9. The Sims
Why Its Controversial: Generally, the Sims is considered by hardcore players to be aimed at the casual market; to young girls and boys, or maybe young stay-at-home Mothers with too much time to kill. False. The Sims is as hardcore a game as any other, and can rob of you of hours, days even, at a time, if you let it. Its controversial simply because its considered as a guilty pleasure game. And for any game to be considered a guilty pleasure indicates that there are people out there whod give you untold sh*t for playing it. For example, if I were to admit to my hardcore CoD buddies that I spent seven hours last night trying to get my Sim to the top of the writing career track, theyd probably all block me seconds later.
Why It Changed Gaming for the Better: Maybe the Sims hasnt had a palpable effect on the entire gaming industry as certain others on the list has, but it took the Sim genre (previously boasting semi-popular titles like Theme Park and Roller Coaster Tycoon) to a whole new level, with the Sims 2 still standing today as the highest-selling PC game of all time (20 million copies), raising its creator Will Wright to the level of gaming superman. Guilty pleasure, maybe, but runaway success, definitely. Thanks to the unbelievable success of The Sims 2, theres still a genuine mainstream demand for the Sim genre, and there probably still will be for years to come. Thanks to that fact, we can expect the Sims franchise to continue far into the future, and heres why thats a good thing: no game on the market simulates real life even nearly as closely as the Sims and as a result, no game offers quite as satisfyingly complete an experience. Ill be there for Sims 4, with bells on. Will you?