Why did Maxis almost cancel the Dollhouse project?
Will Wright lost his house in the Oakland firestorm of October 1991. Rebuilding it meant months of floor plans, budgets and furniture catalogs, and he started treating the whole ordeal as a system: constraints, trade-offs and people whose needs collided with the rooms they lived in.
He began prototyping in 1993 under the internal name Dollhouse. Management at Maxis, the studio he co-founded and the company behind SimCity, did not want it. Co-founder Jeff Braun summed up the room in four words that Chaim Gingold recorded in his 2024 MIT Press history Building SimCity: “A dollhouse? That's for little girls.”
The market research went no better. Maxis tested the concept on teenage boys, the demographic the industry assumed bought every game. Wright later described the result to the games historian Jimmy Maher, whose 2026 Digital Antiquarian history of Maxis quotes him: “This was probably the most negative focus-group experience I have ever seen.”
By the mid-1990s Maxis was in trouble financially, and the project was shelved. For several years the game that would outsell every PC title before it did not officially exist.
How did Electronic Arts end up rescuing the game?
Electronic Arts acquired Maxis in 1997, mainly for SimCity. What EA also got was Wright and a cancelled life simulator nobody had been able to explain in a sales meeting.
The rescue is the part that sounds backwards today, when EA is better known for closing studios than saving their strangest projects. PC Gamer put it plainly in its 2025 write-up of the episode: Maxis had killed The Sims, and EA brought it back. The publisher funded the team, kept the design intact and shipped the game on February 4, 2000 for Windows.
Expectations were modest, because the game fit no shelf category. It had no win condition, no final level and no opponent. Players furnished a house, filled it with people, and kept them fed, employed and on speaking terms with each other. The marketing problem that had almost killed it turned out to be the product: there was nothing else like it on the shelf.
It was the best-selling PC game of 2000, and it stayed at the top of the PC charts for years afterward while the industry's attention moved to the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox.
How many copies did the original Sims sell?
By March 22, 2002, The Sims had sold more than 6.3 million copies worldwide and passed Myst, the 1993 Broderbund adventure game that had held the record for best-selling PC game since the CD-ROM era began. By February 2005, the base game had shipped about 16 million copies.
The expansion packs did the rest. EA released seven of them between August 2000 and October 2003: Livin' Large, House Party, Hot Date, Vacation, Unleashed, Superstar and Makin' Magic. Each one added careers, locations or systems, and the cumulative effect was a game that by 2003 looked nothing like the one that shipped in 2000.
The sequel confirmed the scale of the audience. The Sims 2 arrived on September 14, 2004 and sold a million copies in its first ten days, the biggest PC launch EA had recorded to that point. Counting every sequel, expansion and console port, the franchise has now passed 200 million copies sold, which keeps it among the best-selling series in the industry.
What made the game reach people who never bought games?
In 2000, PC game marketing was aimed almost entirely at young men. The Sims broke that assumption in public. Electronic Arts has estimated that women make up as much as 60 percent of Sims players, a share no other blockbuster PC game of that period came close to.
Those players built things. The modding scene appeared within months, years before Steam Workshop made mods a one-click install. People downloaded zip files of custom furniture, wallpaper and character skins from fan sites and dropped them into game folders by hand, the same way PC players of the era kept RollerCoaster Tycoon alive with homemade scenery.
The darker half of the appeal became the most durable meme in the series. Sims could not climb out of a swimming pool without a ladder, because the pathfinding required an exit tile. Delete the ladder while a Sim is swimming, and the Sim eventually drowns. It was never a designed feature, and players found it almost immediately.
That was the real engine of the game. Nothing scripted a story, so every story came out of systems colliding: a burnt dinner, a kitchen fire, a firefighter, a new romance. Two decades of life sims have tried to reproduce that, and very few have.
Who owns The Sims today?
Electronic Arts still owns The Sims, but EA itself changed hands in 2026. On August 4, 2026, a consortium of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners completed a $55 billion take-private of the publisher, paying shareholders $210 a share and delisting the stock from the Nasdaq. PIF holds about 93 percent of the company.
The studio name survived better than the studio. EA closed the Maxis office in Emeryville, California in March 2015 and moved the work to other sites. Will Wright left EA in April 2009, more than a decade before the buyout, and has had no role in the series since.
The current game is The Sims 4, free to download since October 18, 2022, with EA selling expansion packs, game packs and kits on top of it. EA reported 85 million players in March 2024. In its January 2026 franchise update, the company described its long-rumored next project, Project Rene, as “a social, collaborative, mobile-first life-sim game” and said again that it is not the successor to The Sims 4. There is no Sims 5 on any published schedule.
What does it cost to play the original in 2026?
EA put the first two games back on sale on January 31, 2025. The Sims: Legacy Collection lists at $19.99 and includes the base game plus all seven expansion packs; The Sims 2 Legacy Collection lists at $29.99 with its eight expansions and stuff packs. Both are sold on Steam, the EA app and the Epic Games Store, and both were patched to install and run on Windows 10 and 11 without the compatibility workarounds fans had relied on for a decade. Storefront sales have cut both to $14.99 during 2026.
That matters because the 2000 CD-ROM release does not install cleanly on a modern machine. If you own the discs and want to try anyway, the same tools that help with running 90s PC games on Windows 11 apply here.
Where to find one today. Sealed and complete big-box copies of the 2000 release and its expansions are collector items now and trade in the tens of dollars, more for clean boxes with the manual and the cardboard insert. For the rest of that era's PC catalog, restored and DRM-free, the usual home is GOG's classic PC game store, though EA sells The Sims itself only through its own three storefronts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you still play the original Sims in 2026?
Yes. Electronic Arts reissued the 2000 game as The Sims: Legacy Collection on January 31, 2025, with all seven expansion packs included and patches for Windows 10 and 11. It sells for $19.99 on Steam, the EA app and the Epic Games Store, and has been discounted to $14.99 during 2026.
Who owns The Sims now?
Electronic Arts owns The Sims and has since it acquired Maxis in 1997. EA is no longer a public company: a consortium of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners completed a $55 billion buyout on August 4, 2026, with PIF holding roughly 93 percent.
How many copies has The Sims sold?
The original Sims passed 6.3 million copies in March 2002, which made it the best-selling PC game to that date, ahead of Myst, and had shipped about 16 million copies by February 2005. Across every sequel, expansion and console version since 2000, the Sims franchise has sold more than 200 million copies.