Sims' creator leaving Electronic Arts

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/08/BU9716VBNJ.DTL

Sims' creator leaving Electronic Arts
Verne Kopytoff, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Will Wright, the acclaimed video game designer who created hits like the Sims titles, is leaving Electronic Arts to focus on his own entertainment company.

The departure, announced Wednesday, ends a 12-year career at Electronic Arts, during which Wright became one of the industry's most successful developers. The Sims franchise has sold more than 100 million copies, making it the best-selling video game series of all-time.

Wright, 49, plans to devote himself full time to Stupid Fun Club, a studio he founded in 2001 that develops ideas for film, television and video games. Electronic Arts said Wednesday that it has invested an undisclosed amount of money in the company and that it will have the right to license any video game themes that its new partner spawns.

Wright explained in an interview that his decision to leave EA was based on his desire to devote all his energy to his company, which he described as an outlet "for strange products and ideas." He said he has several concepts for television and toys and that the next step is to try to commercialize them.

Wright and EA own equal and controlling shares in Stupid Fun Club. A third, undisclosed investor holds a smaller stake.

Stupid Fun Club is operated from a warehouse in Berkeley and is home to several robots and milling machines. The team is assembled from people Wright met while participating in Robot Wars, a television series in which amateurs build remote-controlled robots and then pit them against one another in fights.

Some of the robots at the Berkeley facility, Wright said, have served the company by "sparking a lot of creative ideas that we realized would make interesting Lego blocks, or nuggets, that we could build entertainment experiences around."

Enlisting EA as an investor, Wright said, was a deliberate alternative to venture capital funding. A corporate investor can afford to be more patient and allow Wright, as he put it, to "keep things small, keep things focused on creative people," rather than having to meet financial goals and prepare for an eventual sale or initial public offering.

Holly Rockwood, a spokeswoman for EA, in Redwood City, said that EA "absolutely believes in Will's concept" for the company. Working outside of EA made sense, she said, because Wright's interests are broader than EA's video game business.

EA's sales have suffered in the slumping economy, prompting a wave of cost cuts including recent layoffs of 1,100 employees, or 11 percent of its workforce, along with delays in the release of several video games.

With partner Jeff Braun, Wright founded gamemaker Maxis in 1987, and scored a hit with their release of SimCity, the first in a series of popular titles. The games were considered groundbreaking because players simply managed their characters, as if playing in a digital doll house, rather than trying to beat opponents.

EA acquired Maxis, a public company, in 1997 for $125 million. Since then, Wright has been an important presence at EA, most recently playing a key role in designing Spore, in which players develop micro-organisms into creatures. The game has sold 2 million copies since its release last year, disappointing some analysts who expected a bigger success.

Todd Greenwald, an analyst with Signal Hill Group, called Wright's departure a big loss for EA but added that the company has several people to oversee existing video game franchises. Whether EA has someone else who can step in to develop blockbusters is another matter.

"Those big franchises will be fine," Greenwald said. "The big question is where will the next Spore come from? Where does the next Sims come from?"

Ted Pollak, a market analyst at Jon Peddie Research and portfolio manager for the Electronic Entertainment Fund, said he isn't concerned about Wright's departure having a business impact on EA.

"Will Wright is a brilliant game designer, but he's just one of hundreds," he said.

E-mail Verne Kopytoff at vkopytoff@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

New Spore Games Target Kids, Wii Players

http://blog.wired.com/games/2009/01/electronic-arts.html

New Spore Games Target Kids, Wii Players
By Nate Ralph
January 22, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — The long-awaited release of Will Wright's evolution game, Spore, wasn't the end of the journey. It was just the beginning.

At a chic San Francisco art gallery Wednesday evening, Electronic Arts unveiled its plans to expand on the franchise in 2009. Wright and Co. are looking to bring a wide variety of new players into the Spore universe. A new Creature Keeper game is aimed at young kids who want to play Tamagotchi with the monsters they create. Spore Hero is an action-adventure game for Wii. And a new expansion pack to the flagship PC game allows players to tweak the gameplay, creating their own adventures and challenging other players.

Spore, which was released last September, had years of hype behind it. The game promised to recreate the entire path of evolution, from cells swimming in the primordial ooze all the way to space travel. Critics were largely in agreement that while the game's creature-creation tools and procedurally-generated universes were stunning in their complexity, the gameplay laid on top of it was lacking.

Electronic Arts hopes it can evolve the series this year.

One of the most praised parts of Spore was the creature creator that allowed players to pull and prod body parts every which way to design amazing creatures, which would then animate in a lifelike fashion. Spore Creature Keeper takes those monsters and dumps them into a virtual-pet game aimed at kids.

In addition to ensuring that their little creation gets its daily exercise, players will be able to decorate their critter's living space, and invite friends over for play dates.

