We’re big Sims fans here at Breakthrough T1D Play, and we’re feeling all nostalgic right now because the Sims franchise celebrated its 25th birthday this week. Humple Borpnah, friends!
Of course, our community loves playing The Sims—especially with Crowd Control during charity streams. Isn’t that right, Arielehm?
We also have Sims connections behind the scenes. Hans ten Cate, a T1D dad and cofounder of Breakthrough T1D Play, worked at EA in the early 2000s on The Sims 2, The Urbz: Sims in the City, and other Sims console games. Hans was also a producer on The Simpsons Game, and he tipped us off to this amazing Will Wright cameo:
(We played The Simpsons Game with Hans on Twitch last year. See the archived video here.)
Hans isn’t the only T1D connection in the Sims family. Justin Graham, a software engineer who lives with T1D, worked on Sims games at Maxis and EA, and he’s now at Will Wright’s Gallium Studios working on an upcoming Sims-like game named Proxi. As a member of our advisory council, Justin helped us set up an amazing stream with Will on the Breakthrough T1D Twitch channel in December. (Om za gleb!!) And then Will surprised us by revealing his own T1D connections: his grandfather had type 1 , and a good friend lives with T1D as well.
In the diabetes world, your diaversary is the day you were diagnosed. For a long time T1D was known as a “juvenile diabetes,” but in reality many people are diagnosed in their twenties or even older. So it makes perfect sense to us that while the Sims franchise was “born” on February 4, 2020, its diaversary falls on January 31, 2023—the day medical wearable devices were added to The Sims 4, including continuous glucose monitors (CGMs). Hans made this video to commemorate the milestone.
To learn more about the Sims legacy, check out this segment that aired today on CBS Saturday Morning.
Fun Fact: At 1:28 and 2:44 in the CBS video there are glimpses of a Thimbleweed Park cross stitch that hangs on the wall in the Video Game History Foundation’s office. This was stitched by Breakthrough T1D Play’s own Emily Morganti, who offers cross-stitched donation incentives during our annual Twitch fundraisers. Want one of your very own? Email us and we’ll give you a heads-up the next time we offer this during a campaign.
