Sul sul! How The Sims influenced a generation of creatives

Consider this seemingly haphazard list of artworks: Celine Song’s adaptation of The Seagull; the snarky, but razor-sharp recreation of the artful chaos of the studio flat of erstwhile influencer Caroline Calloway; Ian Cheng’s prehistoric-influenced animation Emissary in the Squat of Gods; the music video for Kelela’s Frontline; and Airbnb’s Get an Airbnb campaign by Buck. The tie that binds them is their referencing, to varying degrees, the universe of The Sims.

Developed by Electronic Arts, The Sims is a life-simulation video game series that debuted 25 years ago. The player could create their own characters and home environments and guide them through life. Other than the more picturesque aspects of the game’s mechanics – which involve mildly sadistic activities such as electrocuting your characters, drowning them in a pool, instantly removing a toilet the moment they need it most, or spying on them in the act of “WooHoo” – what stands out is the ample possibilities for both character and environmental customisation.

This feature turns it into a mighty toolbox for visual artists. The game lends itself to doubling as a platform to explore architectural and interior design ideas, with players drawing inspiration from notable works of architecture or genre-defining design eras. Conversely, its distinctive visual style has inspired visual artists across disciplines, especially in terms of character design, colour palettes, textures, and spatial arrangements within the game, fully seeping into fields such as advertising, fashion and music videos, illustration, art and much more.

The Cosiness-to-Dystopia Spectrum

The 2024 campaign Get an Airbnb is a series of 30-second spots, each highlighting a different feature that differentiates Airbnb from hotels. For each spot, Buck recreated a different home environment, ranging from a quaint Parisian flat to a tropical villa in Central America, with a focus on cosiness that never feels twee. And while the textures are reminiscent of claymation, there is painstaking detail work: the Parisian flat has artfully distressed hardwood floors arranged in a herringbone motif and a Noguchi lamp; the Central American villa has a hanging chair made of bamboo complete with an embroidered pillow and a garden replete with hibiscus and strelitzia. The design director of the project, Shannon Rollins, has been a Sims fan since she was 12, where she would neglect her characters’ dynamics for the sake of designing spaces, and those houses for Airbnb also scratched an itch in her. “I do a lot of shopping, and [working on these miniature sets] is nice because I don't have a budget; instead of buying something, we just have our incredible 3D team model it,” she says. “You feel the craft, but when it's small like that, it's also very relatable. It’s not a James Cameron movie,” she continues. “There was an effort when we were making these to not make them super trendy – it's not your Architectural-Digest-like tour of Gwyneth Paltrow’s house: these are spaces that should feel really real. And I think part of that reality is that a warm and comfortable space in real life is not always hippest.”

Above: Buck: Get an Airbnb campaign (Copyright © Buck/Airbnb 2024)

Being inspired by The Sims does not automatically mean cosy home spaces and a wardrobe similar to the one belonging to Cher Horowitz in Clueless, though. Romanian-born, Madrid-based visual artist Nicoleta Mureş, for example, was previously profiled on It’s Nice That for how her artwork combined Sims-inspired assets and apocalyptic scenarios. Her series Office After Dark stems from the darker aspects of The Sims. “I remember playing The Sims and doing all the ‘experiments’ – removing the pool ladder, forcing my Sim to swim for hours, deleting the toilet just when my Sim needed it most, or trapping them inside a doorless room,” she tells It’s Nice That. “There was something darkly entertaining about these small acts of simulated cruelty, a reminder of how detached we can become from virtual suffering.” So, for her 2024 series Office After Dark, a literal office hellscape that is at the same time reminiscent of Apple TV’s Severance, The Matrix, and 90s horror anime, she wanted to present a different kind of “trapped” existence – not one controlled by an external player, but a reality where people are alive yet feel lifeless. “The vampire became a central metaphor for this state of being – drained, stuck in an endless cycle, existing but not really living,” she explains. “The Sims-inspired graphics were essential to building this atmosphere. After years of working with different digital tools, I still prefer this nostalgic, imperfect aesthetic over hyper-polished, plastic-looking visuals.” The slightly awkward, glitchy quality makes the world feel more human, more relatable.

