My dad came home once with the sims 1 for me and my sister to play and it was love at first sight .

My sister was also hooked at first but she never took to it like I did.

I now have all 3 of them and she never got past The Sims 2.

For me it all started with a friendly neighbour I new for the longest time. I was around 11 or 12. She had a newer end Dell PC and Sims Life Stories (I believe, can't really remember). As I was in Middle school and Naruto and anime started to become obsessively popular she asked me as there was a 'adult' party going on outside if I wanted to play. She set me up with all the ropes and I created and moved my own "Naruto' themed family in. I was instantly OBSESSED. When I was unable to go to her house (she got mad because the only reason I continued to go over was to play) I kept thinking of who I would create and such when my family got out of the stone age. (However that didn't happen til I was in highschool four years later.)
I almost forgot about the sims until I went to my cousins house after she got hooked and played Sims 2 for the first time. A year later in highschool I purchased my first Laptop (which I'm on right now lol) And got almost the whole Sims 2 collection. When the sims 3 came out I was a bit skeptical because of all the words being tossed around by gamers and modders alike. Almost two years ago I opted out to get the third Series and have never regretted for one second all the hours and rigorously painful finger and wrist attacks I've had for four long hard years of mad gaming.
Sad thing is, I'm going into the Navy soon and won't be able to game.....how will I survive without my simmies!!! Oh well, I'll have to I guess. It'll just make coming back to them that much more of a reunion. I will die a sim fanatic I know.

The Sims was my first game in my childhood! =D
Man I remember I used to hate the sound effects like 'Ghost sound effects' & 'Robber sound effects'.
They gave me bloody nightmares!

I played The Sims for 4 years and I remember I always sneak in to my computer and play The Sims in early morning.

And who remembers Claire the Bear who always messes up your trash can!?

There's this commercial complex in downtown Hawally, an urban district, that was predominately geared to gamers, nerds and geeks. You want a game, they've got it and if they don't then they'll pirate it for you. Now I was, and still am a computer gamer so there was only one store that catered exclusively to PC gamers and that's where I discovered The Sims.

I originally wasn't interested, and looking back I never understood why. I kept walking back and fourth looking at all the games they offered and either I had them, or they bored me. This left me with one choice, well technically two, they had Diablo but that scared me so I went with The Sims.

Of course it wasn't that easy. My mother noticed that two of the Sims were locking lips and made sure to have a little chat about that. I didn't see what the big deal was, I just wanted to build homes and terrorize the little b*****ds.

Three years later I'm downloading nude skins and "WooHoo" animations.

And that's how I become a whore.

Strictly speaking it started in Wal-Mart, where one of the computers on display had SimCity 2000 installed. I enjoyed playing with that, and eventually bought it, followed by SimCity 3000. My 3000 disc was "lost", so I bought SimCity 3000 Unlimited to replace it...and when I installed that, I saw the trailer for The Sims. I was instantly smitten. I bought it within a month of its release, and had a BALL watching Bob Newbie dance to the Latin station during the tutorial. I spent most of middle and high school engrossed in the adventures of my pixel-people, in building homes and designing restaurants and living vicariously so many lives -- gangsters, movie stars, preachers, marooned Starfleet officers, Ward Cleaver-esque family men, sleazy retired country music singers, professional gamblers....

Good times. At the moment I'm enjoying a neighborhood with a Maxis theme: it has homes from SimCity 3000 and the original game in it, and the Sims are mostly named after petitioners and so on from 3000. So I'm paying homage to my roots.

Oh man, the memories. The Sims was one of the very first video games I'd ever played. I was around 8 and we had just gotten our first computer right around the time the game came out, and my cousin brought over a copy for us and showed me how to play. I still remember my first family, it was a blonde lady who was in the medical profession and lived in the Goth's house. I also couldn't figure out how to make her happy enough to go work or do anything and so abandoned her very quickly, but I soon caught on and got hooked. I still very vividly remember when I got the expansions too. Good times, haha

Ah, down the Memory Lane.

