The Sims is one of the most well known video game franchises in the world. The aim of the game is to create a custom “Sim”, a character within the game that you control, and the rest of it is up to you. After moving into a starter home, the general direction the game points you in is for your Sim to find themselves a job, and then more or less live out a life within a zany world.
That is not, however, how most players end up playing the game. Most will immediately open up the cheat menu and enter in a code a bunch of times to make their character rich, and then proceed to create a dream home to torture their Sims in. EA Games filled The Sims to the brim with all sorts of different objects and activities for players to interact with. They even made it possible to build a family in-game, causing many fanboys and girls to live out their respective fantasies about them.
Well, when any game is filled with lots of interactions and animations to code, something is bound to break. The Sims is home to some of funniest and most terrifying glitches in the gaming community. Sometimes objects become hilariously stuck to a Sim’s hand while they do an activity, other times the rigging for an animation or even the 3D model fails with horrifying results. So today, we’ll be looking at 25 glitches from The Sims that prove this is one of the craziest games players can buy.
25 Extreme Sunbathing
As mentioned, The Sims is a sandbox where, with enough patience, a player can recreate their fantasies and play them out within the game. EA Games has gone out of its way to create many expansions and add-ons to their games over the years in order to keep them fresh.
You would be wrong to think all those expansions are enough for avid fans.
There are still players creating mind-blowing mods to allow players to do even more things in the name of their vivid imaginations. One of these mods involves allowing players to turn their Sims into centaurs, presumably by mining assets from the pet expansions. Unfortunately, it does come with issues, especially considering that this isn’t official content. Take this sunbathing centaur lady, for example. While the modder was able to recreate almost all the perks of being half horse, apparently they didn’t iron everything out.
24 Perhaps It’s Time To Get Out Of The Hot Tub
It seems that any game where a character needs to interact with water in some fashion almost always has the wildest glitches. The Sims allows players to purchase a hot tub for their Sim to relax in after a long day. If they have a party going on, or just family or roommates nearby, they might even hang out with them in their Jacuzzi.
It’s hard to really know what the intended animation was supposed to be here for this poor Sim.
The caption certainly says it all though: He looks like he is making eyes at his crush, while his hands perform unspeakable gestures that would likely send someone straight to the emergency room in real life. Knowing how little self preservation that a Sim can have though, it’s easy to see this young man chatting up his partner well into the night while his hands continue to move in frightening ways.
23 “Hello, Father.”
One of the most prevalent sources of terrifying glitches from The Sims seems to come from the babies. A cool features The Sims offers is the ability to not only have a family, but to also watch the children grow up from a baby to an adult, while your original Sim ages and eventually dies. It’s absolutely possible to indefinitely play through generations of your Sim’s dynasty. It also turns out, however, that allowing a game to smash together features of two 3D models produces the highest chance for something awful to appear, even temporarily.
In this case, this Sim’s baby has a case of the horror-movie fingers.
They stretch out, almost menacingly, towards their father while the child smiles and laughs like nothing is wrong. It’s probably a good thing that Sims don’t react to these glitches, because there’s a good chance that that baby would be flying across the room.
22 A Case Of The Mondays
It looks like someone is having a case of the Mondays. Really though, aside from the obviously giant head, this character looks so morose it’s hard not to wonder if they wandered into a mad scientist’s lab that morning.
Lots of players like to do this in any game that allows for a lot of character customization.
What likely happened, other than someone modifying the game, is that a player played around too much with the sliders in the character creation menu and made a monster. Some find it fun to see goofy-faced characters in their game, while others like the idea of breaking a game’s ability to rig and animate a character. Considering how sophisticated video game coding has become, it is becoming harder and harder to break a game’s ability to work within a player making extreme features for fun.
21 A Summons Gone Wrong
It appears that with the right tools, even a Sim can be summoned from their wacky world. This Sim’s body is refusing to cooperate with the game engine, and instead of doing whatever it is they were supposed to do, the game has simply decided otherwise. When it comes to game coding, when two connected objects are far apart, the only logical thing to do is to stretch it between two points.
As you can see, this tends to also mean that the textures won’t sync up properly, moving facial features and clothes to strange places so that the end result looks like something from The Thing instead of The Sims.
The distorted thing in the picture also has two black pits for eyes, to top all the terror off.
It’s a wonder the player didn’t just immediately throw their computer out the window and run screaming in the opposite direction.
20 We’ll Skip Dinner
What is it about game engines and having trouble with properly rendering a face? And when it does mess them up, why does it always have to be in the most disturbing way possible? The unfortunate Sim is having the worst day of her life as her face has clearly decided to no longer stay in its proper place.
This is only reinforced by how her hands are positioned to look like she’s attempting to catch her face.
