First time I played I believe was in the summer of 07. I had been obsessed with the game for about a year before, but could not get my hands on the game. By luck one of my friends had the game when I just happened to be over at their house, so I immediately begged we play. Made an adult sim with a toddler and moved them into a Pleasantview condo. It was kinda hilarious since I knew more than my friend about her own game (she was warning me that cribs came with the baby so making one in CAS was gonna mean I had no crib, think she mighta been confused with Sims 1 now lol).

It wasn't until a year later that I actually had my own copy to play. The real pain was that I had gotten Bon Voyage as a christmas gift in 07 because child me hadn't thought to explain that I needed the base game. It wasn't until the next summer that my mother and I had finally been able to find a copy of the base game in store (technically it was Double Deluxe). We hunted months for it, kinda nostalgic about that looking back because now the first step would've been to just search online for it. Sure, I cried a lot when each store was a failure, but hey it was a time...lol. So been playing since 2008, with very short breaks compared to some others people have had and I can imagine myself playing it for as long as there is a way to play it.

Played the game for the first time in about 2010, mostly because I'd played the Sims 3 and loved it and wanted to try the game before it. It was a little too hard for me as a 10 year old, so I didn't play it much. Then when origin did the free giveaway of the sims 2 in ~2014 I think, I managed to get a copy of the Ultimate Collection, and I've been playing ever since.

I got Sims 2 for Christmas in 2004.

2005 PS2 version. Then from there all the other PS2 Sims games.

In 2008 I got a computer that could finally play the PC version.

I was 4 years old. We started with The Sims 1 as my mum had the complete collection; my older sister seems to think my dad pirated it and burnt it on a disc, but I seem to remember owning each expansion individually (thick case with all the discs in it with the cover art and everything). Either way, we were able to play that game and this was in the middle of 2004 making me 3 at the time. I wasn't good at it, I mostly relied on my older sister, but I still played it... horribly. We also had The Sims, The Sims: Bustin' Out, and The Urbz: Sims in the City for the PlayStation 2. We mostly loved the PC game, but we had to play on the console if our mum wanted to use the computer, and as for the console versions, we loved The Urbz.

My older sister found out about The Sims 2 in 2005 (I would have been 4 turning 5 that year) and at that point only the University Expansion Pack was released. My sister begged our parents and they relented and gave us the base game as a treat. I still remember the excitement when it popped through the letter box. My sister then received the University EP for her birthday a couple of months later, but everyone got to play it, and from that point onwards we kept up to date with EP releases and ignored Stuff Packs for some reason. Then, after the release of FreeTime, stuff really went down in my personal life at that time (I was 7 about to turn 8), which made us lose track, we weren't even aware Apartment Life was a thing until years later. By the time we tuned back in, The Sims 3 was being hyped up and announced and I remember how cool it was for the time. Kept up to date with all that, while my sister slowly collected for The Sims 2 again and as soon as that started, I played The Sims 3 less and less, especially with the more instability it threw at me.

So to make a long story short, I've been playing The Sims 2 since I was 4 and the series as a whole since I was 3. My family really loved their video games

I started playing when I found the game in a shop in 2008.

I must've started playing back in 2008-ish as I remember Bon Voyage being sold physically at stores when we bought it. A friend of my sister's lent her the base game and some expansions and she introduced it to me, I was like 7 lol

My (older) kids have been playing since about 4 as well. However neither of them so far is a super sims fan like me But it's fun to see what they want to do. My 14yo used to dress everyone in crazy hairs/outfits, adopt lots of animals and build giant, unplayable maze type houses. My 4yo constantly tells me to take the sims to the swimming pool or order a pizza. He also built a pretty great, usable house, although he left 1x1 spaces between all the rooms because he didn't get that walls were a thing. And he created a really long 2-tile wide room in the garden, which he said was for the horse. I couldn't find a horse in game so I gave him a Chritsmas reindeer statue and discovered that when you pet the reindeer you have a chance to get an electric shock!

2006 when Open for Business came out. My older female cousin introduced us younger cousins to the Sims 1 and we were sitting around the old computer at some family event we kids had gotten bored of and were fascinated by the Sims and kept busy for what felt like hours. I was close to my only 1,5 year older male cousin and he eventually got first the sims 1 and then later the sims 2 and we played it for hours together too. Eventually I wanted to play it at home too so I bought Open for Business myself and borrowed the basegame and Nightlife from him (I only bought the discs for them around 2010 because our relationship had broken down due to some family drama and us being on opposing sides). From then on, I build my collection and bought every new pack as soon as my 15€/month allowance would allow or a holiday came around. Sims 2 has been with me through some tough shit but also the highs. I was 9 when OfB came out, now I'm 26. I never upgraded to Sims 3 because my old laptop probably would have grown feet and jumped out the window if I tried it and the basegame for sims 4 has been sitting untouched in first my Origin and now EA library ever since they first gave it away for free. Still happy I had the forsight of redeeming the I-LOVE-THE-SIMS code back in the day for the UC just to be better safe than sorry. Saved me a lot of hassle when my current laptop came without a built-in disk drive.

