SimSational || History

The Beginning: SimSational Sim Shopping Centre (5th May 2001): Here is where SimSational began. But how did it begin in the first place? This page will explain the history of SimSational and how it came to existence. Here we go!

In early 2001, our family got something amazing added onto our computer called the Internet (don't laugh!). I was already a fan of the PC game The Sims and I was playing around on this new amazing thing called AOL (again, don't laugh). I had heard about these chat rooms on AOL and went into the chat area. There was a chat room called SimCity 3000 but no room called The Sims, so I went into the SimCity 3000 room. As soon as I entered, the first sentence at the top of the window was sent by someone called IXI Squirtle IXI. It read, "I am looking for some object makers for my Sims site called The Sims Round Table". Stupid me, I said, "I can help! As long as you show me how to make them". As he was so desperate, he agreed to my offer and taught me how to make objects.

Now, these looked pretty terrible I have to admit but I was dead pleased with them. I made about 5 objects and 1 bathroom set. It was called "Cool Blue Bathroom". Actually, it was just loads of Maxis bathroom objects recoloured into blue. I didn't have much of an idea how to do recolours, so the whole object was a glowing blue, including the toilet seat etc.

I eventually got bored and wanted to make my own site. I asked Squirtle how he made The Sims Round Table. He showed me, and it was made using GeoCities Page Builder. So, I got myself a Yahoo account and started building my own site based on Mall of the Sims (which still exists). I couldn't think of a name at all, but eventually I came up with a really cheesy name: SimSational Sim Shopping Centre. I spent ages on it, and when I had finished the main site, I made a few "stores" with my own objects, and a girl named LuckyMe opened a store on the site with her own floors and wallpapers. Again, I got pretty bored with this site after a few months and I had just bought The Sims Hot Date. So I decided I wanted to open a brand new site that had Downtown lots up for download.

SimSational Sim Properties Inc (October 2001): I started making a design in MS Paint (yeah I know, but I couldn't afford Photoshop back then!) and I got all the main pages set up. Now all I needed was a name. I decided to try and keep the "SimSational" part of the name, so I came up with SimSational Sim Properties Inc. Again, this was all made in GeoCities Page Builder.

Along came The Sims Vacation. I wanted to have Vacation Island resorts in the site as well, so I opened a new section and used the same design but changed the colours. The Downtown section would stay the same old turquoise colour, and the Vacation Island section was bright yellow. This is when SimSational Sim Properties Inc got quite popular. The site was getting ~~thousands~~ about a dozen visits a day which was a lot for me back then. And then one day I had an email from Josh van Hulst that runs SimStuff.com. He told me that he was a big fan of my site and asked if I ever wanted to help out at SimStuff.com, I could. So I did just that!

SimStuff.com (March 2002): At SimStuff.com I was a news reporter. I loved working there and I wanted to help out a little more, so I ran a section there called Sim Finds of the Week. Every week I would find the best objects or sets and post a poll so visitors could vote for their favourite object or set. This was a great success and only 1 site still has one of the awards on their sites: Simulation Sims (at the bottom of the page). At this point I didn't have much of an idea about how non-GeoCities websites were created and the section I ran at SimStuff.com was a real mess because I didn't understand how to use FrontPage correctly. But eventually I did learn and corrected all (and there was a lot of them!) of the mistakes I had made over the few months I had been working there.

Again, I got bored and went back to SimSational Sim Properties Inc.

SimSational Sim Properties Inc (Late 2002): After a few more weeks of SimSational Sim Properties Inc, I realised that PageBuilder was actually quite naff after using FrontPage a lot. I decided to move the site to SimGames.net and start the site from scratch using FrontPage. Kevin (the manager of SimGames.net) told me I had to choose a sub domain for my site, which would be www.BLANK.simgames.net. I picked "simsational" as the sub domain and started to work on the new site. I got it all uploaded and after a month or so, I had a brilliant idea. The web address to the site was www.simsational.simgames.net and that said SimSational Sim Games. I wanted to have a site about all the current Sim games like The Sims, SimGolf, SimCoaster and SimCity 3000 (these games were current at the time!). And then came the beginnings of the site you see today.

The Early SimSational Sim Games (December 2002): My design for SimSational Sim Properties Inc was pretty awful, and I wanted a new design for SimSational Sim Games, so I headed on over to Web Design Helper UK for a website template. I found a really nice once and used that.

