We’re not sure we’ve made any progress in the music industry if we can’t get into The Sims, whose fifth installment, Project Rene, hasn’t been the subject of any optimistic news lately.

There’s a big difference between, say, seeing Lady Gaga live in concert and seeing her perform in Fortnite. The latter is a lot cheaper. But Epic Games wasn’t the first to try something like this, as The Sims beat them to it by several years. In Maxis’ game, you have to spend some time learning the game’s language, which is a kind of gibberish English (Simglish).

Katy Perry was still on the rise when The Sims 3 was released and got her own add-on, while The Sims 2 Pets featured the Spanish pop group La Oreja de Van Gogh with their recording Dulce Locura. In The Sims 2 there was still an official dictionary, but in The Sims 4 each of the synchronized voices got its own dictionary. Electronic Arts had to take matters into their own hands for each of these hit songs, translating them song by song and reformatting the lyrics to presumably mean the same thing in Simglish.

We first saw this adaptation in 2004 with The Urbz: Sims in the City (PS2, Xbox, GameCube). Later, many other recordings received this translation: The Pussycat Dolls – Don’t Cha, Jason Derulo – Don’t Wanna Go Home, Nelly Furtado – Manos Al Aire, Pixie Lott – Mama Do, LeAnn Rimes – You’ve Ruined Me, OK Go – This Too Shall Pass, My Chemical Romance – Na Na Na, Rita Ora – Shine Ya Light, Becky G – Teen in the City. There have been other attempts, though: For example, Depeche Mode’s Suffer Well appeared in The Sims 2: Open for Business, but only as an instrumental.

So it didn’t start with Fortnite.