cabs/buses at the street in case we happen to save the game at a precise point where a vehicle is honking! Everything changes in case we switch its position to an area of the house that is supposed to be visible by us (See the bus at the second-story's Earth Teleporter??)


As though its intended "creativity-friendly-factor" wasn't enough, we are gladly and minimally allowed to switch some of its deepest functions, with some minor issues, depending on how deep you fancy digging! Mainly due to the fact the engine does not adopt a "this information isn't known; therefore it isn't real" philosophy, for most of the things we're ever doing to the game, there's going to be witnessed an attempt from the program to digest the new, strange information and to display it in the best way it can do (And, if it cannot help us, it'll prefer not to show it and "moving on", other than making the exe to close! At least based on personal experiences, and with exceptions because, hey, that's life). I bet you, reader and Sims 1 player, once have inserted one of your favorite mp3 at a certain folder to make it the soundtrack of your SimLane's radio station. Same rules apply!

The base game launched with windows 95 support but more interestingly-- and you probably know this already-- the game tracks a full* real world calendar which begins in 1997 by default on most lots. Direct x 5 was released in 1997. Spooky!

*there's some quirks but shh

A calendar isn't that much of a surprise. The Sims 1 followed in the footsteps of SimCity when it came to many of the design decisions. The Sims 1 feels the most connected to the SimCity universe, and more specifically SimCity 3000. Which I always loved about how The Sims 1 actually feels like you're controlling the same Sims that would live in SimCity. The other Sims games haven't been connected directly to SimCity. Sure they've mentioned SimCity 100 times over, but the Sims in later games don't feel like the same Sims that would live in a SimCity 4 or SimCity 2013 city.