Like many kids, I grew up playing whatever video games I could get my hands on, with my early choices largely dictated by my parents’ preferences and what the owner of the only computer store in my rural hometown chose to stock. The original The Sims was the first game I successfully lobbied to buy: actively seeking it out — and my obsession once I actually played it — was, in retrospect, an important early sign of my personality development at age 10. So, as you might imagine, four years and countless thankfully unrecorded playtimes later, I’m as enamored with the first sequel to The Sims as a geeky 14-year-old. Read: extremely. Because life is sometimes beautiful, I am destined not to be disappointed.
All of which is to say that nostalgia plays an undeniable role in gaming; but I still maintain that The Sims 2 is the pinnacle of the series. While it’s not an uncontroversial opinion, it’s not entirely a niche one either: it’s certainly more deserving of that title than The Sims or The Sims 4; while The Sims 3 has its fair share of fans now, room temperature readings seem to suggest that it’s a 50-50 split at best.
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Of course, The Sims 2 wasn’t without its share of critical acclaim upon release, even if it received fewer critical acclaim overall than its sequel. For players of the original game, it was the first time they could return to the base game without the add-ons they’d spent the previous four years (and tons of money) collecting to expand their experience. The notable absence of features like pet ownership, vacations, fame, magic powers, and city nightlife — all of which were added via the original game’s seven expansion packs — led to a certain amount of criticism, especially when it became clear that EA and Maxis were going to sell nearly all of those features again in The Sims 2, which essentially amounted to a rehash of the aforementioned EP.
Yet The Sims 2 avoided the backlash that The Sims 3 and 4 experienced throughout their lifespans for a number of reasons; key among them being its genuine innovation.
The Sims was a revolutionary life sandbox game when it launched in 2000, and The Sims 2 is the only one of its sequels that innovated so much that it was almost unrecognizable as an iteration of its predecessor. The Sims still deserves its place in video game history as a proof of concept, but The Sims 2 had a bigger budget and better technology, and introduced a number of features to the series that feel so significant it’s hard to believe we hadn’t played them four years before.
The Sims 2 was the first game in the series to take the passage of time and its effects on characters seriously: aging, heredity, generations, and even days of the week were introduced in the base game. In the original Sims, death was simply the result of unfortunate events and fairly easy to avoid. In The Sims 2, death is inevitable, adding a deeper level of time management to a game that I think has always been a pretty hardcore management sim.
This dovetails perfectly with the introduction of Aspirations: a brand-new gameplay feature that lets Sims choose a few basic directions they’d like to see their short simulated lives take. Options include devoting themselves primarily to the pursuit of love, wealth, family, knowledge, prestige, or (in later expansions) simple leisure. Successfully fulfilling these aspirations will determine whether an elderly Sim about to have their last date with the Grim Reaper feels that their life was lived fully, or wasted on a dead end.
Some longtime Sims players argue that the original Sims never really had a sequel, as The Sims 2 added so many new dimensions to the life simulation concept pioneered by its predecessor—indeed, a new defining idea. In comparison, The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 were both milder versions of The Sims 2: each game had a core setting (the open world in The Sims 3, the relationships in The Sims 4) that was controversial among contemporary players, and was nowhere near as revolutionary in terms of gameplay as The Sims 2’s radical overhaul of the core purpose of the entire simulation.
The open world in 3 was a winning idea in theory, but the stability issues they caused meant that even ardent fans often couldn’t really play the game; and the idea of Sims experiencing fluctuating emotional states in 4 wasn’t as game-changing as it sounded on paper. But the shift from what initially was a relatively static requirements management sandbox to a life sim that actually simulated life in a very realistic way? No wonder it still stands out all these years later.
Of course, the threat of death wasn’t all that The Sims 2 was about. While some have criticized The Sims 2 for repackaging and selling back add-ons from the original game, it did incorporate many of the quality-of-life improvements introduced in the old game’s expansions from the get-go. The Sims 2’s base game gave Sims the ability to host House Parties, visit community lots, and live in multiple neighborhoods, while greatly expanding their social interactions and food and clothing options, all accompanied by a far more detailed character customization suite than the ready-made skins offered in the original. It was also the first fully 3D game in the series and the most plot-rich entry to date, with the base game alone single-handedly responsible for many, if not most, of the series’ lore cornerstones.
Beyond the base game, The Sims 2 expansion packs introduced major concepts like weather, college, business ownership, and apartments—all of which are now considered must-have expansion pack themes for any new generation of the series (and therefore easy wins in terms of DLC sales). And, for better or worse, with the advent of expansion packs, The Sims also started a tradition of small add-ons—which at least included a lot of content for a low price, but were clearly a precursor to the micro-DLC practice that appeared in The Sims 3’s store or The Sims 4’s ever-growing number of expansion packs.
But on its 20th anniversary, the most pressing question about The Sims 2 may not be what it contributed to the series as a whole, but whether it’s still worth playing – especially if you’re like many current Sims players, born in 2004 and too busy to experience it when it was all the rage.
My answer is yes, but it’s probably only theoretical at this point. The Sims 2 was briefly released in digital form as The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection, which included all the expansions and data packs, and was distributed through EA’s storefront, Origin. But it was only available for free to players who could prove they owned a boxed copy of the original base game, and it was only available for a relatively short period of time, from August 2014 (when the collection was released to promote the release of The Sims 4) to October 2018 (when it was discontinued entirely), and could only be re-downloaded if you had the means and brains to add it to your library in the four years between then.
It’s still fairly cheap and easy to buy used physical copies of the game, but you have to accept that the boxed versions were produced no later than 2008 and are therefore optimized for PCs running Windows Vista and below. While running The Sims 2 on a modern device is by no means an impossible task, The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 both require only the press of a digital button to start the game, making the technical threshold of the acclaimed Sims seem even higher.
While I will always defend The Sims 2’s supremacy, The Sims 3 and The Sims 4 are both excellent follow-ups that deserve praise for their unique take on ideas and quality-of-life improvements. At least as successors, they’re strong enough, and EA’s accessibility and continued support for both games means that unless you’re already a die-hard Sims 2 fan who won’t accept any alternatives, it may be more appealing to just play one of them. If you’re a die-hard fan, then you’re in luck, because even now there’s still a very active support and modding community around TS2; but it’s not a game you can just play casually like a sequel. Basically, it’s abandonware, so players will need to put in some effort to get to the title screen.
Of course, the ideal outcome would be for EA to re-enable support for The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection and start selling it digitally—and, by the way, we’ll be digitizing The Sims Complete Collection so that the entire core series can be preserved and readily available to modern players. It’s not impossible; the entire series will celebrate its 25th anniversary next February, and while EA barely has two other major Sims anniversaries to celebrate in 2024, they’ve hinted for some time that they want to support multiple Sims games simultaneously in the future.
Does this cryptic hint mean they plan to finally reach out to “retro” Sims fans? To be honest, I don’t know; and I’m beginning to suspect they don’t, since production on Project Rene (aka The Sims 5) seems to have quietly slowed down. But maybe this means that now is actually the best time for The Sims to look back to the past rather than look forward to its elusive dream of a revival? If that’s the case, then The Sims 2 is the perfect place to start.
