Tag Archives: will wright

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.

We’re about to go live with coverage from David Perry’s Luminaries Lunch, this year featuring Will Wright, Warren Spector, Nolan Bushnell, Rob Pardo and, the man himself “Big” Dave Perry.

The session is the biggest of the big guns waxing lyrical on dev issues. You may well be in for some surprises, so keep those peepers peeled.

It’s scheduled to start at 1.00pm PST, or 8.00pm GMT. Get all the updates after the break.

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The Iwata keynote may be over, but don’t you dare touch that dial. We’ll be liveblogging the Luminaries Lunch at 1pm PST today, and the line-up’s stellar.

Will Wright, Warren Spector, Nolan Bushnell, Rob Pardo and David Perry will all be on the panel: you’re guaranteed to get some monster quotes.

That’s 1.00pm PST, 8.00pm GMT and 9.00pm CET. See you then!

Gama reports that Will “Spore/Sims” Wright is to talk at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference in New Orleans in August.

Apparently, he’ll be rapping about how game development influences other industries.

“His selection to give a keynote presentation this year is a perfect fit as SIGGRAPH 2009 integrates gaming as an expanded focus of the conference,” conference chair Ronen Barzel said earlier today.

Will Wright will also be at this year’s GDC, spreading the awesome. Be there or be square, innit.

Hit the links for more.

It’s so on. VG247 has learned this morning that Will Wright, Warren Spector, Neil Young, Rob Pardo and Phil Harrison are all confirmed for Dave Perry’s Luminaries Lunch at GDC next month.

The chat takes place on March 25 at 1.00pm PST.

The inaugural event at last year’s GDC bore witness to some spectacular quotes from Harrison, who openly criticised Sony’s approach to gaming as a whole. He quit the firm days later.

The addition of Wright and Blzzard boss Pardo to the line-up for 2009′s panel will only add weight to what was dubbed “GDC’s best session” last year by some.

Discussion will be about the future of the industry, new concepts in technology, recent non-gaming related developments and entertainment trends.

It’s invite-only, Ringo. We’ll be there, obviously, which means you will be to. See how that works?

Happy New Year. We’re glad we shut down over Christmas. You didn’t miss a whole lot.

By far the most important story over the break was news that Free Radical cut its workforce by 140 to just 40.

The developer was confirmed as being in administration just before the Christmas holiday.

Speaking to 1UP, Cameron Gunn of administrators ReSolve Partners said, “We made around 140 employees redundant yesterday, effective 31 December (the date up to which they had been paid). We’re still trading on with the remaining 40 or so employees, have advertised the business for sale and have received some strong interest.”

News broke mid-December that staff had turned up for work only to be locked with a notice on the door telling them to adjourn to a nearby hotel.

Free Radical aside, other noteworthy Christmas news included confirmation that Mistwalker JRPG Cry On has been cancelled.

“AQI decided to cancel the project after analyzing the current market environment and forecasts for the future. We deeply apologize for troubling those who were awaiting its release,” said a company rep.

Cry On was apparently part of “Hironobu Sakaguchi’s triumvirate of Xbox 360 titles,” says this 1UP piece (the other two being Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey), and for those of you who don’t know, the game “was to be an action-RPG featuring a Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack [and] character designs by Kimihiko Fujisaka.”

Full round up below.

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Will Wright’s confirmed to Joystiq that he’s already working on a brand new game.

“I’m working on a big new project that I’m very excited about, but I don’t want to talk about it yet because if it takes three years to come out I don’t want people saying ‘Wow, he’s been talking about that for a loooong time,’” he said, talking at last night’s Spike Video Game Awards.

Spore’s only really just got going, with the game releasing in September and the first content packs making it out in the last month.

Time magazine has named Spore the 20th best invention of 2008, saying, “It’s blasphemy, brilliance or both to take the entire evolution of a species — from a single-celled animalcule in a drop of water to a space-faring, galaxy-exploring sentient being — and turn it into a video game.”

The retail DNA test was top of the chart, which is kind of fair enough when you think about it. Actually, you don’t have to think about it that hard.

More through the link.

According to this Joystiq report, EA’s confirmed a new Space phase expansion for Spore, to ship next spring.

The new product is in addition to the now-confirmed Creepy & Cute parts pack, releasing in the US in November.

Apparently “players’ space faring creatures will be able to beam down from their spaceships to explore new planets and earn rewards for completing challenging missions” in the Space expansion, and “a new Adventure Creator will allow players to build and share online their own custom missions.”

More through the link.