Video of an early demo version of The Sims

The Sims is being celebrated at Metafilter today and they’ve unearthed this video from 1998 showing an early demo version of the game. I spent countless hours playing the original The Sims when it came out. I had bootlegged the game on IRC channels (yes, I am that old) in many parts over an internet connection that probably wasn’t any faster than 56kbps. It was such a fun game of design and torture, with seemingly endless possibilities of life trajectories at the click of the mouse.

The first version of The Sims, released in 2000, was surprisingly not that different from this 1998 demo version. Pretty cool to see it in such an early development phase.