Tag Archives: will wright

Will Wright has explained a bit more how HiveMind would go about mining user data for his game concept of the same name: using a psychological test similar to one someone would take when signing up for a dating service.

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Will Wright’s next game has been confirmed as as HiveMind, which is also the name of the new Berkeley, California based startup from the industry vet.

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Sims and Spore creator Wil Wright has confirmed that he is working on a new game for portable devices and social networks that is based on a short story by author Bruce Sterling.

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BAFTA’s just announced that it’s bringing its video games arm to the US.

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Famed creator Will Wright has said that the spread of gaming beyond established platforms is good for the industry, despite proving “disruptive” to traditional publishers.

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Will Wright has said his classic Sim City series evolved from a tool for placing assets into games.

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It’s the Presidents Day weekend. Catch up on all the little bits before you go large with the holiday.

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Will Wright’s TV show, which has been in the works for some time now, was unveiled this week and it’s called Bar Karma.

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It has been revealed that Will Wright’s currently at work on a television series, according to documents dug up by IGN.

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With practically the last session of the event, Sims and Spore creator Will Wright surprised attendees at GDC by doing a talk at the event.

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Will Wright knows casual gaming. After all, we’re talking about the brain behind The Sims here. He was – in a sense – casual before casual was cool.

So when Nintendo cast its net wide and started reeling in mothers, grandparents, and the occasional fitness buff, you can bet that Wright took notice. But even after selling millions upon millions, Wright’s still not sold on Nintendo’s little white videogame console. At least, insofar as the “videogame console” part goes.

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Will Wright’s told Venturebeat that his Stupid Fun Club outfit is currently working on three games.

“Right now we are pursuing three pretty aggressively,” he said.

“We might get up to four or five. I want to stay pretty focused. We have a lot of ideas that we want to do. But it’s just three now.”

Wright said that we should see the first of them in 2010.

“Our first product could be commercialized in six months to a year,” he added.

Wright formed Stupid Fun Club, an “entertainment think tank,” in April this year after quitting EA.

Thanks, GoNintendo.

Will Wright has spoken with the Chronicle of Higher Education regarding educational games and how valuable these products are to the learning process.

The games creator says that games are better at inspiring students to learn, rather than educating them.

“If you look at what people are doing with this technology it is, or has been, mostly directed at 12-year-old boys,” he said during a video interview. “But it has the potential to do a whole lot more.”

He says that games are created with more of the “idea” of being educational in mind, rather than making learning fun.

View the full thing through the link.

Via Kotaku.

Gaming will have a larger impact than ever before at this year’s  SIGGRAPH conference, with Will Wright giving a keynote and game graphics being discussed in a special session.

The annual meeting of digital artists conference has a special gaming session titled “Big, Fast, and Cool: Making the Art for Fight Night Round 4 & Gears of War 2″, which will focus on real-time graphics and visuals for both games.

“So much of what makes today’s videogames so great are the responsive graphics and the stories that unfold during game play,” said SIGGRAPH chairmain Evan Hirsch in a press release.

“This year’s sessions will offer a rare perspective into how animation and graphics can really enhance and impact game development and the user experience and investigate the future of gaming.”

Full thing through the break, courtesy of Joystiq.

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Will Wright sat down and had a chat with the New York Times regarding hiring team members, and what he looks for when deciding on who welcome into the fold.

One of the things he tries to focus on is diversity, whether it be a recent college graduate, or “veteran” with many years of experience in the industry.

“When you are building a team, there is a balance issue,” he told the paper. “There are seasoned veterans I’ve worked with 10 or 15 years. And then you have these young kids coming out of graduate courses who are very motivated and they’re not set in their ways. And they actually work very well together. And we’ll have another third that is kind of an eclectic mixture.

“I think there is a lot of value in diversity. Some of the early games we did tended to appeal a little bit more to women than most other games. So we started getting the highest-qualified women in the game industry coming to us first. So there’s a gender diversity and there’s an age diversity.