EA says it expects to release Creature Keeper in the summer.

Will Wright has said repeatedly that his company had planned on releasing a version of Spore for Nintendo's Wii console. EA finally made the official announcement last night: Spore Hero will be available this fall.

Spore Hero will allow players to create and interact with a fully rendered creature, and then lead them on a casual adventure to become their galaxy's champion, with a number of challenges along the way. While EA held back on the details, it said that the game will maintain the franchise's focus on creating content and interacting with friends. But the Wii format will bring new challenges — it'll use the console's motion controls — and probably a whole new audience.

A Nintendo DS version of the game, Spore Hero Arena, is also scheduled for a fall release.

The highlight of the event was Spore Galactic Adventures (pictured above), the game's first expansion pack for PC and Mac. It expands the creative pathways open to players by allowing them to create their own gameplay.

Spore allows you to play God: prodding a single-celled organism along the evolutionary road, you design entire civilizations to explore vast tracts of space, befriending (or conquering) neighbors. And with the social networking trappings of "Sporepedia," a compendium of user-created content, your universe is automatically populated by the creations of other players hooked in to the network. (EA said Wednesday that over 65 million creations are currently on the servers.)

But once you reach the final Space stage of Spore, the gameplay becomes a bit underwhelming — once countless solar systems are at your fingertips, you'll quickly realize that there isn't very much to do. Galactic Adventures seeks to flesh out the final bits of Spore by adding a potent new tool set dubbed the "Adventure Creator," which allows you to create their own challenging levels and play others.

While we weren't allowed to get hands-on with the world-shaping, the demo that EA showed us demonstrated that Adventure Creator should be just as intuitive a tool as all of Spore's others. You won't be able to alter the size or shape of a planet, but geological features like lofty volcanoes or winding lakes can be planted with a click of your mouse. You can change the temperature from a ball of magma to a frigid wasteland or anything in between.

Once you've crafted the ideal layout, the full bulk of the Sporepedia will be available, allowing you to populate your world with any number of creatures, buildings, vehicles and objects that other users have created.

Once the stage is set, it's time to start crafting an adventure. Much like Sony's creative PlayStation 3 game LittleBigPlanet, the definition of an adventure will largely be up to the individual designer. One quest I saw involved rescuing a princess from the clutches of a massive predator, while another challenged players to defend creatures from their hostile neighbors, as they migrated from one end of a planet to another.

Players will be able to create vehicle races, hedge mazes, or even platforming puzzles based on navigating a hazardous environment. The tools are fairly open-ended, and adventure-designers will have a great deal of control over how characters and objects interact with one another, including adding dialogue or controlling the feelings and reactions that a particular quest's actor has towards a player's character.

Every adventure is tied to the planet that you create. Once you've completed your opus and uploaded it to the Sporepedia, it functions much like any other user-created object will — you can search the web page for new content, or simply play the game as you normally would, and wait for the adventures to come to you. As you travel around the Spore universe, you'll occasionally encounter a player-created quest, and Galactic Adventures will allow your creature to beam down onto the surface of a planet to explore.

New equipment and abilities will be added with this expansion pack, tools of the trade that no self-respecting spacefarer should be without. These include all sorts of rocket launchers and laser blasters to ward off hostiles, in addition to jet packs and hover boots, to help space explorers navigate treacherous terrain.

Players will be able to rate the adventures they encounter, and popular levels with higher ratings will spread about the Spore-universe, while the drivel will fade into obscurity. Adventures will also have leaderboards, so that players who complete a level will be able to see how well they performed, when compared to players around the world.

When Galactic Adventures debuts later this spring, it will ship with a few dozen adventures crafted by the game's designers, but it will largely be up to players to create the universe as they see fit. If the success of the current content creators are any indication — over 200,000 new items are being uploaded every day — it's going to be an exciting time to be a Spore fan.

Spore, Dividing Cells and Opinions

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/09/13/ST2008091302271.html

Spore, Dividing Cells and Opinions
By Mike Musgrove
Sunday, September 14, 2008; F01

The Turtok species is trying to kill me. The Katmondo are my allies. I'm trying to befriend the Wurbles, but it might not work out, due to some other interplanetary commitments I'm hoping to maintain. Probably none of these alien species would want anything to do with mine, if they knew we used nuclear weapons as a shortcut to world domination a while back on our home planet of Fiumincino.

The latest computer game from the creator of the Sims lets players design and manage a virtual species from its earliest moments as a cell, all the way up to the era when it builds rockets and begins to venture into space and encounter other virtual lifeforms. It's an ambitious adventure filled with humor and eye candy, but at the end of its first week of release, Spore has already been the subject of much grumbling among game fans.

What has mainly caused a stir -- and some cancelled game purchases, from the looks of it -- is the title's anti-piracy scheme, which publisher Electronic Arts says is designed to keep people from sharing the $50 game disc with all of their friends.

