Though The Sims 2 is a life simulator and open sandbox game, its neighborhoods—especially the three default ones of Pleasantview, Strangetown, and Veronaville—have a surprisingly rich lore that you can discover through the neighborhood story, townies, and item descriptions. Of particular interest to fans is the long-running mystery surrounding Bella Goth, matriarch of the Goth family, whose disappearance befuddles simmers to this day. What happened to Bella that fateful night in Pleasantview? While Electronic Arts never gave a straightforward answer, fans over the years have pieced together the clues behind this shocking crime, and come up with a few plausible theories.
Who is Bella Goth?
Fans of the series should be familiar with Bella Goth and her family, as they appeared in every single title since the beginning of the franchise. She is the wife of Mortimer Goth, and the mother of Cassandra and Alexander Goth. Ever since she appeared in The Sims, she’s had the same appearance: black hair, dark skin, and an iconic red dress. According to her biography, she’s elegant and athletic. When playing the Goth family in the original The Sims, we can see she enjoys artistic pursuits like painting or playing the piano.
Née as Bella Bachelor, Bella is the daughter of Simis and Jocasta, and the younger sister of Michael Bachelor. We see her as a child in The Sims 3, living in Sunset Valley with the rest of her family. She’s even wearing a red dress here. In canon, Bella Bachelor marries her childhood friend, Mortimer, and becomes Bella Goth. But in The Sims 3, there’s nothing stopping you from diverging from this timeline and marrying her (or Mortimer) to someone else. Obviously, that’s not canon, though.
The Mysterious Disappearance of Bella Goth in The Sims 2
When you load up Pleasantview, you can read a blurb about the various families and dramas in this seemingly idyllic neighborhood. Some time in the 25 years between The Sims and The Sims 2, Mortimer Goth became an old man who lost his wife. The family description reads, “Cassandra is ready to start a family of her own, but can she tame the town Casanova? And can Mortimer bounce back after the disappearance of his wife, Bella?”
The Casanova in question is Don Lothario, and he is one of the key figures in this story. Don Lothario is the playboy bachelor of Pleasantview, though he’s currently engaged to Cassandra. The game pushes you to marry the two right after you load up the Goth family, which will always end with him leaving her at the altar. Despite Don’s engagement to Cassandra, he has romantic relationships with Kaylynn Langerak (the maid), and both Caliente sisters. He was also the last person to see Bella. According to his family description, rumors around town say that Bella was “scaling the deck of his condo,” and was never seen again. Very mysterious, especially his relationship with the Caliente sisters.
The Caliente sisters arrived in Pleasantview the night of Bella’s disappearance. Between the pair, Dina raises a lot of red flags. She’s the widow of Michael Bachelor—Bella’s brother—and the current lover of Mortimer Goth. The family description for the Calientes also asks whether their interest in Mortimer is physical or fiscal. What’s going on here?
Something that we need to keep in mind as we go forth is that a lot of information comes from an interview on the old The Sims 2 website. This is a fictional interview between Bella Goth and “a team of highly trained SimCity investigators,” which gives a lot more insight about Bella’s circumstances. In this interview, she offers us several key facts:
- Aliens abducted Bella and took her to Strangetown, where she currently lives. She had amnesia, but with the help of a therapist, she’s remembering details about her past life in Pleasantview.
- Mortimer was working on a “permanent life extending elixir.” This is likely the Elixir of Life, which is an Aspiration Reward you can get in The Sims 2.
- According to Bella, she felt bad for Don, who didn’t fit in with the neighbors. On the night of her disappearance, she went to his house to have a chat. Since the weather was so nice, they spent it watching the stars, which was when the aliens took Bella.
- Bella’s own theory points a finger at Dina, as well as Nina. She believes someone sent the Caliente sisters to Pleasantview to take Bella away from Mortimer, which would make him stop his work on the Elixir of Life.
So now, we kind of have the picture. On the night of her disappearance, aliens came and abducted Bella Goth. Simple enough. But there are still so many questions we don’t have answers to.
The Caliente Sisters and Don Lothario
Before we move on to Bella’s appearances in other neighborhoods and games, we need to talk about the Caliente sisters, as well as Don Lothario. Don Lothario is a skeevy slimeball, but he’s likely an innocent in this case. The Caliente sisters framed him for Bella’s disappearance. His significance in the story doesn’t stop at his house being the setting of Bella’s abduction, though. Don is quite important in establishing a time travel twist to the story.
