When I first encountered The Sims in 2001, a year after its launch, I was deeply bored by the Goths and their middle-class stability. The house had been in the family for a while. A number of relatives were buried in the backyard cemetery and their ghosts would rise, on occasion, to terrify the living. A bathtub to luxuriate in, rather than the cheap standing shower most starter Sims could afford. Inside, the rooms were studded with symbols of disposable income: a piano, an aquarium, an easel for their awful daughter Cassandra. On the Goths’ patio was a dining table with a price tag several multiples above the entry-level Formica square.
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Yet it still retained an air of loftiness, a comparative mansion in a suburb full of bungalows.
Sitting at 5 Sim Lane, the house of Bella and Mortimer Goth wasn’t especially ostentatious-two-storey, detached, subtly nineteenth-century in a way that befit their name without berating it. If you wanted to cut straight to the marrow of living and skip all the nonsense, like job-hunting or buying a toilet, then you started playing The Sims 1 with the family that came pre-built into the game.