It was propably 2001 or something like that. I was visiting my friend who asked me if I want to try to play a game she liked and I tried. I remember that I had a male sim who kept wetting his pants all the time. LOL I was also more interested in decorating. I remember I furnished a nice big house and was quite proud of my work...Until another friend of mine came to visit my gamer friend and he started a fire in my precious house and it burned down. Damn, I was mad! Anyway, it took about 6 more years for me to get a computer that could handle games, and I bought the Complete Collection a month before I found TS2. I still have the collection pack installed and I play it now and then. It's so nostalgic!

When i was really little, my mom got the first Sims City (which didnt really interest me) but when she got the sims, i would sit beside her drinking a chocolate milkshake while she played and eventually she let me play and my dad taught me how to download CC when i got the Sims 2 when i was about 7 or 8. It's been all downhill from there

In the late 90s, our living situation was complex. Our housemate, M, had an "office" set up in a sunroom in the back of the house. His girlfriend C (who during this period came to live with us, too) is, I think, the one who introduced him to Sims. He'd sit up late back there playing it, and they had contests, married their self-sims, and so on, and told me about them. Our house, which was built in 1910, is in continual need of work and I would get very frustrated at all the things I wanted to do, but couldn't. So Michael showed me how to build and turned me loose in his neighborhood, with permission to use it when he wasn't on the computer. And then I had a period of severe insomnia.

I mostly built, but M didn't know how to build on an empty lot, so I also had to build families in order to build. Whereas he and C tended to make their selfsims and then populate the neighborhood with people they wanted their selfsims to meet (I remember a Scotsman in a castle modeled on Sean Connery and a sybaritic house full of women called the Twinkies), I would make the March girls, or a single dad with a kid, or a lesbian couple, each of whom brought a child from a previous marriage. But mostly I built amazing unplayable fantasy houses. When M got Hot Date, he let me use his base game disk in our machine, at which point, with only one neighborhood to work with, I reached a point where I either had to stop building and start playing, or tear everything down. And anyway I'd gotten curious about how the houses would play. I'd go through phases of playing and not playing. At some point he moved out, and I bought Double Deluxe and found my own sources for custom content, which is when I began to get good at it. And when Unleashed came out, I failed my saving throw against buying it - had to have pets and vegetable gardens! Eventually my husband got me Complete Collection for a birthday.

It was never as engrossing to me as Sims2 is now, but it saw me through many hard times when I just needed something to do besides fret, and I still have the Complete Collection in case I ever need it again. 'Cause you never know.

My mom came home with sims 1 one day and, well, i loved it! (even before i realized that the outside of the house was not the inside. Heh... xD) then, when i bought sims vacation, i saw the advertisement for sims 2 and bought that one myself.

Been hooked with sims 2 ever since. Now if only those expansion packs weren't forty bucks a pop and barely in stock anymore, i'd finish my collection. *facewalls*

For me it was when i was 10 my mom had a new phone and it had i game i would play for hours called the sims 2 mobile so i never knew its a pc game and i had a crappy pc,what i liked about the game controlling a person life i had a sim amy i would have her marry a guy or make a lesbian sim so i would to school happy and proudly say i made a girl kiss another girl she is a lesbian like its something amazing,i learned the game had a pc version when i had a laptop at the 7th grade i was searching the web and i saw a pregnant male sim and i thought that is wired and kind of cool so i watched a lot of vids about the game and finally bought the cd off the internet because i never found it in the gaming stores and i never had a lot of time to play it in first days because i had school the next day wonder what i would do if its wasn't a school day,now i have some eps and buying another ep and everyone in my family think im hooked to this game and they would say : stop buying this game cds,but i will never stop.

It all began with Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. Kind of.

My daughter had received a Game Cube for her birthday back in 2004. I had a go at Ocarina of Time, but I was positively awful at fighting. My daughter eventually took pity on me and helped me out (I should mention that she was in elementary school at the time!) because I was getting a record number of "Game Overs". I did finish the game, however. Finally. Enjoyed it thoroughly, don't get me wrong, but could never say I was any good at it!

From there, it was on to Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon. I seemed to do a LOT better when I didn't have to fight bosses. I thoroughly enjoyed those games and played them for several months. I liked this kind of game! Originally, they were for my daughter, but we both wound up playing. It was a fun thing to do with her. I also seemed to be pretty good at button-mashing games, but I'm going off-topic now.

