It’s every returning Sims 1 player’s worst nightmare. You remember some really cool custom content or helpful software you used back in the day and try to find it online. But either the website that used to host it has disappeared forever or maybe the website is still up but the site is broken beyond repair. Before you freak out, there’s no reason to panic. There is a way you can retrieve some of this stuff. Learn how below:
If the website is up but links are dead
An example of a site that’s still up but broken is 7 Deadly Sims. For some reason or other, when you click on any link, you get an error message. Because of this problem, you can’t download anything from the site even though the objects are still up.
If you run up against a problem like this, one thing you can do is look up the website on the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. Just do a search, click on the calendar going back about a year or two and see if you can get a working version of the site. This method isn’t always successful but I find that it works 90% of the time.
If everything has vanished off the face of the earth and no one remembers where the content and programs came from
Some Sims 1 custom content and programs have become so obscure that there are no traces of their homepages anywhere on the web and no one can even remember the URLs or the name of the websites that used to host them.
In a situation like this, things may look hopeless, but there is a way around this. Here are some suggestions:
- Do a search for the content or program in any popular Sims forum
Chances are, someone at the official EA site, Mod the Sims, The Sims Resource or some other popular Sims site has asked for help finding whatever it is that you’re looking for. If you do a search, you may get lucky and find out where to find it. - Search for old Sims 1 website lists of programs and custom content
Many Sims 1 fansites made lists of Sims 1 content for the benefit of players. The bad news is that these lists are so old that the links are often dead. The good news is that you can try getting a working website at the Wayback Machine.Even better news is that sometimes these lists can help give you additional clues about where to find something. This Sims Universe page is a great example of what I’m talking about. The links to the programs are all dead, but the page tells you who originally made them and which site hosted them. Using this info, you could do some detective work to track something down if you forget the name of the website who hosted it.