12. Miscellaneous

Discover how to unlock the 'Did You Know?' feature in The Sims, learn about the game's creation, and meet the brilliant minds behind Maxis!

Hey there! So, you've been playing The Sims for a while now, huh? That's awesome! You might have noticed a little question mark icon popping up sometimes. That's actually a super cool feature called 'Did You Know?' that gives you some behind-the-scenes info about the game's development. Let's figure out how to get it to show up and what kind of neat stuff it reveals.

First things first, to even unlock the 'Did You Know?' feature, you need to play with a single family for at least 100 Simdays. Don't worry if you have a bunch of families in your neighborhood; you only need one to hit that 100-day mark. Once a family reaches this milestone, you'll see a special question mark icon appear in the top-right corner of your screen, right where those QuickTips usually show up. A message from the Maxis folks will pop up, asking if you want to accept the 'Did You Know?' window. You'll definitely want to say yes!

This 'Did You Know?' window will then pop up every morning around 10 AM, marked by that same question mark icon. If you happen to miss a day, don't sweat it! The game keeps track of the information it's unlocked, so it won't skip ahead. It's still a good idea to keep an eye out, though, just in case.

The 'Did You Know?' Window Content

When you first hit 100 days, you'll get a congratulatory message. It'll say something like, "Congratulations! This house has been running for 100 days! You must really like this game. We are glad since we do too. If you like the game this much then you must be interested in knowing how it was made. Each day you continue to keep this family going a new 'Did You Know?' box will appear until you know all about us.. If you are not interested then click 'Don't Show This Again' but come on you want to know... you know you do!" You'll then have the option to click '-OK-' or '-Don't Show-'. Obviously, you want to click '-OK-' to see all the juicy details!

Meet the Maxis Team!

The 'Did You Know?' boxes are a great way to learn about the talented people who brought The Sims to life. Here’s a peek at some of them:

• Will Wright - Game Designer: Will actually first got the idea for The Sims shortly after making SimCity. It took a while for the technology to catch up to his vision! They even had a mock-up design in the Maxis offices that's pretty close to the final game. Fun Fact: Will bought real pink flamingo lawn ornaments for the team to study their shape and how to model the physics and 'emotional algorithms' for kicking them!
• Kana Ryan - Producer: Kana was the one who really kept the Sims project moving forward. She was rarely seen without a Diet Coke and used a test house called the "Saga of Kana" to track progress and find bugs. Fun Fact: The wedding picture your Sims paint? That's actually her wedding picture!
• Jeff Charvat - Development Director: Jeff joined the team later to lead the programmers to the Alpha and Final releases. He had to deal with a pretty tough schedule and the game's database. Fun Fact: They showed off an astronaut suit as the first career suit at E3, and shortly after, Jeff was 'borrowed' from the "SimMars" team. A programmer and two artists were also 'borrowed' from "SimMars" later on.
• Charles London - Art Director: Charles started with just himself and grew the art team to include artists, animators, and contractors. He designed the game's interface and its overall look. He's known for his work on classics like Panzer General and Allied General. Fun Fact: The interface went through so many changes as new features were added that even the team lost count!
• James (Jamie) Doornbos - Programmer: Jamie wrote most of the game's code and also created the "tree" language used for coding objects. This system makes the game super expandable, which is why you can add custom objects from the web or create them yourself. A.K.A. "Jamers." Fun Fact: Jamie was initially the only programmer for the object code, but it eventually took four object programmers to finish everything for the game's release.