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Will Wright on the Colbert Report
N'Gai Croal, the talented gent covering the games scene at Newsweek, has a short piece up looking behind the scenes at the Colbert Report the night that Will Wright was in attendance. Mr. Wright passed on some encouraging words about the progress of Spore, and some funny comments about the culture inside EA. From the article: "Wright told us that Spore is slated to come out sometime during the second half of 2007. It's currently at a stage that he calls Pre-Alpha Five. In non-geek, this means that the game is finally at a point where EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned. The project's subsequent milestones--Pre-Alpha Four, Pre-Alpha Three, etc.--are expected to be achieved monthly until it finally hits Alpha next spring. " Update: 12/06 00:23 GMT by Z : Don't blame me, Comedy Central. I got the YouTube link from KingJoshi.
How is this a troll? That comment is a reference to the interview between Colbert and Wright.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
" It's currently at a stage that he calls Pre-Alpha Five. In non-geek, this means that the game is finally at a point where EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned."
now it's been a little while but back when i worked for ubisoft, pre alpha deffinitly did not mean you could play it from beginning to end. pre alpha meant you could play certain small portions of the game at certain times. game testers barely saw the game at all at this point because there wasnt anything for them to work with. what he's talking about makes the game seem like it's almost ready for beta (the stage after alpha but before they start producing release canidates).
anybody else out there in the game industry? am i out of date with current terminology, are these terms highly relative to the company one works for (i know they are somewhat but this seems to be a bit much), or is something odd going on here?
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Black and White was made by Peter Molyneux, who is the pale shadow of Will Wright animated by dark voodoo, cursed to shamble across this world of light.
Spore will be great.
Someone should really let programmers know there are more than two letters in the greek alphabet.
Pre-Alpha Five, indeed.