Despite its tame rating, sex has always wormed its way into The Sims series—I fear it's a canon event to Google "how to make Sims naked" as a teenager. But it arguably didn't blow up into more mainstream simming until Turbodriver's WhickedWhims came along in 2016, offering a package of nudity, animated sex, birth control, menstrual cycles, and even STIs where that stuff had traditionally been scattered across various corners of the internet.
It's one of those mods that, despite its steamy themes, has become widely accepted among the community in the way that, for a while, your mum reading Fifty Shades of Grey in a café was all cool and dandy. Even though we all knew what those books were about.
WickedWhims is so popular, in fact, that its creator can't quite believe how many simmers are galavanting around their game with it. Turbodriver sat down with ROMchip last year to talk about his mod and just how many goddamn people are using it.
"It's not a small community anymore," Turbodriver said. "The number of people playing with WickedWhims is so big that I just can't even believe it." When asked how big, he said: "The numbers are so huge that I can't believe they're actually real. It doesn't make sense to me.
"I was investigating that recently. One of the things I do with the mod is that, when you turn the game on, it checks if you have the newest version and if you don't, it tells you that. It does that once per day, and so the people who load into the game have to connect to my server to see if the version number is correct. So, I can see how many people connect per day, and I have around 300,000 daily players.
"This is beyond normal, this is insane. I don't even understand why that number is so large, because this is more than most games."
I only have to assume that those numbers also include WonderfulWhims—Turbodriver's less sexy version that nixes most of the NSFW stuff but retains the more realistic relationship systems. Even as someone who has been incredibly aware of how normalised the mod is in a lot of simmers' games, I have to admit the number even surprised me.
But hey, if there's one thing that people love about The Sims, it's having total freedom to make your silly virtual people live whatever life you want. And if you want their life to be boinking every adult in a four-tile radius, then mods like WickedWhims help make that possible.
