Will-Wright posts

The man who created Sim City, The Sims and Spore says he's back making new games but is keeping specific details to himself, at least for now. Eurogamer reports that Will Wright, speaking at GDC 2011 this past week, did say that the games he is working on won't be shrink wrapped in a box.

Wright states that the unannounced game projects he is working on will be " ... a little more diffuse" using both mobile and web platforms. He also hints that the games he is making will be more than just to entertain people, saying, "I'm really interested right now in games that get people more engaged in the world around them rather than distract them from it." Wright's most recent project is the TV series Bar Karma which features audience participation in creating the show's storylines.

Will Wright may be a "god" when it comes to creating some of the most influential and best selling PC games of all time (The Sims, Sim City and Spore, among others) but that doesn't mean he thinks games have limitations. In a new article over at CNN Wright is pretty blunt when he states, "Games are not the right medium to tell stories. Video games are more about story possibilities." He pretty much slams story-heavy game like the Metal Gear Solid series with Wright saying, "That's not the kind of game I like playing."

Wright is now the producer of Bar Karma, the new sci-fi themed drama on the Current TV network that does try to tell stories, although those are based in part on suggestions made by viewers via a special web site. So does that mean Wright has abandoned games completely? Nope. According to the article, Wright says that he is "also working on new games" at his company Stupid Fun Club. We assume those games won't have stories either.

So ends another week. Next week is actually kind of slow in the new game release market but we think there will be some interesting news down the pike anyway.

• Steam has new automatic updates for NBA 2K11, ProtoGalaxy,and Monday Night Combat.
• The latest PC Kinect mod lets you become Superman ... sort of.
• You can now listen to two music tracks from Dragon Age 2 from composer Inon Zur.
• A new patch for the Dawn of War II Retribution multiplayer beta test is now available via Steam.
• Will Wright's interactive TV drama series Bar Karma debuts tonight on the Current TV cable network.

Will Wright may have left the day-to-day business of making games but the creator behind Sim City, The Sims and Spore is moving on to his upcoming interactive TV show that he and his team at Super Fun Club are making for the CurrentTV network. This week CurrentTV launched the official web site for its Creation Studios which will allow viewers to interactive and contribute content to Wright's TV series.

The series itself is called Bar Karma and Wright himself talks about both the TV and the interactive portion in a video on the site which has a 1950's retro look and feel. Wright says the show is a cross between Cheers and The Twilight Zone. The video, which has some straight-faced humor, talks about how the viewers will contribute to the game's plotlines and decide which plots will be used in upcoming episodes. Bar Karma is set to start in February 2011. You can check out the video with Wright after the jump.

In 2008, Electronic Arts and its Maxis development studio under Will Wright released the highly anticipated Spore, which used an innovative Creator Creator to allow players to create a near infinite amount of creatures and units for use in the game. While the final product perhaps didn't live up to its high expectations, Spore still managed to sell millions of units.

In 2009 Wright left EA but that's wasn't the end for Spore. The Maxis studio decided to take the franchise in a new direction with a sci-fi themed action RPG called Darkspore that's due out in the first quarter of 2011. Big Download got the game's executive producer Mike Perry to give us some more info on the title.

Without a doubt, one of the greatest PC game creators of all time is Will Wright. His contributions to the industry include two highly popular and trend setting game series: The urban simulation Sim City and the "people" simulation The Sims. Now a collection of nine of Wright's personal design notebooks has been donated by Wright himself to a game-themed exhibition.

The International Center for the History of Electronic Games announced this week that they have acquired Wright's notebooks which contain notes and drawings for the designs of a number of games including Wright's most recent title Spore. Some of the notebooks will be put on display to the public during eGameRevolution, an exhibition that will be shown at the National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York starting on November 20.

[Via GameSpot]

Last month, IGN reported that Spore and The Sims creator Will Wright was working on a TV show concept. Now it looks like Wright may have found an outlet for that idea. The Hollywood Reporter reports that Wright has gotten himself a deal with The Science Channel cable TV network.

Wright will produce shows for the channel, most likely under his own Super Fun Club company which he founded after he left Electronic Arts in 2009. Not surprisingly his shows will have some kind of interactive element and will deal with various big science themes like "time travel, different worlds and the future."

Over a year ago, famed PC game creator Will Wright left his long time business home at Electronic Arts to found his new company Stupid Fun Club. While he still has an interest in game creation (he made a surprise last day lecture at the Game Developers Conference earlier this month) his first post-EA project may in fact be a TV show.

IGN reports that Wright is helping to develop The Creation Project, a TV series about the making of a TV series. Users submit ideas for a show and then vote on the favorite ones that are submitted. The winning TV story idea is then make into two half-hour episodes. Wright has reportedly created a software program called the "StoryMaker Engine" that will allow users to make storyboards for their TV series idea. IGN says the show could go live by the end of 2010.

Near the end of GDC 2010 on Saturday, a mysterious lecture given by a person only identified by the name "Phaedrus". As it turned out the speech was made by none other than Will Wright. The creator of The Sims and Spore has technically been out of the PC game development business for a year since leaving EA and forming Stupid Fun Club.

As reported on by Joystiq, Wright spent his GDC speech time on, among other things, the rise of social gaming. While you may see tens of millions of people playing Farmville now, Wright stated that it may not be the "next big thing" in gaming. He stated, "It gets a lot of attention, of course, because investors, when they're looking to invest in something, they're looking to invest in the steep part of this curve."Still, Wright predicts that social gaming could end up "doing about the quarter of the market, really."

As we mentioned earlier this week, Electronic Arts is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the release of the first game in The Sims series. Today EA revealed some more info on the people sim game franchise. The Sims series is still one of the best selling game franchises of all time. EA claims that the entire series has sold over 125 million copies worldwide (that includes expansion packs) and has generated a total of $2.5 billion in revenue for EA.

The latest game in the series, The Sims 3, was launched in June 2009 and has so far sold a total of 4.5 million copies worldwide. There have been over 110 million downloads of player created content for the game since its launch.