Chronologically, The Sims 2 takes place 25 years after The Sims, while The Sims 3 takes place 25 years before the first game. Don Lothario first appears in The Sims 2. However, you can actually find a young adult Don Lothario in Riverview, which is a neighborhood in The Sims 3. His biography reads, “Don was facing a big choice between marriage and continuing to be a man about town. Will his ‘accidental’ teleportation to a new town change his old ways?” It appears from this description that in this timeline, someone used a time machine to teleport Don to the Riverview of the past, where he settles down. Maybe the Caliente sisters did so to prevent him from saying anything about Bella’s disappearance.
Speaking of the Caliente sisters, one unfamiliar with The Sims lore may find it strange that this pair of femme fatales can be responsible for alien abduction. It’s not as if they’re aliens, right? Well, actually, a look in Dina and Nina’s family tree shows they do have alien blood on their father’s side. Their father’s parents are Nestor Caliente and Pollination Technician 7—an alien. It’s not that rare in The Sims 2, with entire families in Strangetown openly displaying their extraterrestrial heritage. Dina and Nina are the only alien hybrids in Pleasantview, though, and also the only ones with connections to an alien abduction.
Strangetown and Lunar Lakes Bella
Bella, in her interview, stated that she’s in Strangetown. If you load up Strangetown, you can find a townie named Bella Goth, who looks a lot like her. However, this version has a few differences from the one in Pleasantview. Maxis confirmed and acknowledged these differences, so they’re likely on purpose rather than an issue with the code.
The Bella in Strangetown doesn’t have any memories or her past life, which makes sense. In her interview, she said that she’d lost her memories. Strangetown Bella has slightly different facial features than Pleasantview Bella. Strangetown Bella also has personality data, whereas Pleasantview Bella doesn’t (probably due to the mind wipe from the aliens). While the Bella interview seems to confirm that Pleasantview Bella and Strangetown Bella are the same person, there are too many discrepancies between the two. It’s highly likely that the Strangetown Bella is a clone of the Pleasantview Bella.
In The Sims 3, one of the DLC worlds you can buy from the Sims 3 store is Lunar Lakes. This is an alien planet that has a thriving Sim colony after a spaceship full of them crash-landed on the planet. If you go to the Moon Shadow Graveyard, you can find a gravestone with Bella’s name on it. In a tweet from February 2014, SimGuruSarah confirmed that this is the Bella Goth from Pleasantview, who travelled to Lunar Lakes and died there. As a note, she looks completely different thanks to her yellow skin and blonde hair. All the ghosts in Lunar Lakes look like this. Maybe it’s something in the soil.
Clones in The Sims 2
“What do you mean a Bella clone exists? Clones in The Sims? Really?” you might be saying. It’s not that crazy, though! Let’s leave the Goth family behind for a little bit and look at another family in Pleasantview: the Brokes. Specifically, let’s look at Skip Broke, who is the deceased husband of Brandi Broke. Skip’s death is an open-ended mystery in The Sims 2, and there aren’t really enough clues to have a definitive answer as to what happened. He drowned in a “suspicious pool ladder accident,” which implies someone drowned him (the tiny pool in the Broke house almost makes it look like the pool was specifically built as a murder weapon).
While Skip’s death and Bella’s disappearance are two separate mysteries, there’s something else about Skip that’s bizarre. When looking through Brandi’s memories, we can see two Skip Brokes. You can resurrect one Skip, but not the other. They have slightly different facial features, different voice actors, and different aspirations. Skip also appears in The Sims 3 as a child. However, Bob Newbie and Betty Simovitch—the parents of his future wife, Brandi—are teenagers. That doesn’t track, since in The Sims 2, we can see from when he died that Skip and Brandi are around the same age.
In Skip’s case, there aren’t any alien shenanigans to blame on this discrepancy. Time travel is also a possibility. However, in 2009, SimGuruRain (who produced the Riverview neighborhood in The Sims 3, where you can find the child version of Skip) stated that “you’ll have to Skip twice for it [the Broke family’s story] to work.” Many people have their own interpretations of this line—such as skipping generations for him and Brandi to be around the same age—but it’s possible that this is alluding to the clone theory, in which one of the Skip Brokes is a copy of the original.
Clones aren’t unheard of in The Sims. For example, you can get a Clone Voucher as a Lifetime Happiness reward in The Sims 3. So what does this have to do with Bella Goth? Well, it’s possible that the aliens abducted Bella at Dina’s behest, and then used her as a test subject for cloning technology. That would explain the differences between the Pleasantview and Strangetown versions of her, as well as why her grave appears on Lunar Lakes in The Sims 3. If the aliens plopped her in Strangetown, they have no reason to abduct her again to Lunar Lakes, right?
