De Sims 11 jaar: fun facts

De Sims bestaat vandaag 11 jaar en EA Nederland heeft ons wat leuke factsheets opgestuurd die erg leuk zijn om even te lezen. Jammergenoeg zijn ze in het Engels maar we hopen dat ze er ook nog in het Nederlands komen.

THE SIMS FUN FACTS

A family of overachievers
The original The Sims™ was the best-selling PC game worldwide in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2003, until it was dethroned by its own sequel The Sims 2, which was the best-selling PC game of 2004, and the second best selling PC game of 2005. In October 2006, The Sims 2 Pets was the most successful expansion pack in franchise history, ranking in spots 1 or 2 of the PC game charts for more than 3 months. In 2007, the franchise dominated the top ten charts claiming four of the ten spots including The Sims 2 Seasons Expansion pack at number 3 along with The Sims 2, The Sims 2 Bon Voyage, and The Sims 2 Pets. In 2008, The Sims had three games on the charts with The Sims 2 Double Deluxe, The Sims 2 FreeTime and The Sims 2 Apartment Life. In June of 2009, The Sims 3 sold a whopping 1.4 million units according to NPD data in its first week making it the biggest PC launch in EA’s history and now the worldwide best-selling PC game of 2009!

A worldwide phenomenon
The Sims franchise has fans around the globe with combined sales for the franchise topping 125 million – that’s more than enough for one for every single person in the UK!

Blockbuster Entertainment
The Sims franchise has generated more than $2.5 billion of revenue, putting it in the same class as blockbuster films Avatar, Titanic, and The Matrix Trilogy.

Celebrities Love The Sims
In the mix of Sims fans from around the world, famous actors, TV personalities, and musicians have shown their support for The Sims over the years. From attending parties, lending their voice stylings to the games, spoofing the games on TV shows, or just professing their adoration, celebs know how to get their game on.

Making news
The Sims was the first and only video game franchise to make the cover of Newsweek! Since then, The Sims franchise has graced hundreds of magazine covers to date with a more than 45 for The Sims 3 alone.

Fun that translates
The Sims 3 has been translated into more than 22 languages including Swedish, Thai and Russian and is available in over 60 countries worldwide! Da!

A language that doesn’t
Sims speak Simlish, an emotion-filled language that defies translation. In creating Simlish, the development team experimented with fractured Ukrainian and Tagalog, the language of the Philippines. Inspired by the code talkers of WWII, The Sims creator Will Wright also suggested Navajo. Over the years, fans have learned to recognize some words like dag dag for hello and nooboo for baby.

Funny Money
The Sims have their own form of currency called Simoleans. The currency originated way back in early eighteenth-century Britain, where sixpence were often slangily called a simon. Simon mixed with the much more valuable French gold coins called Napoleans became Simoleans! And, what more appropriate currency for The Sims!

Hot tracks
Rock Stars like Simlish too! Soundtracks for The Sims games read like a who’s who of chart-topping talent; The Black Eyed Peas, Nelly Furtado, Katy Perry, LeAnn Rimes, Natasha Bedingfield, the Pussycat Dolls and Depeche Mode have recorded their chart topping hits in Simlish.

Play from the comfort of your living room
Kick back and enjoy playing The Sims 3 from your couch! Play with life like never before on the PlayStation® 3 computer entertainment system, Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system, the Wii™ and Nintendo DS™. In 2011, the most popular life simulator franchise comes to a 3D world with The Sims 3 for the Nintendo 3DS™. Various The Sims games are also available on PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system, the Xbox® video game system from Microsoft, the Nintendo GameCube™, the Game Boy® Advance, the Nintendo DS™, Wii™, the PSP® (PlayStation®Portable), and on mobile phones including the iPhone!

Drop in for a download
Imagine having the entire city of San Francisco drop by each week for a visit. That’s close to what’s happening at The Sims 3 official community site, www.thesims3.com. The site welcomes up to 7 million unique visitors monthly, handles nearly 260 content downloads every minute, and more than 3.4 million uploads have been made to date including 12 movies each hour. Fan intensity is evidenced through the more than 200 million downloads of player created content including: The Sims characters, houses, stories and more.

It’s all about the hair
Over the years, the most popular downloaded content is hair, with over 670,000 downloads to date. The most popular style is female, long and wavy.

It started with a toilet
The first object ever created for The Sims was a toilet featured in the 1993 prototype. A variety of ways to interact with the toilet were introduced, from using it to cleaning it. According to the team, it was also the only object in the original game that different genders used differently—the men tended to leave the seat up!

The Sims go green
With the release of The Sims 3 in 2009, Sims can now be environmentally friendly. Not only can they live entirely off the land by growing their own food, but they can also reduce pollution by riding their bike or driving their Toyota Prius to work.

Hello neighbor!
In 2009, for the first time ever Sims can leave their homes with no loading screens and wander the neighborhood. Sims can go to the town square, ride their bikes to the beach and take a jaunt to the gym.

It’s A Material World
The Sims finally get their materialistic fix in 2006 with must have stuff to decorate, redesign or dress up new outfits. To date, there have been nine stuff packs which included items for your family, holiday, mansion, garden and of course, glamorous life.

Name Brand Envy
In 2008, nearly 1,000 H&M stores worldwide featured a garment designed by a player of The Sims for anyone to purchase. EA released The Sims 2 H&M Fashion Stuff pack, making Sims the trendiest on the block.

Home is where the heart is
IKEA® and The Sims collaborated in 2008 to make home the most important place on earth in The Sims with real-world IKEA home furnishings for the living spaces, bedroom and home office in your Sims’ homes.

Social!
With the launch of The Sims 3, Sims fans are online like never before with a Facebook page, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube. All together, The Sims have nearly three million friends online worldwide. That’s enough to fill up the largest stadium in the world, Rungrado May Day Stadium in North Korea, over four times. You can also play with your Sims in a new way with teaser experiences like SimSidekick, SimSocial and SimFriend.

Play it your way!
The appeal of The Sims is that there is no “right way” to play. Some players spend all their time building cool houses or following the personal lives of their Sims, while others like to create chaos wherever they go. Are you one of those players? If you have ever removed the pool ladder after sending your Sim in for a dip, then the answer is probably yes!

The Sims in Real Life
In 2004, EA Benelux created a real glass house where a family lived out their life for all to see in true The Sims style.

Before there was bird flu
Will Wright once introduced a mysterious virus to The Sims. As infection spread throughout the game, so did lively debate on the message boards. What was the source of the illness? Players finally traced it back to pet guinea pigs and shared tips for surviving the outbreak.

Feeling needy?
Like most of us, the Sims have aspirations, fears and needs. The model used in the game was inspired by “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” According to Maslow people’s needs are based on a hierarchy and once basic needs are satisfied, people are motivated by less urgent needs.

Stamp of approval
The French love The Sims so much that the French postal service issued an official postal stamp honoring the game. For that, we say, “Merci!”