The website had a section called "Sim Finds of the Week", just like the one I started at SimStuff.com. I did it every week without fail and it got boring (yes, I get bored easily) after a few months so I gave that up. Not a lot after that happened really, I just kept posting news each week and then around July 2003 I installed a phpBB forum. This wasn't used much, but I still liked it and it had a few regular posters. And then one day the owners of The Sims Unity asked if I wanted to merge my forum with theirs. Stupid me, I said yes and it all went ahead. Now, this is the worst decision I have ever made. If you are going to take in any of the historic info on this page, then make sure you take this in as well: forum merges do not work out! You will always argue with the original owner about what should happen etc. It was a complete disaster. I left The Sims Unity and opened my own forum again. I was free! "Yay!" I hear you shout.

SimSational Sim Games (August 2003): I redesigned the site and I got Adobe Photoshop! I could make, umm, ok-ish graphics with it, but they looked better than the ones I used to make in MS Paint! It was around this time that I got an email from Luc Barthelet (the then-Maxis General Manager) about me being invited to EA in San Francisco to find out more about The Sims 2 and to basically plug it on SimSational Sim Games. In November the webmasters that were invited went to EA, as I am living in the UK it took 14 hours to fly from the UK to California. It wasn't actually too bad! Unfortunately there was a lot of flu going around before I went, and on the night before we were going to leave I started feeling ill (okay I know this has nothing to do with the history of SimSational but never mind). On the Friday that we got to see The Sims 2 at EA I was really ill with flu, but I still went. How could I turn down the chance to meet friends I had made on the internet and the chance to meet Will Wright, Luc Barthelet, Lucy Bradshaw and of course, the chance to play The Sims 2? I couldn't! So there you go. Moving on...

SimSational Sim Games goes PHP-Nuke (December 2003): Because the site was created with FrontPage, it was very difficult to update. So I wanted to try and use PHP-Nuke to create the website (for those of you that don't know what PHP-Nuke is, it is a web portal system that lets you publish pages and news through an admin panel on the internet). I downloaded a theme called WinterICE for the site and just added the banner that I used on the old FrontPage site. PHP-Nuke was okay, but it just looked messy and none of the pages matched.

I then bought a domain: simsational.co.uk which is still used today. Because of this new domain, people didn't really know what the site was called. Was it SimSational? Or SimSational Sim Games? People even started to call is SSG which I liked. I changed the banner to say SSG instead of SimSational Sim Games, but people still called it SimSational. So in the end, the site had 3 names which was pretty annoying.

SimSational Sim Games goes PostNuke (Thursday 8th April 2004 7:43PM GMT): Wow the exact date and time! After many hackers had hacked the old PHP-Nuke as much as they could, I had to change to a different system and a new database and new details... basically I had to start from scratch and make everything more secure. I decided to change to PostNuke which i think is fantastic. It looks clean and the different modules match well. I even made my very own theme! The website was no longer called SimSational Sim Games or SSG. It was now just SimSational. SimSational Sim Games was a ridiculous name anyway!

SimSational Version 7.0 (Sunday 1st August 2004 0:00AM GMT): On July 12th 2004 I decided to close the site until September 1st and rebuild the site from scratch! As we stepped into the new PostNuke era and left behind good old Coranto, we found out PostNuke wasn't all it was hyped up to be. You were very limited. Yes, it was cool, but you couldn't do much with the site, you were very restricted. So guess what? I changed back to Coranto again! I designed the new site from scratch and abandoned the old "boxes and squares" approach, and opted for a new soft rounded corner style design with different coloured blocks, and softer colours. Before the refurbishment, I made a new logo and kept it for the new site.

SimSational Version 7.3 (Tuesday 25th July 2006): I've skipped versions 7.1 and 7.2 because each carried minor changes, but now we're into 7.3, all the little changes have togther created quite a large difference to how the design started 2 years ago. The foundation of 7.3 is the expansion of the layout, adding an extra column to the right of the page for extra tid-bits such as headlines. The banner has been extended to accomodate the extra width. Together I think this makes the site feel more filled out.

Unfortunately, 7.3 marks the end of SimSational's coverage of SimCity 4. Hopefully when SimCity 5 is announced (we can hope!), SimCity will once again have a place here at SimSational!

And there you have it! The complete history of SimSational. What is in store for us next? Who knows! We will just have to wait and see. I would like to thank the following people for making SimSational what it is today (in alphabetical order):