AC and HM kept both of us occupied, but I wanted something more for an older person. I had heard about this game called The Sims. When a local store went out of business and was liquidating its stock, I picked up a copy.

It might have helped if I read the manual more thoroughly first! My Bob Newbie had to be the most annoying character I ever saw. He kept setting himself on fire, falling asleep for no reason, arguing with everyone. etc. If I were Betty, I would have tossed the stinky bum out.

I had no idea you could toggle Bob. Oops. For a while, I thought it was some sort of survival mini-game: "Can you keep Bob Newbie alive before he does still another stupid thing to kill himself?" But even after I learned to toggle, I played Sims 1 for a couple of months and really liked it. My daughter also started playing it and enjoying it around the same time. She had pretty much outgrown Animal Crossing by this time, and was looking for something different. (We both still play many of the Harvest Moon games, though, even now.)

At that same store, I had also picked up The Urbz. I confess ... long loading screens aside, I liked The Urbz. I might be one of the ten people here who did. With those two games, though, I became hooked on The Sims.

I initially bought Sims 2 for the DS, and HATED it. Got rid of it as soon as possible. That almost ended my fascination with the series. Then I kept reading about Sims 2 for the PC and how much better it was than the DS version. I thought I'd give the game another chance. This was now in 2006. The PC version certainly WAS a whole lot better! And a whole lot more addictive.

In 2006, I was chatting with someone on MySpace about the game, and she told me about this great site she found called Mod the Sims 2. This site was a bad influence on me. I learned about the lure of custom content. Bad site. Bad, bad site.

And here I am ... I guess both of us are. My daughter still plays as well, though not quite as much.

NOTE: I should add ... and this gets the post back to the topic of Sims 1 for PC, that my netbook has all expansions up to Unleashed. Back in 2009, I wanted a Sims game I could take with me when I went to visit my mother, who does not have a computer. Sims 2 and 3 would give the poor netbook too much trouble. Then I remembered how much fun I had with Sims 1. So it's a return for me to where the series started, I suppose!

However, Sims 1 will just will NOT cooperate on the netbook with the Superstar expansion. I read that some Superstar expansions were badly glitched. Is this true? if so, I might want to get another copy of Superstar and give it a go again. If not, I certainly have enough to work with.

I remember I saw an advert in a magazine, it had a few screenshots and a letter written from a child to her dad, and it went along the lines of 'Dear daddy, if you don't get me The Sims for Christmas, I'll tell mummy where you are when you say you've gone to golf.' (That could be utterly wrong by the way )

I was absolutely SMITTEN by the pictures and begged for it for weeks. I was finally given it the same day I was going to the cinema with my mom to see 102 Dalmations and I really didn't want to go, I just wanted to play my beautiful new game!

Oh wow, a Sim 1 forum! How did I miss it?
My Sim history started with Living Large EP than my cousin from another country had. She showed me some families she created, different fun objects, etc. And I instantly fell in love, previously I played strategies and shooters mostly and this simulation was a revelation for me. When I came back home I begged my parent to buy me a copy and afterwards all following EPs. I didn't have Internet at home then and didn't know about cc and hacks, so played the game as it is. Actually I remember managing a household of 6-7 sims easily, which is really hard for me now after playing sims 2 and 3. And then I found out about 7 Deadly Sims and All Around the Sims and the rest of excellent free sites. Let's say I had a lot of cc downloaded. I play Sims 1 still, there is some sense of humour and gameplay style that I cannot recreate with following sim games.
Ah, I distinctly remember that exciting feeling - loading a new EP for the first time, seeing all new objects, travel opportunities, pets... Those were the times.))