I wish my memories were as specific as some of yours, but I can only tell it was somewhere around 2007-2008 when I was 14 or 15. I was in high school and it was most probably before the release of freetime and apartment life. I never played TS1 and was not particularily hyped about TS2, even though two of my middle school friends played it (and, as I understood much later, one of them was actually even creating recolors for clothes!). I was actually not the one who was interested in getting the game, my younger sisters convinced my parents to buy it. And in the end, out of three sisters I am the one who became literally addicted and is still playing to this day :D

I do have two defining memories of my earliest play sessions:

- The first time I decided to build a house, I actually didn't know about the build mode, so I decided to create a sim, move them to an empty lot, cheat to have a ton of money, and just wait for the sim to die so that I have an unoccupied lot to build on. After all this effort I was very disappointed to discover that you cannot keep playing on a lot after your sim's death and are forced back to the neighborhood view... Don't know how I eventually discovered the build mode but from that point on I rarely ever played live mode again

- One of the very first families I created was a pair of two female roommates, and at some point I realized that I could make them interact romantically, fall in love and even get in a joined union. This was absolutely mindblowing for me at the time, as a queer teenager starved for gay content

2004. I just got a new computer for my 16th birthday. I knew sims from the kids in the neighbourhood when I was 12, had my fun with AOE in the years between, and I just had to get Sims 2 when the base game dropped. My first CAS sims were characters from a sci-fi book I really liked back then and my own characters from the fanfic I wrote because of said book; I started a household with 5 sims, got a bit overwelmed and sent two sims cloudwatching... A few minutes later one sim was missing, but there were a tombstone and a satellite.

I played until Bon Voyage and then took a break for over ten years.

15th July 2014. I was 13 then. I got the Sims 2 for free when the Ultimate Collection came out (thankfully a lot of youtubers I followed made me do it and gave me the exact instructions on how to enter the code and such) and I play it ever since. However my first memory of the Sims 2 goes back to 2007 when my sister played it. She never let me play it but I was allowed to watch. I remember how she drowned some dude with pink lipstick.

My memory is awful but I do vaguely remember playing it when I was around 8 years old. One of my sisters was an avid fan of The Sims 1 and purchased The Sims 2 which I took over until The Sims 3 came out, clearly not that long LOL. The Sims 2 disks were likely broken because I remember that I was stuck with only The Sims 3 until 2014. I purchased The Sims 2 Double Deluxe that year and had a lot of fun. Within the same year I found out Origin was giving out The Ultimate Collection for free so I snatched that up. I was 16 at the time. That's all I ever play these days and I wouldn't have it any other way! :D

If I could only remember the year... It was around the time The Sims 3 was being advertised heavily on TV. My only experience to the series prior was The Sims 2: Pets for the PS2 and I saw somebody play The Sims 1 years before that. I went to a garage sale with my grandparents who unfortunately passed away last year and I got my first experience with the base game, as well as Nightlife, Open For Business, University, Bon Voyage, Seasons and Teen Style Stuff. Eventually I got everything, and that's pretty much my story. It's been about... fourteen years I'm gonna say since I last played The Sims in any consistent manner as there were so many other games I was getting into, and after my disappointment with The Sims 3, it feels good to get back into The Sims 2 in 2023. The music is too good for me to wanna play any of the others. Mark Mothersbaugh truly is an inspiration. He made my childhood with Rugrats, and only enhanced it further with The Sims 2.


Also, for those who are wondering, I don't hate The Sims 3 or 4. I just can't find myself enjoying those two is all. I love the goofy music and cartoony look to the Sims that The Sims 2 pulled off so well and seeing that all go away in later installments just made me a little sad tbh. What can I say? The Sims 2 is my Sims game for life.

By the summer of 2004 I got seriously bored with the original game. For a while, I was playing Singles - does anybody remember that one? It was revolutionary in a way because it was the first 3D Sims(like) game, but it was rather lacking in content - basically you had a couple that you had to get to bed, and in order to achieve that they had to clean their apartment all the time. (There were surely other actions available, but cleaning like a maniac is all that I really remember.) It was good for a while and there was even a sequel but by that time, TS2 already blew it away.

I bought TS2 as soon as it was available - late September, perhaps? - and by the end of the year, my first Pleasantview exploded: I made so many Sims living in so many houses that my poor old computer just could not cope anymore. I am afraid I am still playing like that but now I have a much better computer.

I think it was in 2008 when I was 8-9 years old. Before that, my family friend showed me The Sims 1 and I didn't show a lot of interest. After that, a slightly older friend told ne about this amazing Sims game her friend had and told me the wildest moments and her use of CC. I was intrigued. Then I found out that the friend of my parents is a simmer, mostly builder and I asked to play when we visited them. I played Riley's story in Life Stories of all games cause I clicked on a random icon on desktop. The first gameplay on my PC was when two of my friends and me made three teenage girls and their mom and moved them in Pleasantview in the house with a big window near the park.