SimsZone

SimsZone
http://www.simszone.de/logo.gif
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Homepage
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Forums	No Forums
Exchange	No Exchange
General Information
Webmaster	None
Administrators	Jan Harder Robert Wille
Global Mods	Andreas Fabian Fuchur Hexlein Hummel Spocky
Languages	English
Alexa Ranking	2.016.565

SimsZone was founded by Jan Harder in 1999 as "SimCity 3000 Zone" when he had ample time due to a broken leg after a legendary collision with a snowcat during his skiing vacation in the Alps. In 2000, Robert Wille joined the team with his The Sims website, and they quickly realized that they should join their efforts by maintaining a single site rather than two individual ones. Robert became the "news hunter" and posted at least one new message each day, an effort that he kept up for several years. Jan continued to write articles and took care of the technical stuff. The site became popular very fast, which was also due to the quickly growing SimForum community that was started in 2001.

All further staff members were recruited from the forums, and SimsZone was always among the first who used new and unique features, such as a quick overview across all Sim games, called "feature list". The weekly "download news" for new The Sims objects was collected into a huge database called "SimsFiles", which is still available (also in English). The "SimKompass" is a vast directory of countless The Sims-related fansites, and the current SimCityKurier for SimCity 4-related files is the successor of the largest German SimCity download archive that was available at SimsZone.

In 2007, Jan and Robert decided to retire from managing their site, which ultimately lead into the closure of SimsZone. The content was split up and transferred to two new sites, SimPlaza for The Sims-related content, and SimCityPlaza for all SimCity-related stuff. Both sites still share resources, such as the SimForum, though, and the former SimsZone team still works together as "SimForum Team".