I had never played video/computer games until I was in my 30s. My husband was a gamer and after we married he bought a playstation. He and his buddies would spend hours playing that thing and I would have to retreat to the other room to surf the web or read...and being a good husband, he felt badly about that. Not too long after that Sims was been released, so he brought it home for me one day as a gift. :lovestruc

He created a monster! In the years past, I have bought every single EP, a bunch of SP's, and become an avid gamer. First it was an ad for SimCity on the back of a Sims game, then it was ancient city builders, then golf games, then came the day that I got an X-box. Needless to say, after spending the last dozen years updating a series of computers for me (honey, I need more RAM/a better video card), buying me an X-box(360), a Wii, a PS3(2), PSP and a bucket load of games, he probably regrets that decision. And the really funny thing...he doesn't really game anymore.

I never had a computer really before 2002, only an old lap top, that I didn't think would handle the game. Anyways, when I was in stores, I was always attracted to these Sim games, and what you could do with them. I always though they looked fun! Once I got a computer in 2002, and realised I could get these games, I bought a few of them at once, and I was sold on them! I bought every ep that came out. I didn't know about the Sims site really, so I never joined or even got patches that would have helped my game out a lot. But, then I heard of Sims 2, and got really excited about that, that once I got the new version, I could never go back to Sims1. At times I'd think I'd like to- seeing I still have them all. However, I'm used to the age progression now, that family is recognized, that building is much easier, and I know cheats! I never knew any, and the ones I did, like rosebud, never worked for me, I always go a message "no cheating"!
But, as I see the pictures and knowing I didn't go very far with Making Magic, perhaps for kicks I just might try it again. Particularly if Sims 4 sucks....

Building houses building houses building houses BUILDING HOUSES!! :D

I was a big fan of SimCity, and when I saw the commercial for the Sims on TV, I wanted it. But I didn't have a good computer to run it. It wasn't till a few years later that I got the base game and a bunch of expansions for 5 bucks each at a flea market. I still have them. maybe I should load them up.....

Well, it was a typical boring day, as usual. I didn't go to kindergarten, because I'd always get sick after two or three days.

My dad's best man's son and I were always best friends. His parents got divorced when he went to first grade, so it was quite difficult for him and he'd often come to my place to hang out and stuff.

When I first got the computer, I was 9. Of course, I immediately knew where the games are, I knew how to change the desktop and stuff (my mom's an administrator in the ministry of seas or something like that, and I used to go to job with her. There are a lot of computers).

My dad's friend, who got me the computer, installed the first game on it; Need for Speed Underground II. I loved that game so much, but I didn't attend races, but instead I'd drive around the town.

So, my friend (my dad's best man's son) came over and he'd always play the game. Of course, as many of my other toys, he SOMEHOW managed to uninstall the game (or he didn't? But I remember he did something to it). In lieu of the racing game, he offered me The Sims. "Simpsons?" I asked. "No, Sims. Something different, you'll see."

He brought me his game (which was on a recordable CD - so my first TS game was pirated. Mods please don't kill me). He showed me around, and when he went off home, I created myself and moved to an empty lot. Soon after, I started building (I remember, that the hardest thing was placing the doors and windows. I'd always miss a wall where I wanted doors and windows to be, and I'd always have to get back for the wall tool. How the hell do I remember that?!), and then I switched to Buy Mode. "Damn, I can furnish their homes, too?!" So I did. Very lazy, a bunch of non-matching furniture and a huge pool in the backyard. And then, I was able to type klapaucius faster than anything else.

Finally, I switched to Live Mode. After a while, I got used to it, and when my friend came over (after a week or so), he said "Oh, so you got the point of the game?". I was like "Yes", and was hoping that he'll show me something I didn't know. But he didn't. That was the first game I knew from heads to toes.

He also liked to play the game, and he was borrowing it to his friend, and he to his friend and so on. Therefore - my gameplay was muted the whole time. Nowadays, when I watch Let's Play videos on YouTube, I can't imagine that TS had sound the whole time.

I remember that one family had around 20 kids. All of them got taken away from me, because they went to military school.

I've been playing the game for so long, that when I opened Paint, I pointed my mouse at the edge, hoping that'll scroll the screen.

Four years have passed, and right when I was coming home with my friends from school, we somehow managed to start a topic about Sims. My friend said, "Oh my Gosh you still play that crappy game? Here, I'll borrow you my game, The Sims 2, tomorrow. You know that pajamas with hearts your female Sim wears? Well in TS2, you can change that. You can select as many hairstyles you want, as many clothes you want. Trust me, if you loved TS, you'll adore TS2." We had a deal.

