spore posts

The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright shocked many in the game industry earlier this year when he decided to leave his long time development team at Electronic Arts to start an all new company with the terrific name Stupid Fun Club. VentureBeat chatted with Wright this week to get an update on what he's been up to and what he has planned for his new company.

Wright says that Stupid Fun Club has three projects in the works right now including one that might be released in the next year. However not all of the projects involve video or PC games. Wright states, "One of them is toy related. The others aren't. We are looking at a lot of different industries. There's the web. Toys. We're not restricted to one type of entertainment. We're kind of looking for ideas that cross a lot of different boundaries." However games are not far from his mind with Wright saying, "We are taking the games industry into other areas. We are expanding what we call the 'play industry.' Games are limited in some ways. Play can be applied to so many different kinds of experiences."

The latest game-to-movie deal is one that perhaps is not much of a surprise. Variety is reporting that EA's alien evolution sim Spore will be turned into a CGI feature film by Twentieth Century Fox. The movie itself will be created by Blue Sky Studios who created the popular Ice Age series of films. Indeed the director of the first Ice Age movie, Chris Wedge, is scheduled to direct the Spore film.

The script is being written by Greg Erb and Jason Oremland, who also wrote the script for the upcoming Disney 2D animated movie The Princess and the Frog. EA Maxis VP Lucy Bradshaw will be an executive director of the Spore movie. However there doesn't appear to be a similar credit for Spore's creator Will Wright, who left EA shortly after Spore shipped to stores last fall.

If you still haven't tried out Spore yet and don't feel like downloading the free version of the Spore Creature Creator, Electronic Arts has something planned for you. They are supposed to launch a Flash-based version of the creator in a 2D format on the spore2d.com web site. We say "supposed to" because at the moment the site doesn't appear to be working yet.

Once the site is operational, EA said you can use it to make any kind of creature you want or import any creature to the web from the Sporepedia site and even play with them in the Spore Creature Trainer mini-game. You can show off your 2D creature via email or your favorite social networking site as well.

Update: The spore2d.com site appears to be working now.

Stardock's Impulse service just got a big revamp earlier this week but that's not all they are doing to add to their PC download service. Today Stardock announced that will be adding select PC games from Electronic Arts. The list of available titles is relatively small at the moment. It includes The Sims 3, Command & Conquer Red Alert 3, Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 Uprising, and Spore. It also includes pre-orders for Dragon Age: Origins.

There are also some new weekend game sales on Impulse. Among the sales is pre-orders for the PC version for Resident Evil 5 for 10 percent off its normal price.

Recently laid off EA Maxis worker Chris Hecker is clearly not moaning and groaning about his fate. Far from it. The developer, who helped to create the code that allowed for the extensive customization for their alien evolution sim Spore, is now working full time on a new indie game called SpyParty.

That's a very early screenshot from the game which Hecker describes as a "very different multiplayer espionage game." Basically the game has one player as a "spy" who must complete missions while also staying hidden in plain sight in a cocktail party full of AI driven characters. The other player is a "sniper" who merely observes the party and tries to find and shoot the "spy" in the crowd. There's no word on when the game will be ready for release.

News of even more mass layoffs are hitting the game industry today. Electronic Arts has announced that it has cut back its work force at its EA Maxis studio in Emeryville, California, home to its Sims and Spore game brands. This news comes even as EA announced earlier this month that The Sims 3 has sold 3.7 million copies since its launch last June.

EA would not give any specifics on how many people are being laid off at their Maxis studios, saying only, "EA has taken action to reduce the workforce at Maxis as we focus the business and focus Maxis." Maxis' founder Will Wright left EA earlier this year to form a new company called Stupid Fun Club. EA's next major PC game from their Maxis studio is the expansion pack The Sims 3 World Adventures. Earlier this year EA said it was planning to lay off about 1,100 people from its total work force.

Last month's release of Spore Galactic Adventures was an attempt by the team at EA's Maxis studio to expand the amount of content in the original game by allowing folks to create their own space missions (as opposed to the main game which concentrates on making custom alien life forms and units).

Apparently the new feature in the expansion has proven to be popular. According to a new press release from EA, over 100,000 new adventures have been added to the Sporepedia since the expansion's release in mid-June. That number includes 10 new adventures created by the writers of the Robot Chicken TV show on Adult Swim. As you can see from the above screenshot, their new missions are certainly . . . different.

[Via email press release]

This patch updates Spore and Spore Galactic Adventures to v1.05. Includes numerous bug fixes and gameplay enhancements. A full list of changes is listed after the jump.

Download Spore v1.05 Patch (147 MB)
Check out all Spore downloads
Check out all Spore Galactic Adventures downloads

The NPD Group may have decided to forgo releasing weekly lists of the top 10 best selling PC games in the US but they are still releasing their regular monthly top 20 lists for the same catagory. Today it was revealed, to no one's surprise, that the debut of Electronic Arts' The Sims 3 was the top selling PC game in retail stores for June in the US.

In fact Gamasutra states that The Sims 3 sold a total of 820,000 copies in June in US retail stores. That made the game the number one best selling game title of the month, console or PC. The Xbox 360 version of Prototype was the number one best selling console game in June but sold just 419,000 copies.

1. The Sims 3 - Electronic Arts
2. The Sims 3 Collector's Edition - Electronic Arts
3. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe - Electronic Arts
4. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King - Blizzard
5. World of Warcraft Battle Chest - Blizzard
6. Spore: Galactic Adventures - Electronic Arts
7. World of Warcraft - Blizzard
8. Spore - Electronic Arts
9. Empire: Total War - The Creative Assembly/Sega
10. StarCraft Battle Chest - Blizzard
11. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade - Blizzard
12. Reel Deal Slots Adventure - Phantom EFX
13. Civilization IV: Complete Edition - Firaxis Games/2K Games
14. WarCraft III Battle Chest - Blizzard
15. SimCity Box - Electronic Arts
16. Diablo Battle Chest - Blizzard
17. The Sims 2: Apartment Life - Electronic Arts
18. Prototype - Radical Entertainment/Activision
19. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GOTY Edition - Bethesda Softworks/2K Games
20. Ghostbusters: The Video Game - Terminal Reality, Atari

Dave Perry has been hyping his streaming game service Gaikai for the past few months. We were supposed to see it in action at E3 last month but at the last minute Perry pulled out of showing the service to the press due to "patent filing" delays. Today, however, Perry decided to go public with a 10 minute + video showing off how the Gaikai service supposedly works.

You can see the video above with narration by Perry as he plays games like Spore, World of Warcraft and EVE Online with only a few seconds of load time via a Firefox browser. He even had a full version of Photoshop running near the end of the video, showing that the service can be used for more than just games. Perry claims that the video demo was being run via a streaming server 800 miles from his location and that the bandwidth for the demo was "mostly sub 1 megabit across all games" meaning that the requirements for playing these games will be fairly low. Perry took a couple of shots against rival streaming PC service OnLive (without mentioning them by name) saying, "We don't claim to have 5,000 pages of patents, we didn't take 7 years, and we do not claim to have invented 1 millisecond encryption and custom chips. As you can see, we don't need them, and so our costs will be much less. ;)"

There's still no word on when this service will launch but Perry states he will be talking more about the business model for Gaikai at game development conferences later this summer.