Foreword: Legacy Hall of Fail 2.0

Let us begin with one pathetic fact: In all the eight years I’ve been simming, I have never completed a legacy.

That’s not right. Not even the basic, ten-generation, can’t-go-wrong variety that was so history when Alphabetacies and Apocalypses came around. Not even the kind without an accompanying story, where you can just three-time through the whole thing without taking pictures or notes. Yes, I’m that pathetic.

It’s not like I haven’t tried. I have. Eight times in about as many years. But only a few of those attempts made it off the ground, and all of them ultimately crashed. Let’s take a look at them one by one, shall we?

First were the Lowens. They lived in that archaic place we call The Sims 2, in the year 2006ish. Their founder, Kylie, was created on the same day I learned about the legacy challenge. She married a hideous pizza guy named Edward and popped out three ugly children–Walter, Daniel, and Delilah. She then went on with her life while her children had ugly children of their own. Good start, right?

Not at all. The trouble was, I was twelve and stupid. I’d only skimmed the rules before starting, so I failed to grasp some of the finer points. And by that I mean the fundamental concept of picking an heir, maintaining a core bloodline, and keeping your ancestors around. So two kids, Delilah and Walter, remained in the legacy house while Kylie (that’s right, the FOUNDER) moved out with her husband and most hideous son. The whole thing fell into a heap around Generation Four, at which point I realized I didn’t like the family much anyway and left them for the vultures.

(A scary thought: They still exist somewhere on my hard drive.)

The Harveys were my most promising attempt, and the first who had a story worth uploading–or so I thought. Melissa was a loopy, stubborn sim who ate nothing but cookies and failed in her professional pursuits–and her romantic ones. It was not her dateability in question but her taste.

Enter Cleve, a whacked downtownie whose nose entered the gene pool and NEVER LEFT. Four generations later, there were still traces of it. The Gen. Two heir (yes, I understood the concept this time!) was Fred, and he married a pretty townie from college and decided to have ten children. You can guess what came next–lots of chaos, red plumbobs, near deaths, urges to boolprop and instantly fix everything… You get the idea.

Once nine of the Torturous Ten were out of the house, Hallie (our new heiress) married a Pokemon trainer wannabe named Ash, and the tale continued. Hallie’s daughter Adelaide gave birth to the first Gen. Five child who would ever grace my game, plus two more, but I’m afraid that was the end of it. My computer got so slow that a single day on three-speed took at least ten years to play. And that was the end of the Harveys.

In November of 2006, EA announced The Sims 3. For me (and perhaps many of you) it was a bittersweet moment of indecision. Would I buy it when I came out? Would I like it? And the question I didn’t dare ask–if I liked it better than The Sims 2, would I ever go back?! (Cue weeks of genuine stress.) Eventually, I decided that of COURSE I would buy it. After all, they were making the neighbourhoods seamless and what was more annoying about TS2 than those stupid blue loading screens?

However, I also decided–now working on the assumption that I would abandon the old game–that I couldn’t possibly leave it behind without completing a legacy. So I made a very one-sided pact with a fellow simmer to each finish a ten-gen legacy before the release of The Sims 3. I was pumped. This was the one! I was going to finish it if it was the last thing I ever did! Only, our timing was terrible. We had a month before TS3 hit the shelves–we were also in Year Eleven and had impending exams. Thus, Carlanna Parlour‘s Epic Journey of Validation was cut short after her daughter, Blair, gave birth to her first child. At this point both exams AND TS3 hit me in the face. I said screw it and rushed out to buy the first copy I could find, officially leaving my TS2 days in the dust.

As excited as I was, I waited until exams were over to install The Sims 3. Because I was a good kid, right? LOL NO. Because my computer was shit and couldn’t run the game. I was outraged at the time, but I’m not at all surprised looking back. I was running a homemade rig with some Intel Celeron piece of crap and 5,000-year-old Radeon graphics, so yeah, I might have been overshooting a bit.

So I waited. I taped the controls manual beside my monitor (who even needs that?!) as incentive while I memorized types of government and the quadratic formula. When exams were over, my dad leant me his computer to test the game. Lo and behold, it worked! It wasn’t perfect, but beggars can’t be choosers and all that. I just wanted to play. Specifically, I wanted to start a legacy because I mean, what else did people do with The Sims in 2009? Pinstar hadn’t even released TS3 rules yet, but I’d been lurking on the exchange reading people’s first attempts, so I knew it was doable. The very first sim I created in TS3 was Toastie Mackerel: an insane angler who would not only be my guinea pig but the founder of my first TS3 legacy. What an honour for such a pitifully named sim!

