Simlish is a fictional language featured in EA's Sim series of games. It debuted in SimCopter (1996), and has been especially prominent in The Sims franchise, as well as in its spinoff MySims series. Simlish can also be heard in SimCity 4, SimCity Societies, SimCity (2013 version), and SimCity BuildIt but far less frequently. Civilized Creatures in Spore can also be taught to speak Simlish. It is also featured to an extent in Firaxis Games' Sid Meier's SimGolf. Development Simlish was created because Will Wright, creator of The Sims, knew that the game needed dialogue, but thought that using real-life languages such as English would cause the dialogue to be repetitive and would be expensive translating the entire dialogue Sims may say. He also decided that Simlish worked best as a "language" made up of gibberish words that could not be translated, so that the dialogue's meanings would be left open to the imagination of the player. Wright later commented that using a nonsense language turned out to be the right development choice, as people were capable of imagining it more realistically than a computer could simulate a real language. The actual sound of Simlish was improvised by voice actors Stephen Kearin and Gerri Lawlor. One of Wright's biggest concerns while developing The Sims was that giving the characters actual dialogue would have made such dialogue extremely repetitive, because even if Wright had been able to fit five CDs' worth of voice clips into the game, players would eventually have started hearing the same voice clips over and over again. He found that this problem persisted even when he tried using Navajo, Ukrainian or Estonian, but that, because the gibberish of Simlish was so far removed from any existing human language, it was very difficult for players to detect repetition in it. The team went out to record hundreds of voice clips in Simlish, each with their own unique cadence and emotional nuance. Wright wanted the player to be able to tell whether a Sim is feeling flirtatious, upset, laid back, or tired, based entirely on their tone and tempo. The only "agreed upon" Simlish phrase with an analog in real English is "sul-sul," (SOOL-sool, /'sul.sul/) which is a greeting phrase. There is no official recognition of this, but it is the only phrase consistently repeated by the Sims, and always as they are departing a building or social situation.