It’s probably a good thing that characters aren’t able to react to glitches. The trauma caused just by witnessing something like this would be more than enough to make a player start a fresh game out of pity. That is, if the player hasn’t already sworn off The Sims forever in an attempt to help get rid of regular nightmares.
19 Extreme Workout Ahead
It looks like we have an extreme workout enthusiast here. This Sim is obviously determined to work her body to its breaking point, which is clearly demonstrated by the fierce look on her face that only comes with someone doing their best.
Oh, and also managing to ram a bar through their head repeated in the process.
The animation team clearly didn’t test out this activity enough, or else this exercise junkie Sim would have less of a head ache. It can be extremely difficult though to control this kind of thing, even with the extensive testing that the resources of EA Games can buy. At the very least, player have an entertaining thing to watch while they wait for their character’s skill points to level them up. Who knows, maybe the next skill level will only let them hit their nose with the bar instead.
Perhaps this lady should invest in a coach.
18 The Invisible Man’s Nephew
Someone is related to the Invisible Man! Only partially though. This Sim is missing the lower half of his body, which is a common glitch that players can run into in almost any character modification screen. Sometimes, the game can forget to render entire sections for a few minutes as it tries to load all the objects, menus, and sliders.
Even funnier is when a character becomes a reverse vampire.
This is when something in the game world is refusing to load, like this man’s legs, but is showing up perfectly fine in a reflective surface. Hopefully, this Sim and its player weren’t attempting to shop for a new pair of pants. It’s extremely frustrating to have to constantly switch in and out of screens if they only load properly in one, just to make sure that this guy looks good in his new shorts!
17 Same
It’s almost guaranteed that a student took one look at this image and thought to themselves, “same”. Somehow, the game has managed to get the animation location wrong for this Sim to take a nap, and ended up making them lie down in the roaring fireplace. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to test out all possible interactions within a game as large as The Sims, and even when it is extensively tested to weed out this exact issue, sometimes code doesn’t cooperate even when put together perfectly.
The kicker in this image is the other Sim lazily poking at the fire while their friend is sleeping inside a roaring inferno.
This almost makes the image look like an attacker attempting to dispose of the evidence. Unfortunately for players and fortunately for Sims everywhere, making a Sim directly end another isn’t a thing. Yet.
16 Trendsetter
In the ultimate case of bedhead, it appears that the game engine here can’t tell the difference between a large piece of furniture and an actual hat. Instead of puzzling it out, the engine just decided to combine the two, and leave it at that. Hopefully that Sim has a good chiropractor!
Though perhaps we have it wrong, and she merely got her head stuck in a child-sized version of an adult bed.
The two other Sims in the background seem to think it entirely normal for someone to go through their day with a whole bed on their head. For all we know, this girl could be quite the attention seeker, and the other two are simply trying to ignore her newest stunt. Or, they’re trying to be good neighbours and are actively trying not to make her feel self-conscious about it.
15 The Aftermath
This man looks like the direct result of trying to adopt the look of the trendy Sim above and spend his day with a bed on his head. Anyone who tried to do that is sure to look just like him, twisted up on the ground like he’s fallen and slipped a disk while simultaneously suffering from a full on seizure. It’s a shame too, considering on what good shape he’s in.
He’s not likely to do a whole lot of hard core exercise while he recovers in the hospital from that bad decision.
Though now that we think about it, he certainly could be suffering from the infamous post-workout morning soreness that often comes after not working out for a long time, and then doing a long workout all at once. Hopefully this guy remembers to warm up next time before starting leg day!
14 Babysitting Blues
This image has often been used as the poster child of Sims zaniness. In it, we see someone who might be the mother blatantly ignoring the baby, who is on fire. A feature within The Sims games allows control over your Sim, and makes them stop doing things on occasion.
Rather interestingly, sometimes cancelling an action can cause a Sim to forget an entire days worth of tasks.
Another potential reaction for a Sim to have when an action is cancelled is to immediately put whatever it is they are holding on the ground, often causing them to abandon it entirely. A Sim can potentially leave a baby lying on the ground without a second thought, and seeing as how tiny the baby is, a player can easily overlook this little mishap until the baby begins to cry from lack of food.
13 Worth The Double-Take
24 hours gyms are a boon to people all over the world looking to get into shape and can’t fit a workout into normal operating hours otherwise. When the sun goes down, however, the weirdos come out in full force.
While the gyms you can find in The Sims are not 24 hours, this definitely looks like something someone making a late night stop would see.
From the looks of things, it appears that the hood on this Sim is clashing with the polygons on their face, and refusing to render it at all. This would definitely make for a terrifying encounter, even in the light of day. Maybe that’s why the Sim on the next treadmill over face-planted. Seeing a faceless wizard-looking person jogging on the treadmill next to you is sure to be distracting enough to cause you to trip. It also could be from wondering how that robe hasn’t been eaten by their exercise machine yet.
