[4][5] In 1996, Sims founded and became CEO of GenArts, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that developed special effects plugins used in film and video production.

[7] The creatures were evolved to display multiple modes of water and land based movements such as swimming like a sea snake or fish, jumping and tumbling (walking was not achieved).

The cover of Chris Langton's 1995 book Artificial Life: An Overview uses an image of the creatures generated by Sims.

[9] In this installation, viewers help evolve 3D animated creatures by selecting which ones will be allowed to live and produce new, mutated offspring.

His paper "Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics" described the application of genetic algorithms to generate abstract 2D images from complex mathematical formulae, evolved under the guidance of a human.