History
Artificial life games and life simulations find their origins in artificial life research, including Conway's Game of Life from 1970. But one of the first commercially viable artificial life games was Little Computer People in 1985, a Commodore 64 game that allowed players to type requests to characters living in a virtual house. The game is cited as a little known forerunner of virtual-life simulator games to follow. One of the earliest dating sims, Tenshitachi no gogo, was released for the 16-bit NEC PC-9801 computer that same year, though dating sim elements can be found in Sega's earlier Girl's Garden in 1984. In 1986, the early biological simulation game Bird Week was released.
The first digital pets began appearing from the late 1980s, some of the earliest examples being role-playing video games such as Megami Tensei in 1987, and Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride in 1992. Dragon Quest V, which revolves around the growth of the player character, was also the first game to feature a playable pregnancy, a concept that has since appeared in later life simulation games such as Harvest Moon, The Sims 2 and Fable II. In 1990, an early biological simulation game revolving around the theme of evolution, 46 Okunen Monogatari, was released. A revised version of the game was released in 1992 as E.V.O.: Search for Eden.
In the mid-1990s, as artificial intelligence programming improved, true AI virtual pets such as Petz and Tamagotchi began to appear. Around the same time, Creatures became "the first full-blown commercial entertainment application of Artificial Life and genetic algorithms". By 2000, The Sims refined the formula seen in Little Computer People and became the most successful artificial life game created to date. In 2008 also came the game 'Spore' in which you develop an alien species from the microbial tide pool into intergalactic gods.
Read more about this topic: Life Simulation Game
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—Adonis [Ali Ahmed Said] (b. 1930)
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)