Spore is set up so that owners have to activate the software online to enjoy all of its features, such as access to the online content users can download to fill out the game's virtual universe. Under the terms of the game's built-in "digital rights management" software, one copy of the game can be installed on three computers.

But those who have had a bad experience with this sort of software say the system counts computer upgrades as separate installations. In essence, they argue, EA is making people rent rather than buy the game. Some of the title's potential customers are actively discouraging their friends and anyone who will listen not to buy the game or any game from EA until the company changes its policies.

At Amazon.com, some 2,000 or so people have logged on and given Spore the site's worst possible rating; nearly all cite the DRM software as the reason for their contempt. The game's average review at the site is now a lowly one, out of a possible five, stars.

"I have no interest in paying full price for a game that I will be severely restricted from being able to play at a later point," one commenter wrote. "Imagine applying this to other products. What if you could only watch purchased DVDs on one specific DVD player and once you've played it on that system, you could never play them on another one?"

EA, for its part, says that 90 percent of its customers install PC games on only one machine, and that people with special circumstances requiring additional installations can call the company's customer-support number to plead their case. The publisher defends its antipiracy scheme as "just like online music services that limit the number of machines you can play a song on."

It's too early to tell if this week's flap will have an impact on the game's long-term success. Spore started the week as the top-selling item in Amazon.com's video game store when it went on sale, but by the end of the week it had slipped a couple of notches. A bite-sized version of Spore released for the iPhone for $9.99 was the No. 1 selling application at iTunes last week.

Aside from the DRM complaints, the game's reviews have been generally positive, if not wildly enthusiastic. Many of Spore's early players have complained that the ambitious game that was pitched as "your universe in a box" isn't entirely satisfying.

I nudged three friends into playing it last week, and none of them fell entirely in love with the game. One found Spore's many parts to be all derivative of other games, one had complaints with the game's interface, and one said she simply found the Sims more addictive than the new title.

I've been managing the evolution of my species, a meat-eating-type creature I dubbed Humberticus, for about 9 billion years, according to the game's clock. In real-world time, that's somewhere north of a dozen hours, and I could probably pour another dozen hours traveling through virtual space in order to encounter more of the oddball creations people have designed with the game's nifty tools.

The game's chief designer, Will Wright, told me a couple of weeks ago that he always figured this would be a half-finished game at its launch. That's because the idea was to get users to create the content; the aim was to make the game "like browsing an endless art gallery," he said.

As I peruse the Sporepedia, an online roster that keeps track of what players have designed, I find a series of creatures that users have evolved to look like hamburgers. Another player has spent serious time building a collection of famous fictional spaceships from Star Wars and Star Trek. One of the most popular creatures right now is the Charles Darwin species, a pudgy, bearded bald guy dressed in caveman gear. Already, sort of like on Facebook, I've got my real-world friends and Spore-friends mixed together as I subscribe to content made by the game's early wave of players.

If Spore becomes wildly popular, like Wright's last game, I can only imagine that the game will follow the rest of the Web's development and we'll soon see a new equivalent of spam species, with creatures trying to sell Viagra or promote online dating sites.

Already, I'm a little tickled to see that people are using the game to poke fun at itself. Some joker, for example, has created a species named EA's DRM Policy. While I can't tell for sure what it's supposed to be, it looks kind of like a creature with its head parked up in its hindparts.

EA's life simulator is a universal success

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/spore/spore-review/1244284

Ambitious and adorable, EA's life simulator is a universal success.
By Ben Silverman
4 Sep 2008

Contrary to popular opinion, life does not begin at forty. It is not a bowl of cherries, nor is it anything like a box of chocolates.

Life is a game. And a damn fine one at that.

The brainchild of Sims honcho Will Wright, Maxis' long-awaited Spore lets gamers create a new species and guide it from the dregs of the primordial soup to the apex of the intergalactic food chain. And that's just the half of it. From its amazing Creature Creator to its downright groundbreaking integration of user-created content, Spore aims to please gamers of all kinds -- and for the most part, it will. This isn't the game of evolution, it's the evolution of games.

Several games, actually. Spore breaks life down into five stages -- Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization and Space -- that increase in both difficulty and complexity, each crammed to the gills (or paws, or thumbs, maybe) with customized goals, features and mechanics. The fear was that this would result in a disjointed mess, but somehow the designers keep the five stages nicely tethered together with a streamlined design aesthetic. Whether you're nibbling on an opposing cell's flagella, serenading a potential ally, gathering baskets of fruit for your tribe, storming an enemy civilization's stronghold or terraforming planets from the comfort of your spaceship, you'll know just what to do. Spore never feels overwhelming.

