Everybody played Facebook games. Yes you did. Don't try and deny it. We were all there, logging into Mafia Wars and clicking over and over until we beat up some random player for cash. We all had pets in Pet Society, we all had a little dude in YoVille, and yes, well all played The Sims Social. The era of Facebook games was a strange thing. It was on the cusp and deliverance of the iPhone, and monetized mobile games were a twinkle in the eye of development studio CEOs. But, then there was Facebook, and its gaming platform. Ultimately, every single one of these games would be lost forever. Either due to a lack of profit, or a company deciding to move on. And there's nothing I hate more ... than intentionally lost media, never to be recovered. And that's why I'm here writing this today.
I'm the kind of person who is simultaneously looking to the future, trying to figure out where to go next, and also grasping at straws from the past. Trying to find some link to the old me that I can keep, that I can immerse myself within, you know, every once in a while. To feel like I used to, to remember where I came from, and feel some kind of joy in that moment. I've lost much of my past. I don't have things I enjoyed from my childhood. My original Gameboy from 1991 is long gone. The computers I used in my first steps into the internet are buckets of rust somewhere in a heap of trash, or have been recycled into new components. Houses I grew up in are occupied by strangers, and there's next to no hope that I'll ever be able to buy one of them, and reconnect with something that I used to be.
My life is mostly nothing more than myself, in the present, and a vision of where I'm going.
But I want a piece of the past. of my past, back. It's not fair that I have none of it.
Maybe, in some way, it could be possible, but that's out of my hands.
I'm writing this today, because I want to talk about The Sims Social.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/sW68p7QQG1s?si=WMmHijpEpNLpHVy8
I've been an avid fan of The Sims ever since I lived in a towering haunted house in an industrial town in southern central Pennsylvania. I had the disc, I had a hand-me-down PC, and I spent a lot of time rebuilding the Goth home, and wrecking their lives.
And then I moved on to The Sims Online, The Sims 2, and in the era of The Sims 3, there was a blip in Facebook's timeline, where you could make your own sim, mess around with your house, and visit your friends. It was a monetized hellscape, but it was also something special. It was, like Mafia Wars and Pet Society, a daily habit. A thing I looked forward to checking in on. Collecting my money, socializing and raising my skills, and working toward some kind of virtual housekeeping goal. It was fun. I liked it. It's a point in time when gaming was reaching its peak.
We had titles like Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age 2, some of the actual best Call of Duty titles, World of Warcraft when it was still fairly in its infancy, and EVE Online, before it was bought out by the MTX company behind Black Desert Online. There were so many good things about the era between 2009 to 2013, and a little piece of that is, of course, The Sims Social.
But that's the problem. These games were on Facebook, and nowhere else.
That means that, once they were shutdown, they were gone.
Nobody saved them. Nobody data-mined them. Nobody reverse-engineered them.
They were there, and then they were not.
There are still people talking about these games and begging for them to be brought back in some way shape or form, MTX be damned.
Virtually every single Facebook game is lost media, and I'm writing today because I want this post to reach someone, anyone, who may have found a way to save The Sims Social back in those golden years. It doesn't matter what part of it you saved. If you even have a little bit of its code and its art, I want it. I don't know if this will piss off EA. They could remedy the situation by releasing the source code, but they don't and likely won't.
Sure, I have The Sims 3, The Sims 4, and the remastered Sims 1 and 2, and I'm actively looking at emulating Urbz (becuase that was a really good game!!), but if I could have just one piece of my past back, I'd choose either being reunited with my original Gameboy, or just some piece of The Sims Social. I don't think I'm asking a lot. I think what I'm asking is pretty fair, actually.
I could ask that someone give me 200,000 USD to buy out one of my childhood homes, but that would be ridiculous.
I just want my game, dude.
Source: https://mkultra.monster/gaming/2025/09/ ... ms-social/
