For those who aren't aware, the Sims Archive Project is an ambitious project to gather as much of the community-sourced content for The Sims as possible. Not just The Sims, but also 2, 3, and 4; fansites, mods, official DLC from shuttered servers (including the entirety of The Sims 3's store), gathered together on the Internet Archive. I spent, basically, from Thanksgiving to Hanukkah downloading every bit of Sims 1 stuff I could find there to my personal datahoard, and, to my surprise, there was quite a bit left. Some of it was from retrospective fansites, with file creation dates as recent as 2015; but more than I imagined from the old days was included, too. Like, The Sims Resource's entire database of Sims 1 content, for instance—a lot of which I remember downloading onto diskettes as early as 2001. Then, of course, the CTOsims datahoard... it's a huge file to download at one go, but parsing through it, there's stuff in there from at least 15 different websites, including the earliest iteration of TheSims.com.
The problem, unfortunately, is that the Sims Archive Project wasn't started until 2017, which was about 10 years too late for most of the really old stuff. These were places that were featured on the game's website, and not; places I remember going to, despite the fact I can't remember their names. I know there was a site whose webmistress was at university for fashion design and used her fansite to try out her designs; another one where the webmaster was Dutch and he accepted submissions from people, much like The Sims Resource, but smaller; and certainly the places that specialised in things—this one website only had skins, this other one only had cars, this other other one only had sitting-room furniture. All of this stuff would make excellent additions to the Project, except for the singular problem of their not having existed since 2003. The car shop website, as I recall, went offline even during the game's support cycle. The skins designer presumably graduated and went off to start a career, closing her website down pretty soon after I found it.
That's the problem with the longevity of the old web: it can only be kept around as long as there's an active server and someone to pay the account. There was no Internet Archive or free cloud storage back then; you either paid for your server access or you didn't, in which case your site would be shut down and your account cleared to make space for the next person. Or, the server host would go bankrupt or get bought by a telecom company that would repurpose the server group for their own projects. Any and all of these happened to the original Sims fansites. Unfortunately, despite the obvious commercial opportunities it would open up, Google has not yet invented time travel, so it is impossible for the Sims Archive Project to archive these sites. You can't get advice from the wise man on the mountain if he's not there anymore.
I mentioned free cloud storage. It wasn't free, but Sims fansites were sort of the vanguard of offsite file storage. If all your Sims custom content was hosted on your website—ergo, someone else's computer—then it was safe from any failures of local hardware. People got computer viruses. People's hard disks got ruined. People would get power-surges into their computers. None of this was particularly common, but it did happen. Something more likely to happen was people get new computers to replace their old ones (electronic waste has been a perennial headache), they would forget to back up their Sims stuff, they'd throw away the computer, and that would be that.
A 13-year-old Sims fansite webmistress from 2000 would be 36 years old today. Plenty of time to graduate school, become a videogame composer, meet a nice girl, get IVF, and raise a family; and look back on The Sims as a fond memory, rather than a hobby anymore. This is part of the reason why I've been talking so much about running The Sims Complete Collection on Windows 10 and 11; I'm hoping one of the OG Sims creators will stumble across it, go "Hey, you know what I've got on the top shelf of my coat closet?", and put as much of their stuff as they still have onto the Internet Archive. Apart from just helping me relive my fantasies about the past, I truly believe that old games like The Sims are the only defence we have against games as a service. It's not just a matter of archiving, it's also about anti-consumerism.
Hey, I've got to die on some hill. It may as well be this one.
--24 December 2023--