Maybe it happened to you too ?
💽 Back in the very early days of the Sims 2, when we had only the disk versions (not even the dvd ones) and before any EP or patch was released, something happened that I still remember as if it were yesterday… even twenty years later
🏘️ I had the Sims 2 game the very first day it came out in my country and during my very first games using the pre-made neighborhoods, while playing Strangetown, I wanted to move the "Kathy Curious/Bella Goth clone" into Pleasantview. So I made her move to the Curious brothers' home and then put the home into the LotCatalog (we didn't know anything about corruption back then, and subhoods didn't exist yet). I already wanted to marry Vidcund and Cassandra. But Kathy/Bella became friend with her daughter, and started a romantic relationship with Mortimer.
🗨️ And, I swear on my life it's true, around the moment Kathy/Bella moved into the Goth manor, (was it at their first kiss, or when they got engaged?) a notification appeared with text that looked like it had been written by Bella herself, saying in essence, "What a joy to regain my memory and my family." The Bella I was playing (the "Kathy Curious clone") merged with the Bella Goth from Pleasantview, replacing the grayed-out icon in the family tree, and memories appeared in her mind. It was as if the two character files had suddenly merged.
⏳ The thing is, I was maybe 11 years old, I didn't know how to take a screenshot, and I thought it was something that could just happen again. Plus, my family didn't get internet access until I was 14, so I had no connection to the gaming community. It never even crossed my mind back then that I absolutely needed to keep proof of it. But I never managed to reproduce that result, even when playing exactly like I did back then, with only the base game installed from the disc and without using any cheat codes.
💬 But I was thinking back to that story and remembered that the notification appearing on the screen was in my language (🇫🇷 French). I told myself that if it had been something abandoned by the designers, it would have been written in English : they wouldn't have bothered translating it into multiple languages, right?
🖥️ My computer has been out of commission for a while, so I’ve been cut off from gaming and my ongoing projects (I’m stuck using an old, beat-up, slow laptop that can’t even run The Sims 1). Consequently, I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos about The Sims 2 lore theories, yet I haven’t come across a single video or article that mentions this specific notification…
I had also speculated that it might have been patched out between the releases of the various expansion packs. However, the more active I become in the community, the more I realize just how many of us are day-one players. The main purpose of this post is to ask if anyone else has experienced this - specifically, anyone who played the game back when it first came out.
🔍 I was wondering, now that some people have the technical means to dig deeper into the game files, whether it’s possible to find any trace of it?