The Mackerels fared better than I’d expected; Toastie married Cyc10n3 Sw0rd and had give children: Samara, Michael, Scott (to my The Office fans: total accident lol), and twins Harper and Ellen. Samara was the prettiest, and that’s how you pick heirs (duh) so she won. She had a set of female triplets who fell prey to my brief but cringey plant name phase. Sadly, that’s when my dad needed his computer back. Being me, I never retrieved my files from his hard drive, and they were eventually deleted. These are practically the only pictures I have left of the Mackerels. So long, Toastie and co.

Right. So. It was August 2009. I had The Sims 3. I had recently acquired a beautiful purple laptop with impressive specs. It was time to crack down and do this legacy thing.

So did I make myself a nice, normal founder and get started on my ten generations? Of course not. I made Harry Freaking Potter and decided to go for twenty-six. Granted, it wasn’t a completely ludicrous idea. The Potterverse is an endless fount of names, after all. It’s just that tacklig an alphabet legacy when you haven’t completed a regular one is sort of like making creme brulee when you regularly fuck up toast (also me).

I have no idea what I was thinking, but I went for it. Harry apparated to Riverview and married a ginger named Ruby Broke (’cause the Brokes are just the Weasleys in disguise and we all know it). The “A” generation was a success; we had Andromeda, Albus, Antonin, Algie, and Alice. But I couldn’t pick an heir, so I figured I’d post a poll somewhere. Which meant posting their story first… and though I swear writing is a thing I enjoy… it’s also work and I let the backlog of screenshots build up until it broke me. Thus, the Potters died, too.

The Potters’ nosedive sparked a profound “play it simple” epiphany. I was convinced, therefore, that my new founder Goldilox Horton (named for Tim Horton’s by a Canadian who’d been out of the country for too long) would be the beginning of my legacy success. In fact, this whole intro spiel was originally intended for her story, before it was Seth Mellencamp’s and long before it was adapted for this very purpose.

That never happened. Goldilox’s four children didn’t even get to grow up before they fell victim to my abominable attention span.

Next came Valeria Little–yet another founder who was going to be “the one.” She wasn’t. Are you surprised? She did, however, get a kid or two out of Jared Frio–and that’s an accomplishment in itself.

And finally, ladies and gentlefolk, we come to the Mellencamps. Oh, the poor Mellencamps. I started their story almost a year ago when I experienced a giant wave of resolve and finally got the hang of this blogging business. I fleshed out this intro just for them; I even got caught up on my expansion packs! The Mellencamps (no relation to John–I just thought the name was cool) were going to be the Chosen Ones. For real this time. I could feel it.

I uploaded a whole generation’s worth of chapters. There was an heir poll, a brief hiatus, and then the first chapter of Gen. Two. It was smooth sailing for a while… until it wasn’t.

Some of you may have been directed here from the Mellencamps’ blog, and you may be wondering what the hell happened. Why I cut their story short, and why I’m recycling their foreword for new sims I’ll probably just abandon anyway. Well, there’s really no answer that doesn’t involve a deep psychoanalysis of my lack of commitment, but I can feed you some nonsense about starting university, developing interests outside of stories and games, and desperately needing a computer upgrade and a clean slate. All you really need to know is that the Mellencamps won’t be coming back. Sorry Seth, buddy–we had a good run, but it’s time for bigger and better things… you know, like Sims with actual body fat.

And that right there is a “condensed” history of my miserable attempts thus far; if you will, my Legacy Hall of Fail.

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Take a moment to digest it all.

Nine families, nine failures. Nothing has been going my way for the past eight years. Computer issues, glitches, distractions, you name it–everything that could possibly have hindered me has weaseled its way into the path of progress.

But not this time. Because I have a plan.

You see, in each of these legacies I strove not only for completion, but also perfection. (Maybe not with the Lowens, but come on. I was twelve.) Eventually the pressure is just too much and my lazy brain cracks, unable to bear the weight of something quite as SERIOUS and CONSEQUENTIAL as a Sims challenge. So I’ve decided that, in order to make things work, I need to first make them… not work.

I’m not talking about causing myself technical issues. In fact, I’ve just build a brand new gaming rig with graphics that blow all of my previous computers out of the water. We’re all set in the hardware department. I’m talking about the sims themselves.

From here on out, there’ll be no more record-breaking attempts, no more picture-perfect families with their boring, overachieving offspring. We’re going to spice things up a bit and create a more fallible family. A more dysfunctional family.

But, proper spelling being far too dull for a blog like this, I hereby introduce to you:

THE DYSFUNKSHINUL LEGACY.

And who better to kick off ten dysfunkshinul generations than a human dumpster fire?

Everyone…

Meet Tewl Langurd. This is his tewlish face.

And this is his legacy.

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