How The Sims 2 inspired the first generation of YouTubers: "The 2000s were a simpler time"

The legacy of The Sims 2 has always fascinated me. At the tender age of 11 I spent much of 2006 trawling YouTube for Sims 2 fan creations, be it short original movies or narrativized takes on my favorite emo anthems. Almost every 30-something I speak to can relate. It's a unique shared experience that feels fundamentally 2000s, and I've not come across something quite like it since.

Still captivated by the Sims 2 music video subculture and its symbiosis with early YouTube, I wanted to catch up with the scene. Where are its creators now? Could the community still be out there some 23 years later? I put some feelers out on Reddit, expecting more nostalgia than active signs of life. Instead, I found a community more driven than ever.

Long ago...

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With a plethora of free, fan-made mods available and with YouTube established a year after The Sims 2's 2004 release date, EA's life simulation game offered the perfect filmset. I haven't managed to track down the first ever Sims 2 music video or Machinima on YouTube but the earliest ones date back to 2006, when the first generation of Sims 2 fan media was born.

Through Reddit, I find Sims fans who share the same core memories – namely, watching fan-made music videos for Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend and Sk8er Boi. "This topic is probably my Roman Empire," Redditor such_a_sweet_sorrow tells me, detailing their first taste of fan-made Sims 2 videos on YouTube in 2008. A number of us worshipped jaydee227's incredible vid-ification of Helena by My Chemical Romance. I can still remember its custom content, including an uncanny recreation of the ballerina from the official video.

"[Helena] was so ahead of its time and I still don't know how some of the shots were pulled off," says creator simthesize. "When I saw it for the first time, my jaw was on the floor. It made me realize that virtually anything is possible in this game."

The slew of fan-made web shows, also known as Machinima, were just as foundational. To find out more, I reached out to Tori, known on YouTube as fenderchick2010, who was most active during that era.

"What made Sims 2 Machinima captivating is that it was largely made by teens, for teens," she reflects. Tori's first video was called Left Behind, an adaptation of the Left Behind: The Kids book series she created for a ninth grade school project in 2006. The video is no longer on YouTube, but Machinima fans might recognize her most popular work: the first episode of Cahuna Beach High, a Degrassi-like high school drama series. "I also made that in ninth grade, but was 14 by that point. It was the first Machinima video I created, other than the brief trailer, that was fully intended for an online audience."

The opportunity to build a strong following and community around a video game – especially at a time before algorithms, content creation, or a glut of social media – speaks to how unique and expansive EA's second-gen life sim was. As Tori puts it: "We went from observing the dollhouse in Sims 1 to living in the dollhouse in Sims 2."

While Tori remains active in the still-thriving Machinima community and is actively pursuing bringing her series to television, simthesize returned in a more casual capacity.

"I was around 12 when I made my first video using The Sims 2," he tells me. He'd been most active in the community between 2007 and 2009. "It was a total incoherent mess made up of random clips recorded in the lowest resolution possible. But I remember the excitement of just being able to do that – record scenes and combine them with some random song playing in the background."

In 2015, simthesize made his comeback with a frame-by-frame recreation of Evanescence's Bring Me to Life, inspired by his favorite FMV, regevaway's Everybody's Fool. "I wanted to see what it’d be like to make these videos as an adult, and it's been so much fun. It's become my main pastime now."

Bring Me To Life (Sims 2 Music Video) - YouTube

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The pastime demands more than stringing clips together and calling it a video. This was (and still is) a cinematic artform in its own right.

Viewers grew to expect a sophisticated level of production as the Machinima community developed, with artsy camera angles, framing styles, and editing techniques raising the creative bar each year. The goal was to make something that made people wonder how on Earth you managed it with such little in-game utility – and most of the time, the answer was software Sony Vegas.

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The Sims 2's role in shaping Tori, simthesize, and avid fans like me is hard to overstate.

"Pretty much everything I did as a kid [were] random videos I made for fun, so while I remember that period very fondly and I was quite proud of some of them, it's nothing to write home about," says simthesize. "And of course, they were the videos that I cringed the most looking back at. For example, my most watched video ever ended abruptly mid-verse because I just ran out of clips to use and I didn't feel like going back into the game to record more."

