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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.
That is certainly what happened with Ultima 9. I see no reasy why Spore's release should be any different.
I agree. It's totally a reasonable assesment that the entire video game industry will change its entrenched development process from static, pre-made content to stuff that will make Spore look like Pong. And they'll even somehow do this for all the games coming out in 2007 that use static content and are 75% done already. Yep, you totally have the pulse of the game dev community, bud.
I was hoping for an announcement of the Tek Jansen video game. As long as we don't have to do the shuttle landing part.
From the theme song: "Loving the aliens... Killing the aliens... Sometimes loving then killing the aliens."
and it could very well still be the best game out there due to its playability... i mean... look at WoW... dated for sure, but still... quite playable.
I watched this interview last night just because it was Will Wright. So many interesting topics were alluded to and touched upon but nothing was explored in sufficient detail. Wright is a brilliant man and a fantastic speaker, but like all of Colbert's guests he was not given enough time or flexibility to speak his mind. Having seen Wright interviews elsewhere this really frustrated me.
Will Wright is a man who speaks best without an interviewer. I look forward to the next opportunity to see him give a lecture.
Will Wright is far from being the type of guest I would expect to see on Colbert's show anyway. Colbert's interviews ARE mostly vehicles for Stephen to deliver his patented deadpan and that's why having guests from the political world seems to be a far more comfortable fit -- it was somewhat uncomfortable to watch Colbert attempt to shoehorn his "overwrought conservative" persona into an interview with a fellow who was obviously not on board to promote any sort of political agenda whatsoever.
This, to me, was a case of "bad booking" at its finest. I would've loved to have seen Will Wright on the Daily Show, but the Colbert Report has always seemed at its best when it's 'guests' are little more than targets for the host's witticisms. Actual informative interview content has never been a strong point of the series.