Speaking on Electronic Arts' (EA) GaymerX panel about creating more LGBT-inclusive experiences, lead AI programmer David "Rez" Graham revealed how lead engineer Jamie Doornbos implemented the programming.

"He just did it," Graham said, referring to Doornbos, who is an openly gay man. "He just went in there and it was a thing one day. Nobody really questioned it, which was cool."

After the conclusion of the panel, Graham revealed that the nature of The Sims as a game allowed EA Maxis to "sneak in" the feature as an optional one.

"I think it was just that homosexuality isn't new, it's something that exists in our world and we're trying to simulate people in our world. And so I think that what they wanted to do, and this is going to sound terrible, but what they wanted to do was protect the people who are basically bigoted against that kind of thing, because they want sales from everybody. So, to make it an optional thing that's essentially disabled unless you seek it out as the player, that I think gave EA the sort of permission to say that's fine. People wouldn't even find it unless they looked for it."

According to Graham, it was because of EA's view that the game was "a terrible idea" and would not sell well that allowed them to implement "all that kind of stuff."

"[Doornbos] had more permission because it was seen as a kind of casual type game, so it would've been harder to have that happen in a huge AAA game."

The Sims has been touted as the best-selling game franchise of all time, with in its first month of sale.

A sequel, The Sims 4, was .

SimCity for Mac includes cross-platform play, meaning PC and Mac gamers can play together on the same servers. Those who already own SimCity for the PC will receive the Mac version for free (and vice versa).

In addition, gamers can take cities they created on the PC and play them on the Mac by logging in to the same server they originally created the cities on.

According to Maxis, SimCity for the Mac is not a simple port of the Windows version, but rather has been created as a native version optimized for the Mac. Target system specifications for the game are Lion OSX 10.7.5 and a Core 2 processor.

SimCity is not the only high-profile game coming to Mac on August 29. That date .

SimCity launched in March for Windows PCs, and was beset by .

From: www.gamespot.com