Jeff Braun, the Maxis co-founder, has said that his company's board were dismayed by Wright's idea. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that more people have heard Jerry Martin's minimal jazz than Thom Yorke's measured howls on 'Everything In Its Right Place.'Īt the time, however, few people thought the game would catch on at all, despite the recent worldwide success of the SimCity series. But Radiohead's Kid A, released that same year and long considered a seminal record, has sold around 1.5 million copies to date-roughly one-tenth of what The Sims has managed. It's difficult to judge any record's true reach-radio and commercial play mean that those albums have had an impact beyond their sales figures. Only four albums of original material released in 2000, the year The Sims hit shelves, have gone on to sell more copies: Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory, Britney Spears's Oops!… I Did It Again, Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP, and The Backstreet Boys' Black & Blue. BusinessWire reported in 2005 that the original Sims had sold 16 million copies worldwide. It's likely one of the most widely heard album-length collections of music to be released so far this century. For a time in the early-2000s, millions of kids were listening to impressionistic, semi-improvised mood jazz without even knowing it. The six songs eased into your headphones as soon as you paused time to do some ambitious landscaping or find the perfect roof. The music for the game's Build Mode-composed by Martin alongside Doobie Brothers saxophonist Marc Russo and jazz pianist John R Burr-was made up of instrumental, new age, lone-piano pieces. My Chemical Romance, Flo Rida, and Kelly Rowland were among the artists who re-recorded songs in the game's unique Simlish language for The Sims 3 the soundtrack to The Sims 4, released in 2014, was scored by the highly regarded British neoclassical composer Ilan Eshkeri.īut one section of the soundtrack to the original Sims has retained a unique power. And as the game has grown, the music has become slicker. The four installments of the game (and the countless expansion packs that have followed) have been translated into 22 languages, selling around 200 million copies worldwide.

It's not like a big build-up to something.'Įighteen years on from its initial release, The Sims series is an institution. 'You're sitting there and you're just kind of building and you're fiddling around with your house-that can just go on and on and on for hours. 'It was supposed to be very relaxing and very contemplative,' Martin says over the phone from his new home in the mountains of central California.

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