Slashdot Mirror
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.
It never went away.
The implication is that Spore will ship when it hits Alpha. I guess that's standard practice at EA ...
I take it you've never seen a black person.
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.
Will Wright's About To Make You His Bitch.
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.