If you neglected to feed and care for your guinea pig properly, it would bite you and give you a deadly contagious virus, which you could spread to other Sims by not following proper hygiene and getting enough rest, and even die from.
Kids who downloaded the binary Sims object from the internet and installed in their game were horrified that their beloved Sims dropped dead unexpectedly, but they learned a useful lesson.
Now deadly infectious guinea pigs are a tradition continued in later versions of The Sims!
The Sims Pie Menus
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-sims-pie-menus-49ca02a74d...
>Viruses
>You can download this guinea pig object, and if you don’t care for it it will make this secret hidden virus object that gives you a cold, and has with it the animations and sounds of coughing and going (cough cough).
>Every once in a while it will just interrupt what you do and cough, and it will be bad for your health. And if you don’t get enough sleep, you have to get sleep to get rid of it. This little program is literally a virus that runs and lives in your household and in your characters, and your characters can spread them to the neighbors, and they’ll bring them home to their families.
>Programmable Plug-In Objects
>Anyway, there’s quite a lot of interesting potential for what new plug-ins additions can do because of this programming languages.
>SimAntics Visual Programming Language
>There’s a built-in visual programming language called SimAntics, that is a control flow decision tree type of language. So the “Come and See” object, we’ll look at that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs&t=12m23s
Something Is Killing the Sims, and It's No Accident. By John Markoff, April 27, 2000.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/27/technology/something-is-k...
Lethal guinea pig kills virtual people
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/746700.stm
The Sims 1: Guinea Pig Disease
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O5cgXuqhnA
The Sims / Illness / Guinea Pig Disease
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Illness
How to Get and Treat Guinea Pig Disease
https://sims-online.com/how-to-get-treat-guinea-pig-disease/
The Sims 4 My First Pet: SimGuruGraham Talks “Guinea Pig” Disease
https://simsvip.com/2018/03/07/the-sims-4-my-first-pet-simgu...