Prerelease:The Sims (Windows)/SimWatch
This is a sub-page of Prerelease:The Sims (Windows).
Will Wright: Oh no the marketing was brilliant! And it wasn't just the marketing. The General Manager of our studio, Luc Barthelet, took a very strong interest in building a community around the game cause we'd put this heavy emphasis on customization. We probably spent an extra year in development making so many parts of the game customizable. Had the game been a flop that would have been a wasted year. But if the game was a success then that year would be well worth it because of the community we could build around the game. Quake 2 was like my model. I was looking at the Quake community and studying it and trying to figure out why it became large. I was hoping to get a community as strong as the Quake community... We did some very innovative [community] events leading up to the launch. So a lot of it was the marketing, but it was also the internal community building that we did.
In the early days of 1999, while The Sims ' development still had a long road ahead, its conceptual foundation was already firmly established. To signal the game's eventual release and foster excitement, the developers devised a clever communication scheme centered around user participation.
One of the team's most interesting feats at the time was the creation of the SimWatch discussion list, which provided a close communication channel between the developers and Maxis fans. It was a mutual collaboration between former Maxis General Manager Luc Barthelet[2] and web designer, part-time DJ and Maxis enthusiast Peter Naughton. This not only marked the beginning of the recurring activity of weekly livestreaming the game online prior to the game's release, but provided multiple resources for collecting feedbacks and laying the groundwork for the participatory culture that would be the catalyst for the games' first customizable contents and fansites, including standalone tools that helped users to create, for example, their first custom Sim floors, walls, skins.
The SimWatch mailing list proved to be a game-changer for the project, propelling community engagement through word-of-mouth buzz and fostering a sense of belonging among early adopters. This subpage will delve into the community-building efforts showcased in pre-release materials, with a focus on exclusive content shared with SimWatch members.
Contents
Opening
On April 26, 1999, just under a month before The Sims' apperance at E3, SimWatch co-founder Peter Naughton sent the first message to the SimWatch mailing list, to the initial six active members. Here's the full first email Peter sent to this burgeoning community...
Date: Apr 26 1999 02:18:20 EDT From: The Sims' Neighborhood Watch <SimWatch-owner@listbot.com> Subject: Welcome to SimWatch Dear SimWatchers, Hello and welcome to the SimWatch! I'm Peter Naughton, the list moderator. If you have any questions, comments, concerns or complaints about the list, direct them to me and I will help you out as quickly as possible. My address is naughton@nettaxi.com. If you have a website, please help spread the word of SimWatch so others will subscribe to the list. We have some HTML code you can use to let people subscribe right from your website. The HTML is sitting available from http://www.borg.com/~naughton/sims.htm If you have any messages you want to send to the rest of the subscribers, send them to SimWatch@listbot.com. Because this is a moderated list, I decide whether your message goes through to everyone or not. I will check the incoming message queue about once a day, usually late at night. Sometimes I may be too busy or forget, so please don't get mad if it's more than a day before your message passes through. If you have a really urgent message, send a note directly to my personal address and I will be sure to check the queue as soon as possible. Finally, message archives are available on the ListBot website. Just go to http://SimWatch.listbot.com if you want to look through past messages anytime. That's about it for now.. again, welcome to the list. You are one of the first 6 subscribers to join, and let's work together to see that number grow! Peter Naughton List Moderator naughton@nettaxi.com
The Sims Video Club
Luc Barthelet: Here are some videos from the Sims. I apologize for the low quality of the capture, but it was a quick hack. The point of those videos is to show you how one controls the characters in the game. You can see that when the user clicks on an object, a "pie menu" opens and several choices are available. Do not pay too much attention to the User Interface at the bottom, as it has changed since the movies were made. The new UI is different and cool. It will be visible in the next set of movies.
