On June 2, game company Maxis released a big update to "The Sims 4," the latest game in its 16-year-old living simulation franchise.
The update removed gender restrictions on clothing items and hairstyles, allowing players to create cross-dressing characters and use any hairstyle on any Sim.
In addition, the team made previously gender-restricted options more fluid, allowing players to decide whether their character sits or stands when using the bathroom, or if they can get pregnant regardless of their physical appearance. This means players now have a wealth of new options when customizing their characters' expressions, body types, or biological functions.
—Nemo (@RestingPhoenix) June 2, 2016
While this might be considered a radical change — especially in an industry that's been less than kind to women and LGBTQ+ folks — the new update is not the first time the Sims team has brought social liberalism to the gaming industry.
Dial back to 1999, the year "The Sims" was featured in a small booth at Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the biggest gaming expo in the US. This was well before the game allowed a generation of kids to start imaginary families or commit blatant acts of digital arson, but it nonetheless shocked crowds by allowing same-sex couples to kiss.
Maxis had been riding high on its "Sim" titles since 1989 — Sim City, Sim Earth, and so on — but no other game really spoke to life as experienced by most people, so Maxis sought to simulate it. Translating everyday life into a marketable game proved difficult.
"The Sims was almost abandoned numerous times," Patrick J. Barrett III, one of the game's programmers, told the New Yorker. "We all knew that if we couldn’t generate any interest at E3 that year, then the game would be canceled for good." Little did E3 attendees know that they'd be the first to see one of the most socially radical games of its time.
Since the purpose of The Sims was to make the experience as true to life as could be, Barrett, a newly employed programmer at Maxis in 1998, decided to code for same-sex marriages, even after it was deliberately excluded from the game's plans. His team knew this and and didn't remove the code, believing EA would disable it in time for E3.
The code stayed. In a video shown to conference-goers and members of the press, two female Sims leaned in for a kiss. It became the talk of E3, and the team has featured same-sex romances in every iteration of "The Sims" since.
“At the time, it wasn’t considered ‘normal’ to be gay or lesbian,” Barrett told the New Yorker. “Some even saw it as dangerous. But in The Sims it was normal and safe to be a gay person."
Barrett hasn't worked on the series since "The Sims 2." But the company's commitment to keeping character options inclusive for game's LGBTQ and gender-nonconforming fans has clearly survived.
