One of the most interesting elements of almost any fantasy work is its language. While it is true that many video games and books use real languages or do not give importance to the language, many others do. One of the most famous examples in the world is The Lord of the Rings, but it is not the only one. A good example is The Sims’ Simlish, a language that Will Wright (original designer) created for his life simulator.
Simlish, a language that mixed different languages?
From the beginning, Will Wright was very clear that he wanted his game to have its own language. This is why he began to study various ideas, such as using musical instruments. He gathered his team: Claire Curtin, voice director, Robi Kauker, audio director, Kent Jolly, sound designer, and Jerry Martin, composer.
However, that first experiment (as The Verge reports) “failed miserably”. To summarise, they did not like the final result, so they continued to consider other possibilities. One of these was to mix different languages.
Surely, the confusion about the origin of Simlish was born at this point, since the legend has some truth to it. Currently, the legend has it that Simlish is the result of merging several languages into one.
However, the reality is quite different, although there is some truth to it. One day they invited Stephen Kearin, an improvisational actor living in San Francisco.
For this test, the team was given several documents with sentences formed by two languages: Ukrainian and Navajo. They were not the only ones they experimented with.
Michael Adams, in his book From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages (Oxford University Press, 2011), explored the background of Simlish. According to him, Maxis also worked with Tagalog and Estonian, as well as other languages.
However, their experiments did not go well. In addition to the fact that they had a lot of difficulty finding voice actors who could properly pronounce the texts they had created, they failed to make the language feel truly unique.
They tried a pidgin version of Swahili and Cherokee, but there was no way. At that time, the atmosphere was not good, since they could not find the key. Who knows if to ease the tension, Kearin made a suggestion: he asked if he could try Foreign Poet’s game.
It was part of one of his acts and the mechanics were simple: he passionately recited a classic poem, but with totally incomprehensible gibberish. Then the audience had to try to guess what poem it was.
The Sims and their language were born thanks to “a joke”
Claire Curtin, “for a pure joke”, decided to accept, as she thought nothing could go worse. Luckily, that joke turned out to be just what they were looking for. Kearin began to recite a random poem with a very exaggerated and practically unintelligible English accent.
As Kearin recounted years later, after the first take they repeated the process over and over again. The studio atmosphere began to change to the point where Wright, the project director, asked Stephen if he had a female counterpart.
The actor called Gerri Lawlor, a friend and collaborator with whom he had already worked and who had several years of experience in improvisation. And so Simlish was born: with Kearin and Gerri they began to record long sessions of meaningless gibberish.
They spoke to each other with invented and meaningless words; it is said that they recorded between 3,000 and 4,000 voice events. By 2004, with The Sims 2, there were already 50,000 lines of dialogue thanks to its team of 11 people.
Over time, it evolved, and although it is not possible to hold a conversation in Simlish today, the community was able to create dictionaries of terms and some phonological rules, as Lingopie points out.
Currently, it is so famous that there are even terms, concepts and words that all Sims players recognize. The mythical Sul Sul is unmistakable, while the funny Wabadebadoo is still one of the most curious ways to say “I’m on fire”… literally.