I remember seeing my first advert for The Sims whilst playing SimCity. It was available on the SimCity disk and I would watch it over and over again in excitement. Looking back on it now the advert still brings back these emotions, it makes me want to play the original Sims.
The idea of being able to build my own house and watch people run around like ants intrigued me. Perhaps because I wasn’t very good at SimCity at all. Interestingly I was never fond of doll houses, often finding them boring and although you can customise them, the ones I had seen were made with specific rooms already. Like a room would have tiled flooring indicating it was either a large bathroom or a kitchen. And another room had a built in fireplace and so hinted towards being a lounge. There was always only one set of furniture to use also, deeming the house to look pretty much the same every time you moved things around.
I remember browsing The Sims website one day when I saw the announcement of The Sims 2, I quickly skipped through all the written descriptions to find the video:
The graphics amazed me, the idea of generations amazed me even more. The excitement I’d felt from the original Sims was nothing to compare to this. By this time a gameplay video had been released, and I would watch it repeatedly, showing my sister and dad trying to convince them it was ‘so good!’.
So far I’d only ever seen The Sims advertised on the internet, but it was years later that I saw an advert on TV.
The Sims 3 took on a bolder approach to advertising. Although I never saw any of these, the NYT describes the three ways EA used to promote the game:
There will be a free trial available at Sims3.com and at the Sims 3 fan page on Facebook, meant for people who have never played the game before.
Another option, called SimFriend, lets visitors to the Web site pick a Sim pen pal from among 120 characters, and that pen pal will send e-mail messages. For example, a Sim might send a message asking what type of dinner she should cook for her boyfriend, and the fan picks from options like “Cook an elegant meal.” The e-mail chain would continue, tailored to the Sim’s personality and skills.
“If the Sim happens to be a kleptomaniac chef, the response you get back might be, ‘Thanks, I went and stole food today,’ when what you’re expecting is ‘Thanks, I just had lunch,’ ” said John Buchanan, senior director of worldwide marketing for the Sims line at Electronic Arts.
The third option is called SimSidekick. A fans chooses from 6 characters on the Web site, and an image of the character that is chosen floats on top of the browser as the fan moves around the Web.
The character has site-specific responses to sites that Electronic Arts has chosen, like MTV.com, YouTube, and Twitter. On Twitter, for instance, where the mascot is a bird, a flock of bluebirds descends on the character, and, depending on its personality, the character will jump, wave his or her hands, or respond in some other way.
On other sites, the SimSidekick software looks for the category of the Web site, like travel or news, and the character responds appropriately, acting like a sports fanatic on a site like ESPN.com, or looking like he’s searching for something on Google.com.
I saw the trailer on the website:
I was, again, excited for The Sims 3. Though I felt the change was less dramatic than from The Sims to The Sims 2, I had doubts I would be as impressed.
Considering how popular The Sims is, I expected to see more advertising than I did. As I said earlier, I didn’t know about the online promotions that the NYT talked about, but why? Should I of been made aware of it? I did browse the Sims 3 website every few weeks, mostly checking to see when the release date for Mac was, so surely, unless I completely blanked it, it should of been obvious on the website. For around 3/4 of the year I don’t have access to TV, and so chances are of spotting a commercial were slim. The 1/4 of the year I do was in the summer holidays, which was the few months before The Sims 3 was bring released. I expected in that time I would of seen it, but I didn’t. However, this could be because they have such a huge fan base that they don’t feel the need to make it obvious, because their followers would be checking in every day anyway.
