Mixing the bestselling PC game of all time with the nascent world of online virtual worlds seemed as obvious as putting your chocolate in my peanut butter. The Sims was a white-hot entity on the PC in the early ’00s, not yet watered down by millions of expansion packs (The Sims: Getting a Huntin’ License!; The Sims: Family Welfare Court). The Internet was still fresh and novel, smelling of new car and baby powder.

Mashing the cartoony world of The Sims with the online wilderness  resulted in a game that was almost exactly what an 11-year-old girl would design if she could somehow switch bodies with Will Wright, a la 13 Going on 30. We are not convinced that this didn’t actually happen.

When it debuted in late 2002, The Sims Online (or TSO, not to be confused with the Chinese general famous for his spicy chicken) attracted a lot of attention and seemed, on paper, like the perfect successor to The Sims.

It wasn’t.

The Sims Online was instead like a non-stop pre-teen chatroom where players soon eschewed anything fun or novel in the gameplay to gain popularity by trying to attract the most number of Sims buddies and to make money. Soon, whorehouses and pizza-making sweatshops sprang up and sucked any remaining fun that was left from the game. Group pizza making, for some odd reason, was the quickest and best way to make money in the game, leading to marathon sessions of robotic virtual Italian pie making for pretend money (Simoleons).

The game indeed skewed toward teenagers, making it almost unbearably icky to play for anyone older than 20, what with all the love beds, hot tubs, naked Sims bodies and dirty chatter going on all the time.

We hear that the game is still up and running, but you’d never know it from the drawn out silence that has surrounded the game like a steel bubble since, oh, about mid-2003. Our guess is that Sim-pedophiles and people obsessed with pizza-making are keeping it afloat, even after Second Life made The Sims Online completely irrelevant.