Similarly, Apisit “Ryu” Techajirasin, a 3D and VFX artist based in Bangkok who primarily works in modeling with the open-source software Blender, notes that in the 1990s, isometric perspectives were a way to circumvent technical limitations, but they allowed players to form strong memories of the portrayed environments. “As opposed to 3D platformers or games depicted in third person, where you would constantly see the camera placed behind a character’s back for the entirety of the game, unless the location is really interesting to look at, those locations just sorta pass on by and you never really think about them again,” he notes. “Utilising isometric angles in my art just captures the vibe and feel of pre-rendered backgrounds really well and gives viewers more than just simply two characters interacting – it’s giving viewers the entire experience of the space the characters are breathing and living in at that specific moment in time.”

“I love isometric perspective – it’s like controlled chaos,” echoes artist Paris-based digital artist Claudia Maté. “It makes 3D look structured yet surreal, like a tiny, logical-but-bizarre universe. It also has that nostalgic old-school video game feel while still looking futuristic. I’ve always found it fascinating how 3D translates onto a flat screen, and isometric projection plays with that in such an interesting way.”

More broadly, the aesthetics of this era of gaming have no doubt influenced a whole genre of digital art, which in turn has found its way into most niches of culture. “Digital art is the ultimate flex,” Claudia explains. “No fabric constraints, no gravity, no logic – just pure creative freedom.” Sectors such as fashion and music, she says, have always been about fantasy, and digital art “removes the last few limitations they had.”

The Sims as an Artistic Keystone

Ryu’s case is interesting because it shows how, regardless of one’s individual degree of involvement in the whole Sims universe, its legacy has nonetheless directly shaped the artistic direction of digital designers and animators, in terms of methodology, lengthy exposure to its interface, or a need for subversion.

In fact, while his art is currently mainly devoted to the Final Fantasy VII universe, Ryu likens his experience with playing Sims to the way he creates artworks in Blender. “Most of my playtime is actually spent on build mode,” he tells us. Several years ago, he set out to recreate his entire house in The Sims 4 from the ground up, depicting how it was during his childhood before it was renovated. “I really wanted to preserve the old house in all its charm in some way or another, and The Sims was really the best means of achieving that,” he says. He used the original floor plans as well as old family photos as reference. “It gave me bearings on where everything was being placed, and it all started to come together. Fast forward four to five years later, and I’m still finding things to add to it; every new pack I bought wasn’t so much to enhance the gameplay experience but rather to expand my furniture library, and I pick and choose them very carefully.”

For Nicoleta, the aesthetics of The Sims were a rediscovery and a way to expand the possibilities of her artworks. Even though she grew up playing video games – Sims included – which provided her with a healthy dose of escapism, in high school and early university she drifted away from the pastime. Then, while pursuing a fine arts degree, she found herself limited by traditional painting. “At some point, I started photographing my paintings and bringing them into Photoshop, looking for a fresh perspective,” she tells It’s Nice That. Soon, she discovered MakeHuman, “…a free software that reminded me so much of The Sims – simple, intuitive, and perfect for creating human figures without prior 3D experience.”

Overall, for visual artists, The Sims are like those entry-level artist kits containing gouache, crayons, pencils, and different paint brushes: a low-risk, high-reward toolbox that can unlock creative skills. Claudia remembers the feeling of freedom that came with playing The Sims and other games, on her own computer as a teen in the late 90s, and the fun outlets it presented to her younger self. “At the time, I wasn’t thinking about a creative career, but I loved playing with software like FreeHand or Photoshop just for fun,” she says. “[It] felt like a portal to another world – one that constantly evolved alongside me.” Nowadays, the artist is diving deeper into game development itself, as part of her practice.

Buck’s Shannon Rollins even believes that the afternoons of her youth spent designing Sims houses (to the detriment of the characters’ developments) was when she first realised she wanted a creative career, where she could wear many hats. “The Sims is this really cool way to have agency and then starting to feel out what it's like to shape the world around you,” she says. “It’s like, when you’re a kid, you can't go buy a sofa, but maybe you can ask your mum if you can paint your room – your hands are a little bit tied in terms of how you can express that. The Sims is a really good jumping off point for starting to feel out if you are the type of kid that's going to grow up to be interested in creative work.”

A cornerstone of an exciting time in game development, the original Sims game was undeniably impactful on culture at the time. But for many creative practitioners today, playing it 25 years ago, and since, has been formative – whether stirring a lifelong passion for interior design, digital art or dark comedy, or simply offering a way into a different type of gaming. For that, we say: Vadish!