I remember paying attention to this before release - Maxis was always good at marketing their big swings, like Spore. I played a lot of this game in middle school (recreating myself and my friends) and also ended up experimenting with mods and editing data files, introducing my own items into the game and customizing skins. That was relatively straightforward to do here since it was a sprite-based isometric game besides the characters themselves, but it got much more difficult in The Sims 2.