The Sims 2

Trivia

The game is featured in the first episode of the fourth season of the US HBO drama series Six Feet Under. Arthur, an intern, is shown playing the game for about twenty seconds.

Contributed by Sciere (119289) on Aug 07, 2009.

The Sims 2 won the Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X Game in 2006.

The Sims 2 was named #6 Game of the Year in the 14th Annual Computer Game Awards issue of Computer Games Magazine (March 2005).

Contributed by PCGamer77 (3025) on Jan 21, 2008.

There are numerous references to pop culture and in-jokes in the game. Here are three of them-

1. In the University expansion go to the create a student mode. See that guy in the portrait? That's the games creator Will Wright!.

2. If you are wondering about the pigs that are often floating in the sky when you are browsing through a neighbourhood (eg Pleasantview). The pigs are a reference to a very famous Pink Floyd cover for their album "Animals" which depicts a flying pig.

3. The town Veronaville is a parody of Shakespeares "Romeo and Juliet" and contains two equivalent families.

Weather was originally planned on being included, but was scrapped due to a bug that had it rain inside houses. The Seasons expansion pack, however, has a perfect rendition of the original plan, and then some.

The description of a memory of "doing WooHoo" with a a service person such as a maid includes the sentence "Hey, what am I really paying for here???" This was originally removed due to ESRB issues, but apparently made it into the game.

Modifications to tweak a game to your needs are common practice, but some of the hacks in The Sims 2 have been spreading like viruses. Popular hacks allow you to keep multiple lovers without the issue of jealousy or let you be pregnant as a teenager. These need to be downloaded and installed, but others are spread unwillingly.

EA provides a feature to export your house to an online "Lot Exchange" to let other gamers admire your work. Unfortunately, hacked items and routines are included as well and some of them replace the default settings for the entire game. People reported their sims to be abducted by aliens every time they looked through a telescope, a single shot of espresso would fill every need and all sims were graced with eternal youth.

Therefore, similar to the virus scene, hack scanners and anti-hack cleaners have been developed, but often a complete uninstall is the only solution.

Contributed by Sciere (119289) on Jan 06, 2005.

Characters from other Sim games make cameos in 'The Sims 2' through job "chance cards". For example, Malcolm Landgraab, a wealthy developer from SimCity 3, is mentioned in one of these.

The Sims 2 is used to make The Strangerhood, a machinima sitcom from the creators of the Halo-based sci-fi comedy Red vs. Blue.

Electronic Arts released The Sims 2 with a revolutionary hard-coded protection that can actually detect if you are using a no-CD crack, CD drive emulator, or other similar tools for bypassing a CD copy protection check, and disables the game to something like a "shareware" version, in which you can play the game, create families etc, but Build Mode (for constructing your houses) and saving your game are disabled.

Contributed by Vaelor (376) on Nov 09, 2004.

Having sold 1 million copies in a week, The Sims 2 was Electronic Arts' strongest launch ever.