You Can Watch 'Titanic' — With Sims Characters
Sims 2 Titanic is almost three hours long and yes, there are captions for those who don’t understand Simlish.
By Lara McCaffrey
If you’re struggling in quarantine — so much time, so little to do! — why not revisit a movie from your past? One with a twist, perhaps? Maybe something like Sims 2 Titanic, a 2-hour and 54-minute recreation of the 1997 James Cameron classic of the same name?
An almost line-for-line replica of the double digit Academy Award-winning film, it features the same storyline, the same characters, and a similar score — except instead of human actors, they are Sims.
Sims are virtual people that eat, shower, and bone, just like humans do. “The Sims” is a life simulation computer game created in 2000 by Will Wright.
Users create homes (sometimes entire towns in “SimCity”) and satisfy their Sims’ needs. Now in its fourth iteration, most people use the game to boss their Sims around, but as Sims 2 Titanic proves, others have more grandiose plans for the simple computer game.
Uploaded onto YouTube in 2012, the lengthy film is the genius of a user named Ryan Castello who, in six years, has only posted the one video.
The Sims version faithfully recreates Cameron’s heartbreaking tale of star-crossed lovers aboard the ill-fated Titanic cruise ship with precision.
Even the film’s most memorable scenes have been Sim-ified — like Jack holding Rose at the bow of the ship (“I’m flying!”), Jack drawing a nude of Rose “like one of your French girls,” and the rescue boats searching the icy Atlantic waters for survivors, only to find dead, floating Sims corpses.
The main differences between Titanic and Sims 2 Titanic are that the characters are, well, Sims and they speak Simlish, a gibberish-sounding language spoken in the game. Fortunately, Castello has provided captions for viewers to follow along with the plot.
Castello also changed some of the names in Sims 2 Titanic. Kate Winslet’s character Rose is “Violet” and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio’s role) is “John.”
The reason for the name change is unclear, but if it were for legal reasons, it wouldn’t matter because Castello’s masterpiece is already copyright infringement. From the script to the background music, it uses many of the same elements of the original.
As one person commented on YouTube:
“It's, like, 90% like the actual movie.”
Although it didn’t win multiple Academy Awards like the original, Sims 2 Titanic has received plenty of praise in the comments section. “Dude, this is amazing. You just put together my favorite movie and game … How long did it take for you to make this anyway?” one fan wrote.
Castello replied that it took him three months to make Sims 2 Titanic “during the summer.” He also mentioned the possibility of “remaking it” with Sims 3 characters.
There actually already is a trailer for a Sims 3 Titanic on YouTube. It’s a fan-made video redistributed by EA Games, and it was released a year before Castello put out his work.
In fact, Sims 2 Titanic is unique when it comes to recreations of full-length movies with Sims. For one, Castello made the whole film instead of just teasing viewers with a shorter trailer version.That’s actually pretty rare, said Shaun Spalding, assistant director of New Media Rights, a California-based non-profit program that provides legal services to creators, journalists, and others in media.
“I think the re-creation of the entire Titanic is kind of interesting to me because you don't typically see that,” he said.
But there are other shorter Sims videos out there featuring original scripted content, like the YouTube series “Strange Town Monty.” These are known as “machinimas,” a term that mixes the words machine and cinema.
The artform — of mixing video game graphics with scripted storylines — has been around ever since users had the ability to record within video games, says the British Film Institute. The earliest instances of this were in the ‘90s, with the short video “Diary of a Camper” made with the video game “Quake,” thought to be the first machinima.
With current-day machinimas, “the biggest genres are soap operas,” Spalding said. “Recreating memes [with Sims] is popular … So are the degenerate videos — which have a lot of views.”
“Degenerate videos” are basically Sims torture videos. For instance, in a YouTube video named “I Forced 100 People to Live Together in a Tiny House - The Sims 4,” 100 Sims characters end up dying from ailments such as starvation or embarrassment in the span of 16 minutes. Uploaded on January 20, 2020, it had more than 2.6 million views as of early April.
The community that creates these Sims torture videos and the Ryan Castellos of the world are vastly different. People who make scripted videos usually use the older characters from “Sims 2.” This is because YouTube and “Sims 2” came out around the same time in the early 2000s.
Lacking the plethora of video editing programs we have today, amateur filmmakers turned to video game engines and later uploaded them to YouTube, a main platform for the community.
Degenerate videos, on the other hand, focus more on bizarre social experiments or sadist themes. They also tend to be made with later versions of “The Sims.” The graphics in “Sims 4,” for instance, are crisper and more human-like, as opposed to the sometimes jumpy animation seen in “Sims 2.”
Judging by the analytics, millions of people love watching degenerate Sims videos. Sims 2 Titanic, on the other hand, perhaps because it’s less well-known, has racked up a mere 325,000 views. This is truly tragic considering all the Sims lives that were lost at sea during the making of this machinima.
Make their losses worth it and give it a view, won’t you?
LARA MCCAFFREY IS A CALIFORNIA-BASED WRITER WITH BYLINES IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, SAN DIEGO CITYBEAT, OUT THERE PODCAST, AND MORE. WHEN SHE'S NOT WRITING, SHE ENJOYS ANXIETY CLEANING HER APARTMENT.
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