'The Sims Spark'd' Episode 1 Preview: A challenge that will showcase everything a Sims player can do
People have been playing with 'The Sims' for over 2 decades now, building custom homes and designing rich, layered, intricate lives for their simulations — and sometimes, taking on bizarre and specific in-game challenges. While it's easy to get lost in the game for hours, it takes skill to really get the most out of the game, and in 'The Sims Spark'd,' you're about to see the very best of the best as they compete for a whopping $100,000.
'The Sims Spark'd' is all set to premiere its very first episode, a reality television series where Sims players compete to win a cash prize. The players will be given two hours to tell the best story they can, developing a Sims world from scratch before a panel of judges. The show aims to show the world just what is possible for a player to do in a game of The Sims. "What I hope people will find in Spark’d are a lot of different ways to look at The Sims game," said The Sims General Manager Lyndsay Pearson. "The game can be played in a million ways. You can build Sims, build houses or tell stories or do crazy experiments with the simulation."
The show aims to do for The Sims what eSports have done for competitive games like DOTA, Call of Duty and League of Legends. However, those games have competition built into their nature — there is always a clear winner and loser at the end of each play session. Deciding who the winner is in a Sims high-stakes competition is going to need a little more nuance, and for that, the panel of judges are all people who have a long, personal history with The Sims themselves.
One of the judges is social media star Kelsey Impicciche, who created the '100 Baby Challenge' — in which players aim to create 100 babies in as few generations as possible. She's joined by Tayla Parx, a singer-songwriter who has voiced characters on The Sims as well as having recorded an entire song in Simlish — the in-game, gibberish-sounding language that the Sims use to communicate.
You can watch a trailer for the series here:
'The Sims Spark'd' releases on July 17 on TBS, with a repeat broadcast on Buzzfeed's Multiplayer YouTube Channel.