That quote was used in promotional material for The Sims 2. Maxis had just introduced the concept of aging as their big back-of-the-box feature, and it was about to revolutionize the series in a way future installments would fail to measure up to.

But where did this all start? Well, it begins with a man named William Ralph Wright and a little event called the Oakland firestorm of 1991, in which Wright lost his house. As an already well-established game designer, the process of rebuilding led him to wonder: what if this was a game? So, he created Home Tactics. And guess what? People fucking hated it! Turns out, people weren't so interested in architectural design. What they were interested in, however, was the complex social relationships that could be explored in a game like the one Wright had in mind. And so, some years later, a demo of The Sims was displayed at E3 in 1999; that is, of course, the E3 where 2 female sims would share a monumental kiss to gaming history. For almost the entirety of its development, EA had little faith in The Sims, and that E3 they had sequestered the game to a small booth hidden away from most of the action. It was pretty well understood that if The Sims didn't perform well at E3, the project would be scrapped. Thankfully, the completely unprecedented lesbian kiss generated enough conversation to save the game from irrelevancy, and the rest is history. Everybody say thank you lesbians BD!

Most of my interest surrounds the Sims 1 & 2, with the latter getting most of my attention. The Sims 3 is a decently competent life simulator, but it definitely marks the downfall of the Sims. The Sims 4 is almost non-existent to me, and I have almost nothing to say about it, despite the fact that I really was obsessed with it back in the day. It's there, I guess. I could honestly break down my thoughts on these games for much longer, but I just don't think anybody needs to hear that. So, how about I let my collection do the talking?

Well, I think that's all. This was actually the last page I wrote out of all the shrines in this directory. What is there to say about a game that has absolutely defined my life that isn't more personal than I'm willing to share? The other day I reconnected with a childhood friend, and I hesitated to tell her that my favorite thing on this earth is still The Sims because I wasn't ready to hear that "Still?" come out of her mouth. If I'm being real, there are very few constants in my life. And yet, The Sims has stuck with me through everything. I couldn't be more grateful.