Actually, youâre both correct. It was an accident and a deliberate decision by one gay developer:
âDuring The Simsâs protracted development, the team had debated whether to permit same-sex relationships in the game. If this digital petri dish was to accurately model all aspects of human life, from work to play and love, it was natural that it would facilitate gay relationships. But there was also fear about how such a feature might adversely affect the game. âNo other game had facilitated same-sex relationships beforeâat least, to this extentâand some people figured that maybe we werenât the ideal ones to be first, as this was a game that E.A. really didnât want to begin with,â Barret told me. âIt felt to me like a fear thing.â After going back and forth for several months, the team finally decided to leave same-sex relationships out of the game code.
When Barrett joined the company, in October, 1998, he was unaware of the decision. A fortnight into his new job, he found himself with nothing to do when his supervisor, the gameâs lead programmer, Jamie Doornbos, took a short vacation. Jim Mackraz, Barrettâs boss, needed a task to occupy his new employee, and he handed Barrett a document that outlined how social interactions in the game would work; the underlying rules for the gameâs A.I. that would dictate how the characters would dynamically interact with one another. âHe didnât think I could handle it with Jamie off on vacation, but he figured that at least Iâd be out of his hair,â Barrett told me. âNeither he nor I realized that heâd given me an old design document to work from.â
That design document predated the decision to exclude gay relationships in the game. Its pages described a web of social interactions, in which every kind of romantic relationship was permitted. That week, Barrett confounded the expectations of his disbelieving boss. He successfully wrote the basic code for social interactions, including same-sex relationships. âIn hindsight, I probably should have questioned the design,â Barrett, who is gay, said. âBut the design felt right, so I just implemented it. Later, Will Wright stopped by my desk,â Barrett said. âHe told me that liked the social interactions, and that he was glad to see that same-sex support was back in the game.â Nobody on the team questioned Barrettâs work. âThey just pretty much ignored it,â he said. âAfter a while, everyone was just used to the design being there. It was widely expected that E.A. would just kill it, anyway.â
In early 1999, before E.A. had a chance to kill the design, Barrett was asked to create a demo of the game to be shown at E3. The demo would consist of three scenes from the game. These were to be so-called on-rails scenesânot a true, live simulation but one that was preplanned, and which would shake out the same way each time it was played, in order to show the game in its best light. One of the scenes was a wedding between two Sims characters. âI had run out of time before E3, and there were so many Sims attending the wedding that I didnât have time to put them all on rails,â Barrett said.
On the first day of the show, the gameâs producers, Kana Ryan and Chris Trottier, watched in disbelief as two of the female Sims attending the virtual wedding leaned in and began to passionately kiss. They had, during the live simulation, fallen in love. Moreover, they had chosen this moment to express their affection, in front of a live audience of assorted press.â
- from The Kiss That Changed Video Games by Simon Parker
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