“If you look at a lot of game companies, it’s primarily 25-year-old guys working in them.”

He also chats about how he filters prospective hires and how he learned a lot more from failures than successes.

Via Kotaku.

Amazingly, we’re not joking. Zootfly is making a game involving Mr T, Will Wright and some Nazis. From a press release:

The first game will see Mr. T 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. Along with Mr. T and other characters from the graphic novel, the game will feature none other than Will Wright. 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.

We’re a bit stunned, so read Joystiq instead.

Warren Spector convinced Will Wright at GDC that Cloud gaming’s going have a giant impact on the trade.

The famed developers went toe-to-toe on the issue during the Luminaries Lunch at the Californian show last month.

“For the first time in my life, at least, I actually got Will Wright to admit that I was right about something we were argued about — specifically, the big impact Cloud computing was likely to have on games and game development,” Spector said, writing on his blog.

“I think it’s going to be huge and he, at least at the start of the discussion, didn’t think it would change things at all.”

Wright told VG247 after the Lunch that, “In the future, if people are really browsing these things, it’s a great opportunity.”

There’s a full update on Warren’s first GDC day through the link, there.

Will Wright has confirmed to GameDaily that his involvement with Spore is ongoing, despite leaving EA.

When asked if he had plans to revisit his hold franchises, he said he has entered into a consulting agreement with the publisher.

“I don’t think it was widely reported, but alongside this whole [Stupid Fun Club] thing, I also entered into a consulting agreement with EA,” he said. “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.”

When asked why there as been little-to-nothing heard about a PS3 and Xbox 360 version of the creation game, Wright explained that there’s a cost issue.

“I know there’s been a lot of talk about it internally,” he admitted, “but for us it’s really an opportunity/cost issue. You know, we either do that or we continue creating new applications on the PC or we kind of go into the handheld arena. I can’t specifically say what the plans are right now, but really all these things are measured against each other.

“We can’t do everything at once, so we have to say, ‘What platforms would it kind of evolve the fastest on?’ So you can sort of look at a straight port to the PS3 and Xbox 360 and basically have the same game we have on the PC… or we could say, ‘What can we do on this platform that will help us explore different parts of the design?’ I think the Wii is really unique in that sense, with the things you can do on Wii that you can’t do on other platforms right now.

“It’s represented a lot of learning for us in terms of the directions we might take it. So I’d say that’s one of the under-appreciated aspects of how we choose to deploy this on different platforms.”

The full interview will be posted later this week, but hit the link to learn what Will wants to be included in the next iteration of Spore.

Will Wright’s told Gamespot that the first Stupid Fun Club projects are to be announced in the coming months.

The designer confirmed he’s leaving EA to start the company yesterday. The firm’s described as n “entertainment think tank”.

“I think it’ll be a few months away,” Wright said on the subject of announcements.

“It’s going to depend on how things develop from here, but we’ve got several projects in the works right now and it’s just not clear when they’ll be announced. That’s my best guess yet.”

It’s highly likely we’re going to see more open-ended simulators from Wright. He told Kotaku last night that there’s going to be “an almost unbroken lineage” between his work at Stupid Fun Club and his previous Maxis games.

Spore-creator Will Wright has told VG247 that he believes Cloud will work if supported properly by developers and publishers, and that the concept represents a “great opportunity” for the industry.

“In the future, if people are really browsing these things, it’s a great opportunity,” he said, talking of Cloud-based systems like OnLive, which was announced this week at GDC.

If Cloud gaming’s successful, however, Wright said it wouldn’t affect the way he develops games.

“No, not really,” he said when asked if a surge in Cloud popularity would change his content.

“With hardware I really don’t care if it’s Xbox, PC or Cloud.”

OnLive caused quite a stir earlier this week with its remote-play concept, a theory apparently debunked yesterday by tech specialist Richard Leadbetter.