Although most of the background music in The Sims was provided by noted soundtrack artist Mark Mothersbaugh, Maxis has a long history of tapping up and coming recording artists to lay down Simlish versions of their tracks for the game. Most of these came bundled with the expansion packs University, Nightlife, Pets, and Free Time.

CNET has a great article from 2005 about the process of finding artists to create in-game songs, and on the artists’ process for singing in Simlish. (Having read it, I feel a bit bad about turning off the in-game music option, but seriously, that Salsa station was driving me absolutely insane. My Sims would change the radio station whenever I asked them to, but somehow it always got changed back to the Salsa station. Oy.)

One of the most popular songs, both in real life and in the game, is “Pocketful of Sunshine” by UK pop singer Natasha Bedingfield. The second single from her album of the same title, “Pocketful of Sunshine” hit the top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. You can listen to the real song here on YouTube.

Bedingfield and Maxis also released a special music video for Sims 2 Fans. The video features the Simlish version of the song, and the video is filmed entirely using Sims 2 machinima. Watch it here. Wonderful!

Infinite Sims is reporting that EA has released a list of artists who will also provide songs for The Sims 3:

* Datarock, a Norwegian dance-punk band whose song “Fa-Fa-Fa” has taken them far. The Simlish version was bundled with the Free Time expansion pack, while the English version has been featured in an iPod Nano commercial, and will be used in a new Coca Cola advertisement.

* Dexter Freebish, an alt-rock band from Austin. Their song “Pretty People” was recorded in Simlish for the University expansion pack.

* Bang Camaro, a hard rock band from Boston whose music has been featured in several episodes of American Chopper, as well as other EA titles such as Guitar Hero 2 and Rock Band. They will be contributing their song “Revolution” to The Sims 3.

* Pint Shot Riot, “Four young lads from Coventry” who cite The Clash, The Jam, and The Kinks as musical influences. Pint Shot Riot seems to be the most unknown of the bands providing music for The Sims 3. (They don’t even have a Wikipedia entry yet.) You can watch the music video for their song “Start Diggin” here on their Last FM page.

* Junkie XL, a Dutch club musician who specializes in remixes and mash-ups. Junkie XL provided the neighborhood theme for the Nightlife and University expansion packs.

You may also be interested in the YouTube videos I found while researching this post. A YouTube user and expert piano player recorded video of himself playing some of the bits of theme song music from The Sims 2, including Buy Mode, Create A Sim, and Build Mode.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 9:29 PM and is filed under Sims. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.