It also never gets stale. You can play aggressively or passively (the former is, unsurprisingly, far easier), and the way you behave in each stage has direct ramifications on later levels. You're constantly presented with achievable goals, each pushing you closer to triggering the ability to move to the next evolutionary rank (you can even skip straight to any of the five levels provided you've played them at least once). It's a not-so-subtle design shift that saves the game from the common sim pitfall of plodding repetition and increases the game's instant-play appeal tremendously.

"Spore aims to please gamers of all kinds -- and for the most part, it will. This isn't the game of evolution, it's the evolution of games."

That is, until you get sucked into the black hole of the game's lengthy final stage. You'll spend far more time in Space than anywhere else, and it starts out great. Astonishing, even, especially when you realize the ball of rock you call home is but one of millions, all accessible with your trusty spaceship, and many of which contain hidden treasures or alien life.

But as you expand your empire and interact with other sentient beings, the game starts acting up a bit, inundating you with repetitive tasks in an odd, manic attempt to keep you from wandering off. Wars turn into constant homeworld invasions, prompting you to just start making friends with everyone so you can get cracking on solving the game's final riddle. Exploring is still fun, but you'll soon miss the simple joy of evolutionary experimentation.

Or more specifically, you'll miss tinkering around in the amazing Creature Creator, the infinitely flexible, 3D Mr. Potato Head that lies at the heart of Spore. Much of the early game is spent acquiring all manner of claw, foot and maw as you continually evolve your creature from a floating ball of tissue to a sentient, multi-limbed monstrosity; eventually, you'll use the Creator to build vehicles, buildings, and UFOs in the Civilization and Space stages. Best of all, you don't need a degree from Pixar U. to feel like a master craftsman. The robust yet easy-to-use tool might be the star of Spore's show, as it routinely steals the spotlight from the core game. You can (and will) lose hours plucking, pulling, nipping and tucking your creations, and by and large, what comes out of your handiwork will actually look and sound pretty cool.

And you don't have to do a thing to show it off. Every one of your creations is silently uploaded to the massive Sporepedia, then used to populate everyone else's game world. Not only has that scale of user-sharing never graced a game before, but it works like a charm. Obviously it's a bit hit-or-miss -- not every Spore player is a Rembrandt, leading to some ghastly evolutionary misfires. Regardless, the endless pool of content makes each world feel truly unique, and unless all Spore players suddenly stop creating, the well won't dry up any time soon.

Occasionally -- and perhaps unavoidably -- Spore buckles under its own weight. Hardcore strategy buffs accustomed to waypoints and build queues will be put off by the total lack of such features, while the oversimplified AI can suck some of the fun out of diplomacy. But to stare at the fine points is to miss the beauty of the view -- and make no mistake, it's a bee-yooot. Spore takes so many risks and introduces so many new concepts, it's far more than the sum of its parts; it's video game history in the making. Join in.

The Sims Sells 100 Million Units

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3167413

The Sims Sells 100 Million Units
In the land of games, Will Wright's interactive dollhouse reigns supreme.
By Mark Whiting, 04/16/2008

In the world of gaming there are smash hits and superstar successes... and then there's The Sims: a game so unbelievably popular, so cyclopean, that it defies all sane and rational attempts to classify it according to any conventionally understood game metric.

Let's be clear here. The Sims is so huge and influential that fully one fourth of EA's massive corporate structure is dedicated to its care and upkeep, placing the games corporate division separately alongside entities like EA Sports, EA Casual and... uh... everything else that EA makes. And why all the fuss, you might ask? Because, as of today, Will Wright's dollhouse brainchild has officially sold over 100 million copies -- putting its total units sold at a figure roughly 10 times that of contemporary PC behemoth World of Warcraft. The mind reels.

EA's Rod Humble was extremely chuffed to announce his company's historic milestone in a letter distributed today to Sims fans worldwide.

"This is an exciting time for the Sims," said Humble. "From teenage first kisses to stormy relationships, naming new babies to death by kitchen fire -- and even alien abductions, we've told a lot of stories together. [...] With the Sims we know that our players are truly unique. Players of the Sims see our games as a place to create characters, tell stories, explore relationships, live through generations design fashions and build homes and design their interiors."

Eat your heart out, Gears of War: Kitchen and Bath Interior Design Edition.

Over the years, The Sims has broken plenty of ground as a business paradigm along with its sales records -- proving once and for all that players' insatiable desire to dress pugs up in funny outfits can be fused with savvy product placement and corporate co-branding in order to produce bags of money seemingly out of thin air (example: a Ford Edge is available for download right now for your Sims off the company's website). With the release of the Sims 3 just around the corner, it's totally within reason to believe that that the Sims franchise could very well keep the merchandising streak, going on to sell 100 million more copies (and then some) at some point down the line.

To commemorate the big event, EA encourages you to head over to The Sims 2 official website right now to download a special "complimentary party skin" so that your your little peoples can celebrate the company's sweet, sweet fortune all night long.