Listen, I know we’re all tired of these types of stories. White teenagers get on TikTok and they detail all the financial decisions they made to buy a house—conveniently leaving out that they started with a tremendous amount of capital from their parents.
But I’m here to tell you that while the American dream may be dead, the SimNation dream is alive and well. Or, well, it was when I was in high school.
Here’s how I became a homeowner at 17 by opening up the Sims 2 cheat menu and typing in “motherlode.”
It started like any other day. I got home from school and opened the game on my Strawberry iMac, and had time to microwave a frozen MorningStar burrito in the meantime because it’s 2006. I spent about 90 minutes making a Sim look just like Chris Carrabba, then 5 minutes on a Sim that looks like me. They’re married, obvs, and I dropped them into the only house they could afford: the Ranch Retreat.
Chris and Sim Me took one look around and knew it wouldn’t do. They muttered some nonsense to each other, gesturing wildly, then Chris went in for a hair-tucked-behind-the-ear kiss (the first of one million that I’d make him do). It was there that I paused the game.
I chuckled to myself, brushing off crumbs of miscellaneous vegan bacon-matter from my Glamour Kills hoodie. These Sims had no idea what was coming.
I opened up the cheat menu with a combination of keys I learned from my buddy xxBexGonexWentzxx and dropped the MOTHERLODE code once, twice, then about 5 more times in a mad rush of greed. I then went straight into build mode and designed the most perfect goth Victorian home you’ve ever seen —complete with a swimming pool in case I got bored and wanted to throw my Sims in without the ladder (bonus: gravestones complete the look).
I know many of us can boast similar successes in SimNation in our teen years. So, if you, too, are a millennial distressed by an unchanging economic status while kids who can’t even remember 9/11 buy farm-door McMansions with their parent’s money, remember: it’s you who wielded the original mother lode.
