My 20 Years Anniversary

I just realized it's been 20 - TWENTY! - years since my first The Sims web site was released in February 2002*! So to celebrate this amazing anniversary I invite you to dive into the past to explore bits of this journey.

My first site was for The Sims 1, and already back then I had a community focus with a council, experts on food and babies and much more. It was perhaps the first sims site out there that was "for sims, by sims". SUN, anyone? The site had guest writers from other games, and it turned out as a nice role playing universe.

Then The Sims 2 came along and everything took off, I mean totally! One of my TS1 sims, webmistress Bimbo O'Brian was allowed by EA Games to visit TS2 before the game had released. Officially she went there to test the espresso ;)

A bit later, a major American newspaper contacted me for an interview, but I had to be true to my "for sims, by sims" concept and replied them as a Sim, and they got quite confused and did not quite get the thing, so, there was no interview, LOL. If you were around, you might remember the SUN (Sims United Neighborhoods)? It actually started in TS1, but grew with TS2. Simmers united and we even exchanged artists to tour each other's games, had common festivals and contributed across websites. It added so much to my game! The members list is still online, but of course with many broken links. Btw; I just noticed that my old sites no longer work well on certain browsers, so if you see less than you would expect, it might work with a different browser.

I also created lots of  CC for TS2 (and TS1), 

I did not run a typical site for The Sims 3, but I had an interactive story going, following the writers of 3 secret diaries with a certain sense of a plot, the SIMbepi. I think the interactive Sunset Valley map was quite cool, and I still regret not expanding it as intended. I had several blog stories going as well, which can still be fun to reread due to nostalgia - or just the stories. Did anyone follow Sim Basic (100 cartoon like chapters!), Greench Farm, Hope Terra (the Mermaid story), The Detesters (rather hysterical about a couple working as testsims) or The Ugly Wickerwood? They are all linked from the Archive on this blog.

Click here to dive into the past :)

This current blog has focused mostly on The sims 4 since the start back in 2014. There's now info on my 100+ actively played households with currently more than 400 sims. With this iteration I also got inspired to make movies, and still have ideas for more productions (if they only were not so time consuming!)

The old sites and stories are of course no longer updated, but I'm happy to see that most of the content regarding how I played can easily be transferred to any of the sims series. Fantasy and imagination was always a huge part of my games.

So, Happy Anniversary! So many sims, and so many stories and locations! Webmistress Bimbo O'Brian, Food expert Joanna Grumblin and Baby expert Ursull Swims will always stay in a small corner of my heart! Here's to the Future!

*) This article was actually first posted a year ago as I thought I started the blog in 2001, but as I could not find any proof I took it down.