The Sims one of ‘The Best of the Decade’

Wired’s Game Life has named fifteen games including The Sims as ‘Best of the Decade’.

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1. The Sims (2000)

It’s the most popular game franchise that debuted this decade, with more than 100 million copies sold. Yet many people don’t even consider The Sims to be a game at all. Will Wright’s people simulator so completely disrupted our beliefs about what a videogame had to be that non-gamers with no expectations had the easiest time wrapping their heads around it. Sims has had a profound influence on videogames in a dozen different ways. The simplified human models with their carefully calibrated hierarchies of needs were revolutionary. The open-ended, accessible game design was the cornerstone of what came to be known as casual games. It was a sandbox game of unprecedented flexibility, allowing every player to create his own goals and play style. It was a platform for both modular add-on packages and user-created content. It was a highly visible property that was ported to every platform in existence, and is the basis for an upcoming feature film. The Sims, to a greater extent than anything else released this decade, broadened the definition of what a game could be. –Chris Baker