22 years ago in the beginning of 2000 we released The Sims.

But releasing an early playable demo of the entire game before the official release was technically intractable and aesthetically unappealing, because it required a "critical mass" of objects and artwork to be even remotely playable.

Check out "The Sims Steering Committee - June 4 1998" to see some of the early ugly graphics and primitive gameplay:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY

>The Sims Steering Committee - June 4 1998: A demo of an early pre-release version of The Sims for The Sims Steering Committee at EA, developed June 4 1998.

So instead of releasing an early pre-release demo version of the game, we bootstrapped the Sims user created content industry by releasing SimShow, a simple 3D animated model and texture viewer featuring the character animation system I developed, to enable players preview the characters and kick off the generation of user created content that ultimately made the game so successful after it was finally released.

http://donhopkins.com/home/SimsSkinsTutorial

https://www.thesimszone.co.uk/files/download.php?ID=117

SimShow included some example content (skeletons, skins, and animations) to allow players preview the graphics and animations of the characters, and tutorials for making your own skins, to create "shallow fakes" of yourself and other characters in the game, using widely available tools like Microsoft Paint and Photoshop.

So even before The Sims was released, fans made all kinds of user create content with skins of themselves and also famous characters like the cast of Star Trek and Superman, which EA could not have legally published themselves because of copyrights and trademarks of course.

https://www.supermanhomepage.com/other/sims-skins.php

But since the fans did that themselves, and published them on their own web sites, it was just fine, and by the time The Sims was finally released in early 2000, there was already a big collection of all kinds of fan-made characters for the game available for download.

More stuff about The Sims:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359560

>When I implemented the pixelation censorship effect in The Sims 1, I actually injected some random noise every frame, so it made the pixels shimmer, even when time was paused. That helped make it less obvious that it wasn't actually censoring penises, boobs, vaginas, and assholes, because the Sims were actually more like smooth Barbie dolls or GI-Joes with no actual naughty bits to censor, and the players knowing that would have embarrassed the poor Sims. [...]

Also there's a great interview with Chris Trottier about "the toilet game", "tuned emergence", and "design by accretion", that I published on my old blog, which is still on archive.org:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160704065742/http://www.donhop...

>Sims Designer Chris Trottier on Tuned Emergence and Design by Accretion

>The Armchair Empire interviewed Chris Trottier, one of the designers of The Sims and The Sims Online. She touches on some important ideas, including "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion".

>Chris' honest analysis of how and why "the gameplay didn't come together until the months before the ship" is right on the mark, and that's the secret to the success of games like The Sims and SimCity.

>The essential element that was missing until the last minute was tuning: The approach to game design that Maxis brought to the table is called "Tuned Emergence" and "Design by Accretion". Before it was tuned, The Sims wasn't missing any structure or content, but it just wasn't balanced yet. But it's OK, because that's how it's supposed to work!

>In justifying their approach to The Sims, Maxis had to explain to EA that SimCity 2000 was not fun until 6 weeks before it shipped. But EA was not comfortable with that approach, which went against every rule in their play book. It required Will Wright's tremendous stamina to convince EA not to cancel The Sims, because according to EA's formula, it would never work.

>If a game isn't tuned, it's a drag, and you can't stand to play it for an hour. The Sims and SimCity were "designed by accretion": incrementally assembled together out of "a mass of separate components", like a planet forming out of a cloud of dust orbiting around star. They had to reach critical mass first, before they could even start down the road towards "Tuned Emergence", like life finally taking hold on the planet surface. Even then, they weren't fun until they were carefully tuned just before they shipped, like the renaissance of civilization suddenly developing science and technology. Before it was properly tuned, The Sims was called "the toilet game", for the obvious reason that there wasn't much else to do!

https://web.archive.org/web/20140720190605/http://www.armcha...