You might have looked at The Sims Complete Collection and wondered what possible use you could have for such an old game; or looked at the low-poly visuals and uncanny facial expressions in The Sims 2 and thought how terrible the past must have been. Or, you could have been curious about those old games; curious enough to seek out physical copies of these pre-DLC games and attempted to install them on your new computer, only to come to the troubling discovery that they won't go. "Oh well," you grit your teeth, "I'll just buy it again on Steam." Nope. "EA Desktop?" Nope. "Bloody GOG.com, then?!" No. Exactly one half of the main series of The Sims games is unplayable on modern computers.
First, what makes it this way? Theoretically, there can't be anything bad about a newer, faster computer, right? That line of thinking went out the window as soon as the new millennium ticked over. Software that was made for Windows 95 that had been utile on Windows Me suddenly, inexplicably would not run on Windows XP. Then, in 2007, it happened again with Windows 7. Now, it's Windows 11 and there's so little of the original Windows NT framework left that even old USB devices won't work properly. Apart from that, though; The Sims 1 and 2 were copy-protected by Safedisc, with later editions of The Sims 2 using SecuROM. This posed a problem even for Windows 7 users back in 2015 when Microsoft nuked support for its base driver, SECDRV.SYS. Gee, it's almost as though a copy-protection scheme that relies on files stored in a crucial area of Windows was a bad thing! Who'd've thought? However, for Windows 7 and 8 users, it was still possible to step around this issue and play classic Sims like normal. Windows 10 locked down, though; Defender started to classify anything with SECDRV.SYS in it as a potential security risk. Since this was before Windows 11 even started development, the boilerplate restriction against SecuROM got baked into 11 as just a routine security matter. This is the technical explanation for why The Sims won't run on Windows 11.
For some reason, Electronic Arts has made the perplexing decision to not release anything older than The Sims 3 on DLC services. Considering their obsession with premium DLC, you'd think they would have, but they haven't. Obviously, new players aren't going to be interested in The Sims Complete Collection, but the 39-year-old network administrator who used to be the 14-year-old who used The Sims to write fanfiction probably would. My dad was a civil engineer, trained in the '70s; he was in his 50s when The Sims came out, and he played it. He'd be in his mid-70s now and I'm sure he would still want to play it (of course, knowing him, he would have kept his Windows 98 SE machine running all this time and would just have played it on the original disc media). The fact is, the market is there, but EA would rather flounder a bit for another 6 months and then get acquired by the Walt Disney Company.
Even Nintendo know there's still a market for their old stuff. I mean, there's a reason why we've had to buy Super Mario Bros. 13 times: keep people aware of the property to maintain demand for it. No, you can't plug an NES cartridge into your Switch (even though that would be really, really cool), but they still have their DLC service where you can go to buy a compatible ROM version of Super Mario Bros. and all that. I have no doubt that, if EA offered The Sims for download on EA Desktop, people would buy it; if they offered The Sims 2, even, people would buy it. But, EA have all the business savvy of a compulsive gambler, so it simply will never happen...
...legally.
It's not as though there's no way to play these games on Windows 11. With a virtual machine version of Windows XP and a cracked ISO of The Sims Complete Collection, it's still possible to play. Contrary to the popular wisdom, there are places you can go to download cracked software without getting any malware (I'll leave it to you to discover them, of course). Electronic Arts had better not get mad about it, because they dug this hole themselves. If they had kept The Sims, SimCity 3000, The Sims 2, and SimCity 4 available as DLC, we wouldn't have to resort to piracy to play these old games. Nintendo and Sega figure into this discussion, as well, but that's another post.
--9 August 2023--