The Sims game hits 100 million units sold

Now this is a franchise. Electronic Arts announced today that The Sims and its bazillion sequels have sold 100 million units since its debut in 2000. It is the best-selling video game franchise of all time.

The irony is that the first game, created by Will Wright and his Maxis team over seven years, had almost no support in its early stages. Wright undertook the project without approval from his Maxis bosses, even though he was the boy wonder who created SimCity and spawned an entire genre of creative games in an industry where destruction games ruled.

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EA bought Maxis for $125 million in stock in 1997. At that point, upper management at Maxis had decided not to fund Wright’s game. But EA’s executives saw its potential and put their support behind Wright. The game debuted with great success, but even EA’s executives didn’t have high hopes. Lucy Bradshaw, a producer on the original game who still works with Wright on the mammoth “Spore” game, said that some even questioned whether an add-on “expansion pack” was even necessary for The Sims.

But the market spoke. Girls, women and others flocked to the game’s ability to customize human characters, build homes, and share stories over the Internet. As such, Wright and his team proved visionaries at seeing the “user-generated content” trend that solidified with YouTube and Web 2.0 companies. It also anticipated the open-ended play form where users dictated what happened in a game, rather than game designers. That has become popular in big games such as the upcoming “Grand Theft Auto IV.”

The Sims is now available in 60 countries and 22 languages. On YouTube, more than 100,000 videos of The Sims have been shared and viewed more than 200 million times. The Sims 3 is slated to come out in 2009. EA doesn’t talk about how much money The Sims has generated, but it has to be close to $3 billion.

The lesson of The Sims? Originality sells. Fun games can turn an entire market on its head. If you have a big idea, run with it, even if it doesn’t have corporate support. When it takes off, get the whole company behind it. And if it’s clearly a big idea, plan for a cross-media franchise at the outset. That last tip is what Wright says is happening with Spore, which launches in September. That game will be available in various forms across different media.

And finally, EA has to figure this part out: How do you correctly judge when a brand is getting over-saturated? So far, The Sims isn’t as popular as Coca-Cola. So I guess they still have a ways to go.