Spore Revolution

The Wright Stuff

In February 2007, Will Wright sat down with Popular Science magazine for a very lengthy interview entitled The Wright Stuff.  Once published, it was 8 pages long!  Here are some interesting tidbits from the interview that I gathered:

• You're not forced out of any level, in most cases.  Since Spore encompasses many types of gameplay, you can just stick around in the area you feel most comfortable with any really work on it instead of being pushed from A to Z.
• The learning curve is smoothed out by the game teaching new concepts at every level.  In other words, it will be very difficult to just pick up the game at the space age without learning all the shortcuts first from the previous ages.
• They are in the design process of a storybook feature so that you can share your creature's story with everyone.. ^_^
• There is no end game.  It will mostly be rankings of who conquered the most plants of built the most federations, etc.
• If you die and your creature fails, you don't start from scratch, but you're taken down to the previous level to reevaluate.
• One of the major reasons they didn't make it an MMO is because of in-game liabilities, like you being exterminated by a 14 yo with too much time on their hands.  And they don't have to worry about planets going offline. And besides, its hard to feel like God when everyone has the same powers as you.

Vehicle Editor in PC Gamer

There are some great new interface pictures in this month's copy of PC Gamer, which is going to be for sale on December 12th 2006.  The article itself can be found on their website, entitled Spore Vehicle Editor Interview, and was published on November 27th 2006. 

Discover Magazine Interview

Will Wright is featured in of the articles of the August 2006 edition of Discover Magazine which you can purchase at news stands today.  The article can also be found on-line at the Discover website, entitled The Discover Interview: Will Wright. It was written by Alan Burdick.  You will need to subscribe to the magazine in order to read the complete article. It consists of a Q&A interview with Will Wright.

Part 1

Part 2

• Through your games, you come across as a guy who's trying to decipher the natural world bit by bit, through computer simulations.
• What were you doing at age 10 that steered you toward game design?
• Spore takes its cue from astrobiology, both in its spatial sweep--from microbiology to galaxies--and in its interplanetary spread of life.  What turned you on to the subject?

Part 3

• So Spore is an existential game?
• I'm told you collect artifacts from the Russian space program.
• Would you ever go up in space?

Part 4

• Do you play computer games besides the ones you design?
• What makes a game compelling to you?
• So games are fun because they allow us to play with time?
• You've collected and analyzed thousands of hours of data gathered from people who play The Sims online.  To what extent is playing The Sims a behavioral experiment?

Part 5

• You've modeled planetary dynamics, ant colonies, even the way players play your games.  What's left?
• You're doing this for fun? That's what you do on the weekend?
• In Wikipedia, Spore is described as a "teleological evolution" game.  Do you think the game will bring natural selection to the masses?
• If you could rebuild Earth in any way--add or subtract any creature or process, for instance--what would you do?

Will Wright on Accessibility, Future of the Industry

Will Wright had an exlusive full-length interview with Game Developer's magazine, for April 2006.   You can read the article if you are a paying member of their magazine, or you can buy and download a digital version of the magazine's magazine's issue.

Gamasutra, Game Developer's sister Internet publication, published an Internet article on April 10th for this magazine article.  It is entitled Will Wright on Accessibility, Future of the Industry, and was written by Simon Carless. It is a summary on Game Developer's article, which many quotes from Will Wright himself.  Spore is not mentioned in this article, and it is mostly about why his past games were successful and what strategies are needed for continued success in the gaming industry. 

Dream Machines

Will Wright is on the cover on the April 2006 Wired magazine!  You can find the article he wrote on their website or subscribe to the Wired magazine to recieve it. You may also find it at news stands near you.  Will Wright writes about the future of gaming, and how games in the future will give the player more creative freedom. Following, there are many different short articles on all the different games and how they have changed the gaming industry, including Spore! There is a great image that covers two pages depicting the complete evolution of a race.  The pictures look just amazing.

This article helped me pick this domain name SporeRevolution, as I believe Spore is the beginning of a gaming revolution where custom content and player power is the driving force.

Will Wright Changes EA's Game

Red Herring published on article on March 27th 2006 that is a very interesting read on Will Wright and the game Spore. It is entitled Will Wright Changes EA's Game. Here are some facts:

"Maxis, not far from animation house Pixar, near the shores of San Francisco Bay, currently has 70 developers working on Spore, most earning six-figures. It’s going to take an estimated $30 million and five years to complete the project. But EA will have to wait a bit longer to see if Spore is the blockbuster it needs. Mr. Wright started development several years ago, but the game probably won’t hit stores until 2007 at the earliest, perhaps even later."

Another point that caught my attention is that user created content will uploaded to the game server and be an important part of the game, bypassing the need for a third party website to download content.  This means that users will not have to log out of the application to install new content, and a website such as The Sims Resource would be ultimately pointless.