The Sims is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The original lead designer, Will Wright, revealed a funny detail about the first game in the series on the occasion of the birthday. In an early development stage, the AI was actually too good.
Why did the AI have to be worsened? As soon as a player does not intervene in the situation, the wildest things happen in The Sims. The chaos that happens to the Sims in autopilot mode is intentional. Wright revealed that the AI was deliberately programmed to be worse because it had been too good at first.
“Almost everything the player did was worse than the Sims on autopilot.”
Therefore, the development team incorporated some bugs so that unpredictable things would happen. For example, it can happen that your Sim first makes a toast after not making it to the bathroom. Another example that Wright mentions is the bite of a guinea pig that suddenly leads to a deadly disease.
If the AI had not been worsened, a player would not have had to do anything to keep their Sim alive. The Sims would have perfectly fulfilled their needs and would have been well taken care of all around. To give players something to do, they had to make mistakes, which is why the AI was adjusted.
The Sims is known for its many expansions. One of them can be seen here in the trailer:
Players should feel like gods
How did the autopilot come about at all? The Sims was originally supposed to be an architecture simulation, but at some point, the idea was abandoned. The basic thought for the autopilot comes from a tragic accident. In 1991, a huge fire raged in Oakland, which also burned down Wright’s house.
When he returned to the ashes of his house, he saw that only ants had survived the fire. He likely paid a lot of attention to them. Because he thought, what if humans used pheromones to communicate like ants? Then they would know directly when they were hungry that they automatically had to go to the fridge.
Initially, Wright developed the insect simulator SimAnt, but later The Sims emerged from it. The initially too good AI is due to observations of the ants, whose behavior Wright wanted to incorporate into the life simulation.
Wright found another analogy to the ants: with The Sims, the developer wanted players to feel like gods controlling small, stupid ants. In reality, they are the ants who believed they were gods. Even the cheats were only meant for one purpose: players should believe they could break the game.
A new game that wants to compete with The Sims is inZOI. The Korean life simulation focuses on pure realism. This is evident in the fact that you can even transfer your own face: inZOI transfers your face into the game and you can try out the alternative to Sims tomorrow