During the game's development, Luc Barthelet teased fans with short, mute snippets of in-game footage, showcasing Sim controls and world interactions. Sadly, most of these clips have been lost, except two clips that seen to depict builds from March '99.
| Huggin' and Jugglin' | Dana takes a shower, Michael seeks relief |
|---|---|
SimWebCam Livestreams
Will Wright: Well one thing we did, we had a lot of fan sites that people started putting up. We started releasing tools early for customizing characters. One thing we did for the three months up to launch is every Thursday we would have a chat event on the web. In our chatroom there was a live webcam on the top of the page of us playing the game, straight from the game. So while we were running the chat we were actually running the game and twice a second we were spitting out an image. Then people in the chatroom were asking us "Can you make him do this?" or "What if he kisses this girl?" or "What if he goes and does that?" and they were basically backseat drivers. And then we'd say "Oh yeah we can do this" and we'd have them walk around and do stuff, and we were actually playing the game with them in chatroom. Now this did two things. First of all it gave them a really good sense for how open ended the game was. Because no matter how much we said the game's open ended, you have to see it to believe it. And they'd come up with these weird situations and then we'd actually do it. We would prove that just about anything you can imagine you can do in this game. But the second and probably more important thing is that we had all these websites and what they all liked to do is have interesting and unique content that's different from the other websites. So these people in the chatroom could capture every image we were sending them, which they could later go pick through and use on their website. So we were actually streaming out huge amounts of content that they could then use on their website.
Likely starting in the week of April 27, 1999, Luc Barthelet and other Maxis employees initiated a weekly series of livestreamed gameplays, which would eventually be officially called SimWebCam. In fact, those were based upon the capturing of static JPEG images at 320x240 resolution, panning across the in-game world and focusing on active Sims, twice per second. This approach aimed to emulate a real-time experience while enabling fan participation through side chatbars. Even the own designer Will Wright participated on these, every now and then! While the SimWebCam system lacked audio recording and playback, developers could print small text snippets at the bottom left corner of the snapshot's canvas to complement the ongoing events in Live Mode. Notably, the image capture engine used in these livestreams remains present in the base game as an undocumented vestige, even though a more sophisticated Camera Mode has been added since then.
Early 1999
Late 1999
07/22/99
07/29/99
07/08/99
08/18/99
Unsorted Dates
Graphics "Paks"
Series of game assets released by Maxis for download so the fansite webmasters could have something fun to cover prior to the game's release.
Objects List
Released in July 1999, the first graphic pack released by Maxis features a rather hastily-put-together collage of in-game catalog thumbnails as they looked like during that time.
- Inconsistency errors between the object renders format include:
- Casting of shadows. The thumbnails in the final game are coded not to include shadows underneath items.
- Some backgrounds do not quite belong to the thumbnail template for certain objects (for example, the backwards alarm clock has a unique background in gradient).
- The fire detector is not rendered at its closest distance.
- Among the objects that were scrapped sometime during development...
- A soccer ball. The final game only contains a couple of animations as remnants of the object.
- An early dining table. Unlike the used tables, it only uses one tile in the game world. Its sprites have been technically repurposed as the placeholder graphics for the pedestrian portal object, even though it can not be seen in normal gameplay without hacks.
What's Cooking
Sims Fans Discover New Graphics Pak Luc's Server, Internet Territory (SCNS) - Three Sims fans hunting for the mystical real release date of The Sims in a remote corner the internet have found the remains of what appears to be Sims' dinners, scientists and local leaders say. Internetologists and elders from the territory where the zip file was found announced the discovery Wednesday on SimWatch@listbot.com <mailto:SimWatch@listbot.com> . But scientists hesitated to say how old they thought the zip file was. ``It's so hard to pin down. I don't want to speculate,'' said Sean Baity, an assistant producer with MAXIS. ``The elders have indicated that we should use this situation, what appears to be several hi resolution shots of food and cooking equipment and refuse, to learn more about this game, what it might look like, and how the food is made and eaten''.
On August 28, 1999, The Sims staff released high-quality renders of an appliance and food for download. These elements typically appear in-game as sprites, which offer limited detail due to their small size and viewing distance.