Alexander Goth
Finally, let’s discuss Alexander. At the time of Bella’s abduction, Alexander is a mere child. As mentioned multiple times before, The Sims 3 is a prequel to The Sims, and Bella appears in this game as a child. There are multiple Easter Eggs alluding to Bella’s disappearance, though, despite Bella being alive and well. “Where’s Bella?” is a book you can buy in the game, as is a book titled “Murder in Pleasantview,” with Alexander Goth as the author.
This could be a whole other Alexander Goth. But the title of the book doesn’t make much sense. Gunther Goth founded Pleasantview, yet he’s still living in Sunset Valley with his wife, Cornelia. It’s unlikely that Pleasantview exists at this time, so a book with that title doesn’t line up with the timeline. Some fans believe that Alexander Goth got his hands on a time machine to go to the past and stop his mother’s disappearance. However, he messed up the settings, and flew too far back. Telling a child version of Bella to watch out for the Caliente sisters or Don Lothario would only alarm her, so Alexander might have written “Murder in Pleasantview” to warn her before she even moves to the town.
In fact, if Alexander had access to a time machine, it’s possible that he was the one who pushed Don Lothario in, rather than the Calientes. Judging by the title of the book, it doesn’t seem that Alexander believes aliens abducted his mother. Maybe he thought Don murdered her, and so he pushed Don into the time machine out of revenge. Since the Alexander from 2 doesn’t appear in 3, it’s impossible to tell what’s going on there, though. Again, the Alexander Goth and “Murder in Pleasantview” thread might just be an Easter Egg for fans of the previous game.
So…What Happened?
Between the information in the Sims 2 interview and what we can find in the first three games, we have a clearer picture of how the disappearance of Bella Goth went down. On the night she went to speak to Don Lothario, aliens abducted her. Dina and Nina Caliente’s alien heritage might have given them a way to communicate with the aliens, and they did them this favor. Their goal in getting rid of Bella was to gain access to Mortimer, either for his money or for his research on the Elixir of Life.
After the aliens took Bella from Pleasantview, they used her as a test subject for their cloning technology. Then, they plopped one of the Bellas—I personally believe it’s the clone version of her—into Strangetown. With the help of a therapist, she recovered the original Bella’s memories, but could never find her way back to her family. Some believe that the crashed spaceship in Strangetown belongs to the aliens who abducted Bella. After the spaceship plummeted to the ground, Bella escaped in the aftermath. Her amnesia resulted from the crash, or the alien experiments. It’s not definitive that the spaceship belongs to those aliens, though, and it could be Pollination Technician #9 Smith’s.
If the aliens who abducted Bella didn’t crash the ship in Strangetown, then they went to Lunar Lakes and dropped the remaining Bella there. Now a member of the Lunar Lakes colony, Bella started a new family, eventually giving birth to Mathilde Goth (or perhaps an ancestor of Mathilde’s). Aside from them sharing the same surname, Mathilde shares a physical resemblance to the Bella Goth we’re used to. Bella then died of old age without ever returning to Pleasantview or her family there.
Of course, that’s all a theory. The lore in The Sims changes depending on which SimGuru you ask, or which game you play. For example, in The Sims Bustin’ Out, Bella’s description states she comes from a “long line of occultists, mystics, and decadents.” But we see her in The Sims 3 and the Bachelors are just your normal run-of-the-mill suburban family. So keep in mind that the above conclusions include my personal hypotheses about the disappearance of Bella Goth in The Sims 2.
Something else to keep in mind is that The Sims 2 is not a very stable game. It’s possible that, to make sure the neighborhoods work properly or that players don’t simply cheat Bella back into the game to preserve the Pleasantview lore, they altered Pleasantview Bella’s files. That’s why they’re so different from Strangetown Bella.
We may never have a straight answer about the disappearance of Bella Goth in The Sims 2. Maxis might have added it as a fun little story beat for those who enjoy playing the pre-made families, and never thought out a definitive answer. Perhaps the truth behind Bella’s disappearance doesn’t matter. All we can do is help the Sims move on from the pain of losing her…or go back in the timeline to make sure it doesn’t happen at all.
The Sims 2: Legacy Collection is available on Windows PC.
Published: Feb 16, 2025 12:00 pm