will-wright 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.

The Sims is one of the best-selling game series in history, and the best-selling PC franchise, with over 100 million units shipped worldwide for the games and expansions. Both the first and second entries in the franchise have exceeded sales records months and even years after their original releases. Now, Electronic Arts has revisited the franchise again with Sims 3, five years after the release of the last numbered title. Thanks to the incredible success of the previous games, it would have been easy to simply reiterate the gameplay into a new engine and call it at that. But Sims 3 does not rest on the laurels of its predecessors, and improves The Sims in ways that make the first two games look dated and obtuse. It is an excellent entry into the series, and will undoubtedly serve as a benchmark for accessible, entertaining simulation games for a long time to come.

Sometimes you just need to sit down, slide a floppy into your A: drive, and enjoy gaming retro style. We know this all too well! That's why we have a list of the best and brightest from days long gone. These are some of our favorite games of all time, and we're sure that you'll love them as much as we do, if not more. Welcome to Boot Disk, and enjoy the retro ride!

Today, Will Wright is known mostly for his life-simulation The Sims. The series as a whole is easily the most popular out of any he has worked on, and is the most popular series in PC gaming. It has a wide appeal, with the grandmother next door being just as likely to play it as the hardcore first-person shooter gamer you hang out with on Saturdays. This was not what launched his career, however. The series that catapulted Will Wright to super-stardom, as it were, is SimCity. While the classic series has four installments (SimCity Classic, SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, SimCity 4), the game that defined the series was easily SimCity 2000. Changing the viewpoint to isometric, upping the graphical fidelity, and adding many new options turned a relatively simple urban planning game into a classic that endures to this day.

While Will Wright has left the day-to-day development of the Spore franchise to others at Electronic Arts, the players of his 2008 alien evolution sim have been busy on their own creating custom creatures and content. Today EA sent over word that Spore players have now created 100 million bits of new content.

All of the content can be seen at the Sporpedia web site which includes 31,017,761 actual creature creations. According to EA , that number is19 times more than all the known species on Earth. You can bet even more creations will be made for the next PC expansion pack, Spore Galactic Adventures, when it's released this June.

Last April started out with the always fun April Fool's Day but the goofy and wacky were pushed aside for most of the rest of the month. April had the announcement of a military shooter that just a few weeks later was disowned by its own publisher. The economic slowdown affected even more game publishers and developers. A highly anticipated PC game released got hurt by poor multiplayer networking and one of the biggest PC game developers of all time announced his move to other projects.

It wasn't all gloom and doom, however. There were major new game announcements and the successful merger of two of the industry's biggest game publishers. And everyone is looking forward to E3 in June where lots of major announcements are expected to be made. In the meantime we have picked our selections for the top 10 PC game news stories for April

Click on the image above to continue reading the top 10 PC game news stories of April 2009

We would think this is an April Fool's joke if this wasn't April 27. However, Slovenia-based game developer ZootFly is apparently very serious in their announcement today of a new game starring one of the greatest men of all time . . .Mr. T. Yep, the bad boxer in Rocky III and the gruff but lovable B.A. on the A-Team TV series will star in a series of "over-the-top adrenaline-pumping action " games.

The games themselves are based on the Mr. T comic book license from Mohawk Media. ZootFly says the first game will feature the man who makes us feel pity " . . . take on Nazis and their gigantic machines in the varied universe of South American rain forests, lost ancient cities, industrial complexes and contemporary military installations." Perhaps the oddest thing about this press release is that ZootFly claims that a fictional version Sims and Spore creator Will Wright will also appear in the game.

Their press release states, " In this universe, Will Wright is not a top-notch game designer but a top-notch American geneticist who was kidnapped and coerced to work on a diabolic plan. Mr. T and Will Wright will join forces to annihilate the Nazis and their hardware." Well of course they do. We plan to contact Will Wright to find of if he has given his approval for this move. No release date for the game was announced.

Will Wright's departure from Electronic Arts to work full time at his "entertainment think-tank" Stupid Fun Club doesn't mean he has no more interest in his last game, the alien evolution sim Spore. Our sister site GameDaily reports that in a conversation with Wright he reveals that he will still be retained as a consultant to EA even with his new business and interests.

What does that mean, exactly? Wright states, "'I'm spending a certain amount of time every month actually working with the Spore team on future versions of Spore and expansions. So I will [still] be involved with EA on developing the Spore franchise as well." Wright added that he will be checking out what fans want to do with the game, saying, "So I think now we're at a maximum learning where the fans are going to be steering the franchise as much as we will – they have their hands on the steering wheel too."

Wednesday EA and Will Wright shocked the gaming industry when it was announced that the creator of so many acclaimed and best selling PC game titles was leaving EA to work full time at Stupid Fun Club. The "entertainment think tank" is a company Wright founded back in 2001 but will now run full time (with some financial backing from EA). The idea is that Wright and his team will create new entertainment properties that could branch out into other areas besides games.

In a new chat at Gamespot, Wright states we will have to wait a little while before they announce the first Stupid Fun Club projects. EA will have first crack at developing any ideas Wright's company comes up with into games. And what about Wright's last game for EA, Spore? He admits, "I think it was probably over-hyped, like a lot of games end up being, primarily because the development time was so long." However he is still pleased at the reaction the game got, especially among young gamers, Wright states, "We never expected a 3-year-old to be playing with their parents."

It's the end of an era for publisher Electronic Arts and game designer Will Wright. After forming Maxis in 1989 (bought by EA in 1997) and helping to develop titles like Sim City, The Sims and most recently Spore, Wright is leaving the publisher to work full time at Stupid Fun Club, a company which is described as an "entertainment think tank" that will create new entertainment properties for a number of different formats.

Wright and EA aren't completely separating. Today's press release announces that EA owns the same number of shares in Stupid Fun Club that Wright does and that EA will have the rights to create any games that come out of Stupid Fun Club's ideas. In the meantime the Spore team at EA's Maxis outfit will be run by Lucy Bradshaw. Rod Humble is in charge of EA's Play unit which includes The Sims.

Update: Our sister site Game Daily has posted up a chat with Maxis head Lucy Bradshaw where she talks about Wright's new move over to Stupid Fun Club and how it will affect the Spore franchise moving forward.