EA and Maxis are celebrating the 25th anniversary of The Sims franchise with a truly excellent surprise. Today, both The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 are available on PC once again via two Legacy Collections and The Sims 25th Birthday Bundle.
EA has announced that it’s releasing The Sims: Legacy Collection and The Sims 2: Legacy Collection today on PC. The two are available separately as well as combined for $40 in The Sims 25th Birthday Bundle.
Both games include all expansions and almost all stuff packs, as it looks like The Sims 2: Legacy Collection is missing the IKEA Home Stuff pack from 2008. But otherwise, everything’s there. In fact, both collections include some bonus content, with The Sims 1 getting something called Throwback Fit Kit and The Sims 2 receiving a Grunge Revival Kit on top of all the other add-ons.
EA’s re-release of the two older The Sims games marks the first time in over a decade that both gave have been readily available to play. The Sims 1 was only ever released on disc, so for years now unless you were able to track down an old physical copy and somehow make it run on a modern Windows machine, there was just no way to get ahold of it (and that doesn’t even include the expansion packs!). The Sims 2 was available more recently in 2014 via an Ultimate Collection on EA’s Origin store, but the Ultimate Collection was taken down a while ago. So unless you took advantage of it at the time, The Sims 2 remained unavailable to you unless you could similarly find a physical disc. With these two new collections, all four The Sims games are now easily purchaseable and playable again through digital storefronts.
We gave The Sims 1 a 9.5/10 and The Sims 2 an 8.5/10 waaaaay back in the day when we first reviewed them both. While the series has added numerous new features and ironed out a lot of kinks since then, the originals are still worth checking out for their goofiness, relative simplicity, challenge, and legacy.
The Sims: Legacy Collection and The Sims 2: Legacy Collection are both available now on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and through the EA app.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].