Slashdot Mirror
Will Wright Leaves EA/Maxis For Stupid Fun Club
Dave Knott writes "Gamasutra reports that SimCity, Sims and Spore game creator Will Wright is leaving EA/Maxis. He will now be acting as head of Stupid Fun Club, an 'entertainment think tank' that he was previously funding out of his own pocket. From the article: 'The club has focused mainly on designing and building robots, as well as creating video productions based on them. Wright and EA will co-own Stupid Fun Club, which will focus on developing new cross-media IP for games, movies, TV and toys. EA has the right to develop game concepts that emerge from the think tank, and both the company and Wright have an equal stake.'"
Reminds me of Daikatana for some reason. Someone breaking away on their own with an open-ended, ambitious project that may or may not actually produce anything.
Kickass -- we can finally play RoboSport in real life!
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I can't blame him for moving on as the Maxis IP has turned into nothing more than a platform for the Sims and its spin offs, the latest Sim City will taking a fresh spin on things, was really just a dumbed down version of the complex monolith I'd grown to love.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
This might be a stupid question...
But, how is Will Wright actually leaving EA if EA co-owns Stupid Fun Club?
Can I leave this box empty?
I played it obsessively for about 2 weeks and then I went back to playing RTS games like Command & Conquer 3 and Supreme Commander and haven't been back since. Despite its supposed infinite combinations, it has held almost no replayability interest for me since raising 2 creatures from Spore to Spacefaring.
Nevermore.
I thought you were talking about /. for a few seconds there.
Then I wondered '/. has a world news section? why?', then was confused how annon got Informative mod while bad mouthing /., then it started hailing and the entire office ran to the windows like children, then I shot myself for such a bad run on sentence.
Then I wondered if I would get modded insightful. If only there was a random mod.
Will sacrificed his original goal, that of something similar to evolution, for a toy completely unrelated to evolution.
Remember all of Will's talks about the high cost of content and how the game industry needed to change?
He had lead everyone to believe that "procedural content" was the goal, when the real goal was apparently to get millions of people to create content for free: all your creature designs are owned by E.A and are automatically uploaded to their servers.
And that explain the evolution sacrifice nicely, as well as the "free" creature creator. They wanted no limits to creativity in order to maximize the diversity and quantity of the free content they were going to aquire.
"His name was James Damore."
Being peed on would be much more enjoyable than trying to navigate that "stupid fun club" website.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.