12 More Than She Can Chew
A common glitch that can happen while playing The Sims is an object becoming stuck to a Sims hand. In this case, this poor woman has an entire pan masquerading as a bracelet.
Living a life and trying to go about your day while a frying pan is stuck to your right hand would make doing the simplest task a nightmare.
If the fact that she has a pan sticking in her face isn’t funny enough, consider what she is eating. The bowl in front of her seems to be filled with greens and carrots, which raises a few questions. In order for that frying pan to get stuck to her hand, she would have had to have been cooking something that needs it. So how did she end up a salad if she was using the stove? Either she failed majorly at cooking, or the game decided to glitch out much harder than meets the eye.
11 Dinner Time!
It looks like these poor ladies have run into the Sim version of Buffalo Bill. Except instead of trying to make them use some lotion, he’s just prodding them with a fire poker. The creepiness factor only goes up when you notice he looks like Hannibal Lecter instead?
Instead of being a great cook however, he just likes to prepare his victims the old fashioned way.
Unfortunately for the player, when a game chooses to glitch this badly, it could spell the end of the save file. From what we can see, the two woman have managed to pass a collision barrier that would normally keep them from falling into the space the fireplace is creating. Unless the player is very lucky, it’s unlikely that the Sims pathfinding capabilities will allow them to walk out again without the game telling them that they can’t walk through solid objects.
10 Happy Birthday!
Without context, anything can look either really funny or extremely terrifying no matter how harmless and innocent it is if no one knows the thought process behind it. One of these things that internet explorers have tried to imagine without context is the concept of birthday parties. It’s been noted that an outsider would think that chanting several verses about having a happy birthday while sitting around a lit confection that is later cut open would be exceedingly creepy.
It looks like The Sims somehow heard about this theoretical scenario and decided to up the scary factor.
Why not just have a live baby in the cake that still needs to be cut? Sometimes a gamer can only wish for the ability to actually talk to a game and just ask, why? Why didn’t you let the cake and baby occupy the same space? Also, why are you trying to add to our nightmares?
9 Et Tu?
Clearly this poor girl has just suffered a horrific cleaning accident with her friend. Her surprised and betrayed face says it all. Her friend, clearly jealous by her mad cleaning skills, has decided to go the way of Macbeth and just get rid of the competition. Though why he chose to use the soft and blunt end of the mop is certainly a question the Sim police will be asking themselves.
This probably happened because of The Sims’ tendency to let objects get stuck to a character model’s hands when they use them, and then refuse to make the object disappear after the character is done with it. As they were walking to or from the spill, they happened to run across a roommate or friend, and that Sim then coincidentally went to sneeze or was surprised by something. It sure is fun to dream though of what CSI Sims would look like though.
8 Shadow Of A Pet
Being able to own a pet was an awesome expansion to the world of The Sims. Unfortunately, it feels like EA Games didn’t do enough testing before release. There are nearly countless terrifying pictures of monsters created when the game engine can’t handle a four footed friend. This almost happens as often as the game tends to mess up babies and kids, though still not quite as terrifying.
This creature almost looks like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft novel.
It’s impossible to tell what this pet is trying to do, whether he’s trying to play with a toy, or just walking around and minding his own business. It’s almost as if the game forgot that this model is four-footed rather than two, and tried to render it accordingly, but of course couldn’t figure out how to properly rig this to its skeleton, with horrifying results.
7 White Trash
Haven’t we all had days where we felt like this Sim? You get in late to work, your computer crashes, your files corrupt, your project is refusing to come together, and on top of it all, you just spilt your dinner all other the floor. There’s a time in all our lives where all we’d like to do is just chuck ourselves into the nearest trash can and go live in the local landfill where we apparently belong.
Some might argue that this Sim is taking things too far though.
Instead of trying to throw himself into the trash like everybody else, he’s trying to fit his head into a trash compactor! Talk about dramatic. Sometimes, all you need to do is take a deep breath, remember that somebody’s trash is another man’s treasure, and just move on with our day. Also, clean out the actual trash, because even a compactor can only do so much.
6 It Is What It Is
It’s images like these that can make you really wonder if the models within a game are really aware when it glitches. With her legs phasing through the antique rocking chair while innocently trying to rock a baby, this Sim looks resigned with everything. In fact, her face almost says “Not again…” while also looking just a touch amused at her situation.
As off-putting as this picture can be, it’s hard not to see the humor in it.
Why anyone should have this much trouble trying to just put their baby to bed for a nap, or even just some bonding time, is a question that only the game engine knows. It’s hard to tell if her feet are even still there, or just bent painfully behind her. Some might say that they’d rather not know. Well, hopefully at least the baby is having a good time.
