Little Computer People

Little Computer People, released by Activision in 1985, is widely cited as a spiritual forerunner to Will Wright's The Sims (2000). Both games feature a digital character living inside a simulated home that the player observes and interacts with, though Little Computer People focused on a single randomly generated character rather than an open-ended household simulation.

The game was designed by David Crane, a co-founder of Activision who also created Pitfall! for the Atari 2600, one of the best-selling games of the early 1980s. Crane designed Little Computer People as an experiment in simulating a believable digital personality within the hardware constraints of 8-bit home computers.

Little Computer People was released in 1985 for the Commodore 64 and Apple II, with subsequent versions ported to the Amiga, Atari ST, and various Japanese computer systems such as the MSX. The Commodore 64 version is generally considered the definitive release.

The game presented a side-view cross-section of a house on the Commodore 64, where a unique computer-generated character went about daily routines like eating, sleeping, and playing the piano. Players typed text commands and could interact with the character through activities such as playing music or asking questions, with each copy of the game generating a different named character with distinct personality traits.