Tori shares a similar fondness for her earlier work – specifically Bloom, a series about gifted teenagers in the late nineties. "Bloom Episode 1 is the work I'm most proud of. It's not perfect, but it's the best example of how my filming, editing, and writing skills have progressed over the years," bolstered by the "unique challenge of finding and making custom content for the series" given its 1997 setting.

BLOOM | Episode One | "Come As You Are" - Sims 2 Voice Over Series [Eng, French, Spanish Subtitles] - YouTube

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"Sims Machinima is kind of a dying art, and that saddens me," Tori muses. She notes how technology has grown in tandem with Sims creative communities over the past three generations, with a trend toward Let's Play-style YouTube content and TikToks becoming the norm as of The Sims 4.

"Most 2000s Sims machinima creators never showed our faces: we existed as screennames with a Sims profile picture. Internet safety was drilled into us millennials, but Internet anonymity norms have changed. Younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha Sims fans seem more drawn to Sims influencer personalities than specific series, if that makes sense, and they want to feel like they know the simmer behind the videos."

Tori is holding fast to her roots, though. Bloom took "a few years to write, another year to prep, and months of filming and editing," but her goal for this year is to make the next nine episodes happen. "Bloom is a passion project for me, and I want to finish what I started. I don't think I've ever enjoyed creating a series as much as I've enjoyed creating Bloom."

The Sims 2 for console screenshot of a bartender with a thought bubble as he admires an approaching woman — (Image credit: EA)

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Much like Tori, simthesize has ambitions to keep growing as a Sims 2 Machinima creator. He might've left some childhood projects unfinished, but his newer work – like Woohoo in the City – is a different story: "By virtue of being an adult I am much more intentional about them," he says.

The Sims-ification of Sex and the City was a much faster, enjoyable job than the Evanescence project. "There was a lot of overthinking involved, as I didn't want to walk away from the project feeling like I did a worse job than a 12 year old version of me would. Or even worse – that I abandoned it."

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The Sims 2 Seasons promotional image of children playing in the snow, building snowmen and making snow angels — (Image credit: EA)

Sims Machinima is kind of a dying art, and that saddens me
Tori (fenderchick2010)

In the 20 years since Sims 2 took over the digital airways, a lot has changed. Game content creation is everywhere in 2026, and the advent of TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Instagram reels fundamentally changed how we consume it.

YouTube's enforcement of copyright protection played a role in this. By the time it was fully realized by 2009, many of our favorite FMVs were muted and eventually taken down. Though some were eventually reuploaded, the crackdown was enough for the trend to go out of style by the time The Sims 3 fully took off. Attention-grabby clips pulled from long-form Let's Plays are far less labor-intensive for the modern content creator – now a paid job –and require little to no modding, which EA has made harder to implement.

Ultimately, the dawning of new Sims generations slowly led to Sims 2 fading into the background. But despite all that, The Sims 2's role in shaping Tori, simthesize, and avid fans like me is hard to overstate.

"It dawned on me that I've been playing The Sims 2 on and off ever since 2004," says simthesize. "It's actually kind of a constant in my life."

What If Sex and the City Was Set in... Sim City? - YouTube

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Tori echoes the sentiment. "Sims videos remind fans of their youth, before they had jobs, bills, kids of their own, and more responsibilities. Societally speaking, older Sims videos remind people of 2000s Internet. YouTube was new, full of unpolished homemade videos, and less algorithm-driven than it is today."

"Social media felt simpler and actually social," she continues. "Monetization on early YouTube barely existed, and now, people often associate YouTube with influencers and podcasts. The 2000s were a simpler time in many ways, but I think we all say that about past decades!"

Machina and FMVs remain truly human initiatives, taking the freedom of sandbox gameplay and translating it to a tightly-executed entity of its own, enshrined digitally. I didn't make Machinima or own a computer powerful enough to download thousands of custom content items to make my own My Chem videos, but bearing witness to the rise of fan-made content and the primitive wonders of mid-2000s Internet feels like a reward in itself. Thanks for the memories, Sims 2 – they really were so great.

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