The Sims Is Turning 25, And People Are Sharing Some Pretty Twisted Things They Did On It

Being a little kid is generally a pretty restrictive business: You’re told when to go to sleep, what you can and cannot eat and when you can play with your friends or go outside.

But if you were a kid who grew up playing The Sims, you got to let your freak flag fly and have all the autonomy in the world. Or at least, all the autonomy you could squeeze into the hour a day after school your parents allowed you to play.

The beloved life-simulation game ― which just got a rerelease from EA to celebrate its 25th anniversary ― was an imaginative millennial kid’s dream: Sure, you could play on the straight and narrow and live out a conventional Sim life: Go to college, get a job in a secure field like medicine, marry your age-appropriate next-door neighbor and give into the relentless grind of life under capitalism.

But that was a staid, boring way to play to play the game, and it was much more fun to go rogue: Don’t get a job and instead use the “!;” “rosebud” or “motherlode” cheats to become incomprehensibly rich with Simoleons. Break up a marriage. Visit your friend’s house in another neighborhood and take a dump while eating their food on the toilet. Force 100 people to live together in a tiny house, like this guy did.

Kill a Sim ― kill a few Sims, even ― whether you’re doing it with fire or by building a swimming pool and then deleting the ladder once they’re in. Grim, but behaving in morally questionable ways is basically a rite of passage for Simmers, especially if you started playing as a little kid.

“I admit I did put my enemies in a 1×1 room and watch them die, though I refuse to feel shame for this one, because although it sounds sick and twisted, I would bet about 80% of Sims players have done this,” said Jesse McNamara, a gamer from North East England who started playing when she was 5 years old in 2000.

In some way, it was merciful of her; when left to their own devices with autonomy gameplay turned on, the Sims in the first and second editions of the game could be pretty dense.

“If I didn’t kill them, then the game probably would’ve. The earlier games did not mess around when it came to fires,” joked McNamara, who goes by Plumbella on her popular Sims YouTube channel. Seriously, watch the clip below for proof.

Twenty-five years in, Simmers still love the zaniness, openness and community of the game, which is now on its fourth iteration, and has sold nearly 200 million copies worldwide, making it one of the bestselling video game series of all time.

As silly as The Sims can be, playing it could also be profound. Some Simmers say the openness of the gameplay.

Some Simmers say the openness of the gameplay allowed them to figure out thornier aspects of their lives, like their gender identity or sexuality: Making two male Sims woohoo each other no doubt spurred on many a sexual awakening, just like making two Barbies go at it did for older generations.

AJ Nebula, a gamer who started playing around age 8 when his mom bought the Sims 1 deluxe edition, said the game helped him figure out his sexuality.

“For myself, it has allowed me to become comfortable with being aromantic and asexual and accept that it is OK to live a life in which I don’t participate in a relationship beyond family and friends,” they said. “A game like the Sims allows you to explore aspects of yourself that you aren’t ready or able to reveal in real life.”

If you were a kid with autism, having conversations with other Sims ― albeit in indecipherable Simlish, the madeup language spoken in the games ― was a great way to work on your social skills.

“Growing up as a kid with autism, I think that chatting with other Sims and developing healthy relationships with them might’ve helped me get more comfortable with opening up to people,” said Marcus Lovallo, a Simmer in Pennsylvania who started playing the game way back in 2000.

Today, Lovallo is a fan of other life-sim games ― “Animal Crossing” and “Stardew Valley,” to name a few ― but The Sims remains the gold standard for him.

“A world without The Sims is not the kind of world I’d like to live in,” he said. “It’s so unique and so special that, no matter how good other games of this genre might be, nothing will ever come close to topping this series for me.”

To celebrate our favorite voyeuristic childhood pastime, we decided to ask longtime Simmers to share the funniest thing they ever made their Sims do, especially as kids.

“When I started playing Sims 2 with my older brother, we really had no idea what we were doing. Impatient to a fault, we built a house in Pleasantview for a family of eight. The problem? While the house had a kitchen, bedrooms and even a TV with a living room. it didn’t have a roof. For some reason, we either did not know how to apply a roof or simply forgot. The irony is that Sims 2 has an easy auto roof feature, meaning even building-challenged Simmers like us could have easily applied one.

