Rosebud and Pool Ladders in The Sims

The Sims came out in 2000 and let you run the lives of little people in a dollhouse. Players used money cheats and did questionable things with pool ladders.

current mood: mischievouscurrently listening to: ♫ Simlish humming

Written by Daniel Rivera · October 9, 202656k: ~1 min

The Sims was a computer game where you created little people, built them a house and managed their daily lives, from cooking dinner to finding a job. Designed by Will Wright and made by Maxis, it came out on February 4, 2000, and became the best-selling PC game in the US that year and the next. Players remember it for the "rosebud" money cheat, the made-up Simlish language and, famously, removing the pool ladder while a Sim was swimming. The series kept going with The Sims 2, 3 and 4, and it's still one of the best-selling game series ever. If you ever left a Sim swimming overnight, you know how it ends.

A digital dollhouse

The idea came partly from something sad. Will Wright lost his home in the 1991 fire in Oakland, California, and rebuilding it got him thinking about homes, the stuff in them and the people living there. The Sims turned that into a game about everyday life, with fewer fires. Okay, with about the same number of fires.

You made a family, picked their looks and personalities, and then built a house from scratch or moved them into one. From there, it was up to you. Your Sims needed to eat, sleep, shower, have fun and talk to people, and if you ignored them, they let you know. If you liked building more than babysitting, RollerCoaster Tycoon had come out a year earlier and let you run a whole theme park.

Need bars and a lot of dirty dishes

Every Sim had needs shown as bars: hunger, comfort, hygiene, bladder, energy, fun, social and room. Let one drop too low and your Sim got grumpy, refused to work or had an embarrassing accident on the floor. Keeping a whole family happy at once was harder than it looked, especially with one bathroom. A Webkinz pet was a gentler way to take care of something on a screen. Morning was the worst, when everyone needed to shower, eat and catch the carpool at the same time.

Sims spoke Simlish, a made-up language of happy gibberish. Nobody could understand it, but you always knew when your Sim was annoyed.

What is the rosebud cheat in The Sims?

Rosebud was a cheat code that gave your Sims extra money. You opened the cheat box with a key combination, typed "rosebud" and got 1,000 simoleons, the game's money. Typing it with a string of exclamation points and semicolons added more each time, so people stacked it up until they had a mansion's worth of cash. The original game had a similar cheat called "klapaucius," and rosebud came along with the first expansion pack.

Many players never built a house without it. Others felt guilty about using it and swore they'd play "the real way" next time. Later games added "motherlode," which handed over even more money at once.

The pool ladder

The most famous thing players did in The Sims had nothing to do with building. If you put a Sim in a swimming pool and then deleted the ladder, the Sim couldn't get out. They swam around until they ran out of energy, and that was it for them.

People did this out of curiosity, out of boredom and sometimes out of spite toward a Sim named after someone they knew. It became such a well-known part of the game that it's practically a rite of passage. Other Sims could also meet their end in kitchen fires, which happened a lot when your Sim's cooking skill was low.

Expansion packs

The Sims got seven expansion packs, each adding a whole new slice of life. Livin' Large added strange objects and characters. House Party added parties. Hot Date let Sims leave the house and go downtown. Vacation, Unleashed, Superstar and Makin' Magic followed, and by the end your Sims could have pets, become famous or cast spells.

Every new expansion meant a trip to the store and a new disc to install, and plenty of people's families ended up with a whole shelf of Sims boxes.

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Building instead of playing

For plenty of players, building mattered more than living. People spent hours in build mode designing perfect houses, with pools, gardens and rooms for every possible activity, and then barely let their Sims move in. Some rebuilt their own homes, their friends' houses or houses from their favorite TV shows.

Others went the opposite way and built tiny, strange houses just to see what would happen. A room with no doors was a classic, and so was a house where the only bathroom was on the roof.

Sims with your friends' names

Making Sims of real people was a huge part of the fun. You made yourself, your friends, your crush and sometimes your teachers, then watched them live together. Sometimes they fell in love, and the whole thing could read like a very long away message about your life. Sometimes they fought over the bathroom. It was a little like a soap opera you directed, and friends compared notes on what happened to their Sim versions of each other.

The Goths and the sequels

The first game came with a few ready-made families, including the Goths. In The Sims 2, which came out in 2004 and took place years later, Bella Goth had mysteriously vanished, and players spent years arguing about what happened to her. The Sims 3 followed in 2009 and The Sims 4 in 2014, each one bigger than the last. There was even The Sims Online, launched in 2002, which closed in 2008.

Things people remember

• Typing rosebud until the money counter couldn't go higher
• Building a giant house and forgetting to add a door
• Sims frozen in place because the dishes were in the way
• A fire starting the first time a Sim cooked
• Naming Sims after friends, crushes and teachers
• Sims passing out on the floor from staying up too late

A house of your own

The Sims let people design a home exactly how they wanted, with every wall and couch in its place. That's not far from decorating a profile, picking colors and choosing your Top 8. If you liked building in The Sims, you probably liked games like Neopets too, where taking care of something was the whole game.

Your crib is a home you build too, and nobody can take the ladder away. Make one and decorate it however you want.

Vote: Did you ever take away the pool ladder?

Of courseorNever, my Sims were loved

You'll need a free crib to vote.

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