Despite EA's big talk about player creation
and their love of using their fan's
creativity to sell their games, they don't
seem to actually respect our creations very
much, do they? Not that every story, piece
of custom content, and mod is a work of art
but you'd think they'd at least not mass
delete thousands of creations without
allowing us get them first... or you know,
archive them with Archive.org.
Fortunately, despite their best attempts to
make us forget that every sims game except
their newest projects exist by wiping the
official sites from the internet, Wayback
Machine did have some of the content from
the story exchange. While it wasn't able to
grab custom content from the exchange due to
how the older exchanges worked it seems to
have gotten several stories. It rarely had
full stories )and all the pictures need to
correctly display them) but it
grabbed bits and pieces.
Another issue is
that WBM's archives are a bitch to navigate
and often archive content that you literally
cannot get to due to errors. However, using
a terminal program I've scraped all content
that can be found on TheSims.ea.com. I found
lots of interesting things but one of my
favorite discoveries was that Archive.org
had automatically divided all the exchange
stories and photos that it had by user!
That's right, if you had an account with
TheSims.ea.com before it was shutdown I
might have some of your stories. It's going
to take a while to compile all the content
but I'll make it available on a subpage. In
the meantime, I've chosen some photos from
exchange stories that I think are
interesting which you can see below!