As somebody who played TSO from the beginning of the beta to its close, I don’t feel like this is an accurate thing to say. Sure, you had to take care of your basic sim needs and you were skilling a lot which were the same as Sims 1, but that’s where the similarities ended. To completely ignore the social features it brought out in playing with other people was really a unique experience at the time and should be remembered.

The pizza machine and the other 2 objects that let you work with 3 other people to make money were some really interesting co-op features that were completely new to The Sims, and still today are original concepts due to the multiplayer aspects of them.

They kept releasing updates so that you could actually go to work locations with your friends and do work shifts together, which at the time was also completely new as The Sims 2 Open for Business wasn’t even out yet. We also got pets to play around with in the end, and I believe there were some breeds that were different from The Sims Unleashed. You could go to other lots and buy furniture cheaper that way, so we had this retail concept happening which was also new at the time.

There were some people who created their own Internet radio stations to chat with people in the game while skilling, and took requests from people on the lot. It made it more fun and less boring as it did take forever to skill up.

Honestly though, the game was so buggy all I did was go around to every lot I could with a few of my friends and caused mischief to see how else we could break the game. We found out how to fill a bathtub with water and keep the water visible with no one in it, which no one could figure out why and it was funny seeing them confused.

We also knew how to take salad plates from the buffet table and always hold them while doing other things, so everytime we went dancing on a disco lot, that was an essential accessory. One of my friends and I timed it so that after we accepted an interaction with each other we had a plan of where to walk and do other emotes at the same time, basically so that we could do synchronized dance routines for other people.

There were some hilarious things we did with beds too, where we just glitched our sims into awkward positions. I remember one time going to a lot that had a bunch of the vibrating heart beds (wink wink nudge nudge) and we did that glitch, and the owners of the lot were laughing so hard because my friends’ sim was a naked blur just outside of the bed.

For some reason we also found a lot that was set up like a court room and I was a witness for something. So yeah, there was a lot of role-playing going on.

The biggest events though were when we figured out how to delay the fireworks from exploding and created a bunch of firework clouds that stayed up, then set them on fire all at once and burned our backyard up. The cleanup sucked though with all the ashes to sweep up, so we bugged the maids with that too. We also took the port-a-potty and kept using it all over our lot so it would leak out water puddles until our lot became Venice. Good times.

But yeah, there really weren’t many things like this on the Internet back then, and I think that if this were approached in a new and modern way today it may be more successful with the younger generations being as social as they are online and with the interpretation of computers today being an accepted social norm.

I think people forget or don’t realize that there were stigmas associated with being computer savvy or playing computer games as a teenager (or younger) in that time period that did not make it a commonality for people, especially girls (which I think the majority of Sims players are girls but I know many guys play too and is for all ages). Otherwise you were a nerd and uncool in school. I feel like a lot of the people I played with were in their 20s or 30s with me as a teen. Given those limitations, and with the majority of people still being on dial-up Internet, I think those are the real reasons TSO died. It was simply ahead of its time, IMO.