The old-school Sims community was awesome...

[SamanthaSamantha's icon]

Like many edgy teens from the so-called "Avril Lavigne era", I was all about that """effortlessly""" """"cool"""" image... which is why I ended up naming my school-mandated email address "sk8ter" (plus a second, equally cringy word and a string of numbers I'm not gonna tell you about). It was a sight to behold.

And what did I do with this limitless kewlness? Join a Yahoo! Group, of course!

Yeah... I wasn't even cool enough to try my hand at Yahoo! Games (let alone something actually awesome like MySpace or GoneGoth), but I'm glad that was the case, because joining that random group led me down a glorious path.

While I wasn't actually looking to do anything with a group I had only joined because I liked the name (told ya I was a teen), that thing soon evolved and introduced me to a whole ECOSYSTEM of sites, groups and forums all centered around a single topic: The Sims.

I, of course, knew what The Sims were (knowing that shit came with the territory of being a geek but pretending not to be), but I rarely ever played it — the game was too expensive, our home computer couldn't run it, and - quite frankly - it looked kinda dull for my instant gratification kind of brain.

But I would be lying if I told you that I didn't fall completely in love with it.

With the game? No, with the community.

I had seen cult-like followings for other games before (Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Doom, Monkey Island and many others had entire sites devoted to them), but none that felt so... pure.

These people didn't just like their favorite game, they contributed to it by collaborating with each other until you couldn't visit a random site without seeing familiar faces pop up on its forums, guestbook or chat — and this happened across dozens of them!

There was no sense of bad-faith competition (that I could tell, at least), but an almost reimagining of the game and its mechanics on the internet itself.

I had a friend who was really good at making cakes and foodstuffs to be imported into the game, so the community gave her the title of Official Baker and let her handle that aspect of the whole experience for others to enjoy, while another friend of ours was really good at designing furniture and got praised and recognized accordingly.

Someone else spent two whole years teasing her upcoming site and, rather than growing annoyed with her, the community loved it when she finally launched it — they could have EASILY dismissed her or ripped into her because the (admittedly overhyped) final product didn't deliver what they wanted, but they were just happy to see a fellow creator survive the minefield of mid-aughts web-building while also having something to show for it.

It was very wholesome, man.

But because of both a freak computer accident and my own responsibilities growing large and monstrous, I quietly left in 2009.

When I decided to check back in 2014, it was as if it had never been there.

Most of the sites were long defunct, others were broken and had not been updated in years; a few had either been sold or scrapped and weren't about The Sims at all anymore... it was a tough pill to swallow.

And when Yahoo! themselves decided to "crown" the universally shit year of 2020 by announcing the death of Groups, the last remaining thread to that wonderful era was unceremoniously cut.

I know it sounds way overdramatic, but this was a very beautiful thing to have been a part of and it really does suck that neither its members nor its traditions could survive even as the franchise that inspired them both continued going strong and still does to this day.

But this is NOT a lament - I refuse to let it turn into one -, but a celebration for such a passionate and pure thing.

So, please tell me: were any of you part of this short-lived, long-lasting phenomenon... or were even you aware of it?

 

[lestagio]

I had been aware of the Sims, but I was getting older and into college around the time it began to grow. I had always looked at it as kind of boring. There was no strategizing to command your army, no blowing up demons, no exploring a fantasy world. It just seemed boring to me. I had no idea that there was such a community around it!

That said, there were some chatrooms in the late 90s and early 2000s that had very tight-knit groups of people. You'd hop into the Warez channel and trade games with people. I talked to quite a few people on there and there were actually quite a few supportive people just dicking around. Doesn't seem like it was the same level of community as you mentioned, but it was definitely special. As I got deeper into college though, I stopped really paying attention and then the community was mostly gone. Not entirely, but it was simply not the same as it had been. No one was speaking all 1337, everyone was more rude and all about piracy and just... general assholery instead of having actual discussion. The feeling was gone.