The Sims 2/History

This article is a review of the history of the game The Sims 2.

Development
EA Games announced on May 5, 2003 that the Maxis studio had begun development on The Sims 2. The game was first shown at E³ in Los Angeles, California on May 13, 2004. Will Wright admits that while most of the content of The Sims 2 are original ideas, inspiration for its own expansions and constituents spawned from the successes of the first game. The community interest in the antecedent The Sims: Unleashed expansion, for example, ensured the creation of The Sims 2: Pets expansion. After development concluded, designers from Maxis regarded The Sims 2 as very capricious during creation. Bugs would appear apparently spontaneously, and Sims would be "tweaked", or have anomalies not present in a previous run.

Subsequent Releases
For the PC, there have been six released editions of the core game, six released expansion packs and six released stuff packs. There has also been another stuff pack and expansion announced. Many of these have been ported to Mac OS X by Aspyr. The Sims 2 has also been released for a number of game consoles.

Expansion packs
The Sims 2 expansion packs provide additional game features and items. Generally, expansion packs add one central gameplay element, several peripheral elements, a new type of "expansion neighborhood", a new mythical creature (e.g. zombies in University and vampires in Nightlife), and over 100 new objects. Six expansion packs have been released so far, with the seventh expansion pack to be released in early February 2008.

Stuff packs
Stuff packs are add-ons to the base game that add only new objects. There are currently seven released. Stuff packs were originally called booster packs, as seen in the release of The Sims 2: Holiday Party Pack. Current releases are called "Stuff Packs" and include certain gameplay elements introduced in previous expansion packs (as opposed to Holiday Party Pack, which only added a package file containing object data). Stuff packs typically add around 60 new items.