A guide for playing The Sims 1 on Intel and ARM Macs

If you’re on an M1 Pro/Max MacBook Pro or other higher resolution computer and the game crashes on startup, follow the instructions CAREFULLY on this page to install the widescreen patch. Try various resolutions until it works and is at a comfortable playing resolution.

The first thing you need to do is download The Sims Complete Collection from here.
Please keep in mind the serial number that’s on that page. You’ll need it later.

Next, we’ll need Wineskin Winery. To get this, we need to install Homebrew first. This is as simple as running a single command. Get it here. Copy paste the command on that page into your terminal and then follow the instructions in you terminal. MAKE SURE that at the end of the installation process you read the instructions in your terminal about how to add homebrew to your path! It should give you three commands to run in order to add it to your path. If you run brew later and it says the command was not found, this is why.

To install Wineskin after we have homebrew we simply run
brew install --no-quarantine gcenx/wine/unofficial-wineskin

Open Wineskin Winery. You should get a window that looks like this:

Now click the + button and add the engine WS11WineCX64Bit21.2.0 or whatever the latest one is. Make SURE you install a 64-Bit one. Click Download and Install.
Next, when you get back to the main Wineskin window, you should see that the Create New Blank Wrapper button is clickable. If it isn’t, make sure that you click “Update” under Wrapper Version. After this is complete you should be able to click Create New Blank Wrapper.

Once you click that, it should ask you to enter a name for the wrapper. This will be the name of the app that you click on to open the game, so I recommend naming it The Sims.app. Click OK. You should see the spinning beach ball of death for a minute or two, then you will see this:

Now that we’ve got the wrapper created, we need to install the Sims game into a sandbox within our wrappe