The Sims

About

As of 2026, it's 26 years old.

The Sims handed you a tiny digital family in 2000 and let you do what humans secretly want to do with control: build them a dream house, then occasionally trap them in a pool with no ladder. It's a life simulator where the line between 'caring parent' and 'tiny vengeful god' is wafer-thin.

It became the best-selling PC game of its time partly by appealing to people who'd never called themselves gamers, all communicating in the gibberish language of 'Simlish.'

Cozy, chaotic, and a little sinister, The Sims is the game that revealed everyone's true nature is roughly 50% interior decorator, 50% supervillain.