“We also happened to forget to add carpet in multiple rooms. Puddles and weeds grew everywhere inside. After a warning, most of the children were taken away. It was a tragic story for the Baker family, and undoubtedly one of the most memorable introductions to the franchise I could have gotten.” ― Erin Jamieson, who lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and runs the channel Simmer Erin on YouTube

“In Sims 1, I remember accidentally burning my Sim’s house to the ground and killing my Sim. With the ‘Makin’ Magic’ expansion pack, you could win a dragon, which is the best dragon in the entire franchise, by the way. I wanted to see what would happen if I left the dragon egg alone, so I placed the egg in my Sim’s bathroom and waited for it to hatch. A red dragon named Burnie hatched and immediately set the bathroom on fire. As my Sim tried to put the fire out, she caught fire and died. As the Grim Reaper collected my Sim, Burnie casually walked off the lot.” ― Nebula

“I made a family of Sims and made it so that, whenever the Grim Reaper would show up after one of them dies, I would add him to the family until eventually I had a whole family of Grim Reapers. Since it was around the holidays, I had them sing Christmas and New Year’s carols together. Just the image of eight Grim Reapers combined with their overlapping voices made me laugh so hard that I could hardly breathe!” ― Lovallo

“I played with my older brother Collin and my mother. We could spend hours building or creating families and creating havoc, especially if it was just Collin and I playing. We sent our pets into careers and let our Sims stay home. We rocked out to the heavy metal station and scared other Sims away. We loved encountering vampires in the downtown district of the ‘Nightlife’ expansion, stealing gnomes from Sim neighbor’s lawns and creating as many enemies as possible. ” ― Jamieson

“I grew up with The Sims 1, it came out when I was 10 years old. My cousin Sam and I used to make all the people we hated ― bullies, for instance, or a parent we were mad at ― and torture them! It sounds morbid, but it was definitely a powerful feeling for a kid. And strangely is my fondest childhood memory of summers with family. Him and I still laugh about and bond over our mildly psychotic Sims experience.” ― Rekowcski, a Simmer who lives in Montreal, Canada, and runs a Sims YouTube channel

“I’d say the weirdest thing I did on The Sims growing up was simply making my Sims have a normal boring life. With all the crazy things you can do in game, most of us go back to keeping things very vanilla. I think it says a lot about the human mind!

“But if I had to name the most absurd thing I did in The Sims, it was re-creating ‘the backrooms,’ a never-ending maze of yellow-ish empty rooms deprived of windows. It was fun having my Sims survive in a surreal environment and cope with half-spider, half-human serial killers, all whilst experiencing hilarious bugs and glitches.” ― SatchOnSims, a Sims YouTuber who lives in England

“The Sims by itself is wacky enough, but this is only exacerbated by mods. There’s so many ways to customize your game, and whilst the most popular ones are fine-tuning mods that improve slice-of-life style gameplay, there’s also mods that only seek to ruin your game. SacrificialMods is one of my favorite mod creators and I’ve done the most out-of-pocket things using their mods. I’ve created a zombie apocalypse and killed every Sim in the game, made a deadly toddler who gets revenge on any adult that’s mean to her, and even killed someone with a machete after running someone over with a motorbike. With mods, the possibilities are endless.” ― McNamara

“Let’s see, I made characters get revenge on their cheating spouses. I tried wooing Bella Goth in Strangetown. There were a TON of alien baby pregnancies. I did download a ton of custom content that was like, early 2000s fashion and Sim versions of celebrities like Gerard Way, Fergie and Avril Lavigne.” ― Maya Jimenez, a Simmer from Los Angeles, California

“My favorite thing to do in the original Sims is make a family, spread campfires and rugs all over the lot, make my family light the fires, then create walls to trap them inside, and watch as the fires spread across the rugs and set the entire lot on fire. It’s so ridiculous, but there’s something oddly beautiful about how absurd it is and it still makes me laugh every time it happens!” ― Lovallo

“My Sim recently did the craziest thing that I never thought was possible: They acquired gainful rewarding employment and purchased their own home in 2025. It was wild.” ― Rekowcski