So I've been looking a lot at the older versions of the game, and I've come across a lot of people mentioning a fire in the EA office that caused most of the original coding to be lost, making Maxis have to completely recode the game, giving us what we have today.

I can't find any results on the internet, and searching on here just gives me Sims fire threads. Anyone care to explain for me? Do you think the game would have been better or worse, had they not lost the code?

Early game videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0o6s-Ym9AE - E3 2003
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq1LScuyzCA - GC Event 2003
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQh0-yykaco - Aspirations Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqiRdae6Qys - Unreleased Soundtrack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XwpoR9-jWc - 2003 Beta

#1 is more or less identical to the game we have.
#2 is so distorted it's almost impossible to see anything. It does look more or less like the finished product. Might be a still unfinished Beta.
#3 is an animated game trailer, not a gameplay trailer - they almost never look like the finished product.
#4 might just be that they decided to not put it in the game.
#5 says it's a beta, so there might be things in it they decided not to put into the game. I can't see anything vastly different from what we got, other than whatever the toddler is doing.

As for a fire, I don't know. Might have been mentioned, but if there's nothing to find it might just be a rumor.
There's lots of "lost" code and "lost" items already in the game files. Some have been salvaged already, and some is too unfinished to salvage properly.

(here comes a conspiracy theory, dislikes ahoy! also, this isn't serious)

Maybe there wasn't actually a fire. Maybe EA was just being EA and wanted the poor devs at Maxis to start over because they didn't like it and thought this newer version, the one we have today, would bring in more money. Whether that is true or not will never be known.

(end conspiracy theory, as a reiteration, don't take this seriously. )

Yeah, most of the videos seemed about the same as what we have in game with maybe one or two differences, except the 3rd one, but those trailers are never like the actual game.

http://i.imgur.com/7O87KHe.jpg And this.. it looks like The Sims original here.

http://www.gamerstemple.com/games3/000570/000570s.asp More early images are included in this link.

http://oi62.tinypic.com/243ivyt.jpg

Ah I remember that Aspirations trailer. The moment I saw it, I was obsessed with getting Sims 2. But I'm going off topic, so anyway; I've done so much research over the years of the Sims 2 Beta and recovered objects and text and stuff and I too have tried to find out more about the fire. It's literally impossible to google it because so much other things came up. The Wikipedia page for Sims 2 doesn't seem to mention it; so I presume it either happened and never got recorded as it wasn't actually that important or it just didn't happen and some things were just took out of the game for 'newer better things'. If you notice, the Sims 2 beta doesn't look that much different from the original Sims game, so I imagine they decided to up their game a little bit more, making them re-texture and change a lot of the hairs (and lets face it, EA want to make money so they're not going to have cars in the original game) and some things just ended up just not working correctly so they had to be taken out (such as weather).

The first pic is interesting; was that box of text supposed to be her bio or or some kind of scenario? As for the archive of pics, the only thing I'm really seeing that's different are unused hairstyles.

Was there a crowd holding pitchforks and screaming "Down with EA!" involved in the fire? (Or was EA actually good back then?)

EA's been the evil empire for as long as I can remember. So maybe there was a riot outside EA's headquarters.

Yes, I do recall there being something about a fire causing them to have to start over in that little mini game that plays when you first install the base game. Does anyone have any evidence as to whether this is actually true or just something that EA made up?

I do remember the fire rumour! They didn't lose EVERYTHING but they lost a good chunk of what they had. Nobody I talked to recalled such a thing so it kind of makes me smile to know that I wasn't crazy in remembering hearing about this.

I would have thought that an organisation of the size and complexity of EA would have had effective off-site backup and source code control in place. (Although I know a lot of Simmers have strong doubts about the competence of EA!) I suppose it's possible that some minor parts of the project were just on one programmer's computer at the time of a fire, but it's highly unlikely that they would lose everything.

If someone got the time they could check the local newspaper from where the EA headquarter is and see if there says anything about a fire in 2004?

Hope this helps.

http://www.unseen64.net/tag/maxis/

So it was just a small server room fire, but it destroyed much of the beta. Some things in the beta didn't look too bad, and I bet that it didn't have the corruption issues the final game does!

Meh, I think the current game looks way better.

I have to say this beta's graphics and UI look like a console version. Thank god we don't have it or I would be in the TS3 realm.

EDIT:

I expect it would be quite nice to play the beta version, and hopefully, Bella, Skip and Olive's hubbies aren't borked up in the beta, we could take a look at them. Just a thought

Whilst I agree the game we got looks better, wouldn't it be absolutely amazing if we could play the beta version? I'm 100% certain EA will have some copies of the early game with axed content and all the other goodies.

The only thing I really see different from the early versions, is the better lighting (Which can be pseudo replicated using the radience mod), and the ugly UI...

Personally, I don't believe the office fire rumour for one second...

If there was an office fire, we would have gotten a really bad game... Think a more broken version of The Sims 3 with none of the advantages...

Is that even possible? :O

AndrewGloria, if EA is too incompetent to keep their Sims 3 Store working to where you can buy Simpoints, they're likely too incompetent to make backups.

Yes it would - if all the dead premades whom we can't access files to or resurrect, aren't borked in the beta, we could take a quick rummage through them to see where EA went wrong. I'd love to take a look at Skip or Olive's past husbands and the two Nervouses without getting corrupted.

Imagine all the items, cheats and etc in the beta!

I wonder if they have that missing Memory Manager...

Tits and Ass Stuff?

Am I trippin' son?

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