She gave me the game and I installed it, and as she said, I loved it. But one tiny little thing is, I STILL didn't give her CDs back. Actually, I got them out of my drawer, and they're right next to my mouse. :lovestruc Ah, the memories. After that, I started buying expansion packs for the game (and yes, I almost forgot; for the four years I've been playing TS, I never installed a single EP. Four years with only base game, no CC. I think I made a record!). And years have passed and it's not anymore TS, so I'll end the post, right... here.

I bought the Sims for my sister, thinking she'd like it. She never even opened the CD package. So I eventually opened it, popped it in my computer...and became totally, completely hooked! I just loved that game, bought all the Xpacks, and downloaded cc like crazy. I especially loved Dincer Hepguler's furniture, so lovely...

I found The Sims in the bargain bin at a warehouse store called Sam's Club sometime in 2000. It looked interesting and I was able to convince my parents to buy it for me

My best friend told me about it, and when I had spent the night we had played it! I was hooked from the start. My parents bought me the base game for my birthday and I remember getting hot date with my birthday money. I have every expansion pack for the sims 1 and 2, and the ones that look the most appealing to me for the sims 3.

My name is Jaya, and I am a Sims Addict, This is my story.
My older sister would play it when I was 7-9 years old. She had a computer in her room and wouldn't let me play the game so one day I snuck into her room and played her family and accidentally set fire to the house and killed the self simmies of us, because I didn't know anything about the game, including that a sim needed cooking points to be able to cook without burning the house down.
I was introduced to TS2 by my old best friend and whenever I went to her house I would want to play and eventually I got my own copy of the sims 2 for about 50 bucks or so I think, I can't really remember, and I had to install it on our crappy laptop and I went through a 2-3 year phase of not playing because the old crappy laptop couldn't handle it and neither could our computer so when my little sister and I were able to get a laptop for Christmas last year I was ecstatic that I would be able to play, I missed it so much because I would watch Let's Play vids on youtube and read the EP guides on IGN and eventually I found this website

Aye, but in the Navy you'll be able to buy the expansion packs free of sales tax at the NEX.

As for me, I got into The Sims when I was middle school aged because I had Sim City 2000, my uncle had talked about The Sims 1, and when I saw The Sims 1 for the Gamecube at Toys R Us, I wanted it. Then I found a Sims for PC CD sitting around with some other programs and I installed it on my computer (I had to cheat to install it though; I didn't have the box with the CD key so I had to find a way around that). Now I have the complete series of The Sims 1 and several of the expansion packs for The Sims 2, and the inspiration to play comes and goes, but I suppose I'll be a Simmer many years to come (I won't say I'll always be a Simmer because no one knows that for sure).

As a kid, I always loved making up stories, both on paper and in my head, I had an old typewriter that I would sit at for hours, churning out page after page of these stories, which were always long and rambling and multi-generational.

Then one day, several years down the track, I saw an ad in my husband's computer magazine about this new game, The Sims, and it sounded like the computer game version of, well, making up stories. At this stage, our budget didn't allow for computer games, but my husband's friend was going to Thailand, and knew of a place where pirated games could be bought. I clearly remember my husband and his friend laughing because I'd asked him to get me "a game about relationships and stuff".

So, his friend brought me back an illegal copy. It worked! But there was no instructional manual or anything with it, so I had no idea what I was doing. Then - brainwave! I went to our local store, which by then had genuine copies for sale - and back then, the game just came in a big cardboard box, so I snuck behind a display and took the instruction book out and began reading, trying to memorise as much as I could, before putting it back.

I made several such visits to the store, trying to soak up as much info as I could from the instructional book, and the stupid thing was that although we had internet access back then, it never occurred to me to look online for info.

My husband must've taken pity, or gotten sick of hearing me complain about not knowing what I was doing, because shortly after that he went and brought me a brand new legal copy, complete with my very own instruction book! Yay!

And that was it, my Sims addiction began there and there was no looking back.