Will Wright
Top 50 Developers of 2008
Mar 9th
Game Developer Research has announced their pick for the Top 50 Game Developers of 2008. Maxis ranks in at #37. A few of my favorite developers are listed too with Nintendo (#1), Neversoft (#20), and Retro Studios (#43).
Behind the Games: Will Wright video interview
Feb 26th
Gamespot was lucky enough to snatch Will away for a quick sit-down interview. In the video, Will discusses how he got into creating video games, what makes games a failure, what is is favorite artist, and his fascination with….carebears!
GDC 2008: Will Wright speaks
Feb 22nd
A few sites are reporting what Will Wright had to say during a private session from the GDC. He wasn’t fully focusing on Spore; he branched from topics from The Sims all the way down to Godzilla (RAWR). Thanks goes out to Spores Illustrated for reporting these!
After tracing the rise of the Care Bears franchise, he moved on the The Sims. “When we did The Sims, it was kind of interesting because it was always an experiment. At the very beginning it’s like we had no idea what this thing could do. We never really thought it would become a mainstream thing, like a franchise.” Wright traced The Sims brand’s growth from original release through the many, many expansion packs, sequel, console versions, and various other incarnations. All the box art was slowly filling in a blank slide on a projector screen. By the end, the screen was so cluttered with box art you couldn’t tell what was what anymore. Referring to the slide, Wright commented, “to be honest I got tired of cutting and pasting all these images,” which sparked a wave of laughter from the audience
It was through these media franchises that Wright came to a few conclusions about the nature of entertainment. “Entertainment is worlds,” he says, and not properties (which reminds him of real estate) or brands (which reminds him of Coca-Cola).
GDC: Will Wright’s Theory of Everything – NextGen
“The point I’m trying to make is this: the best stories are inherently deconstructable and lead to the largest variety of play, and those are inherently generative and lead to story. All these elements [story, deconstruct, play, generation] are inherently interdependent.” This, of course, is what he calls model building, the fundamental thought of all his games, including The Sims and Spore.
GDC08: Will Wright talks the importance of worlds, community ownership – Joystiq
The Soul of The Sims, glimpse of how Will Wright designs games
Feb 20th
Don Hopkins posted an interesting article of what he found while searching thru his old paperwork. He managed to stumble across the prototype coding for The Sims, and with premission from Will Wright, was able to release some screenshots of it. Yeah, it’s nothing of any use, to be honest. The game has changed a lot since Will wrote the code, but it’s a cool find nontheless. Check out the images here.
3-part Spore interview with Will Wright
Feb 12th
Today has been crazy with all of the Spore news coming out. N’Gai over at Newsweek managed to interview Will Wright along with a few other developers on the details of Spore. It’s a 3 part interview, so get ready for a lengthy read. Below is a snippet of the interview:
When we first met in your office to talk seriously about this game it was some time in 2005. It’s now 2008, and you guys are finally set to announce a release date. What happened? What’s been taking so long in making this game?
Oh gosh. It was so many challenges to overcome. A lot of them initially were technical challenges: procedural animation; can we do these levels of detail enough to have zoom on the models; etc. Once we nailed most of those, it became a very large design challenge. And probably the biggest design challenge was keeping it very accessible to players so that every bit of the game was intuitive, easy and approachable. At the same time, we were going to mix all these genres, so we wanted to have one kind of control scheme, camera scheme, feedback system, rewards, across these different game genres. That probably overall was the biggest challenge, I think.
We’ve had all the game levels up and running for quite a while now. Initially it felt like five different games kind of stuck together. We basically did pass after pass, bringing these things into alignment, kind of like aligning the Intercontinental railway, digging into the rails with a sledgehammer, slowly getting closer and closer and closer until pretty soon it’s a seamless fit across the rail.
Will Wright Demos Spore at NASA
Feb 7th
Since I am a NASA Contractor, it is my duty to post this. Will Wright discussed at the NASA Virtual Worlds Workshop about his upcoming creation, Spore. The video is quite long clocking in around 30 minutes and features a Q&A segment. I just wished he could make it to MSFC, I’d be first in line!
History on Making “The Sims”
Jan 18th
Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, an interesting article was posted about the history of The Sims and the difficulties Will had to go thru (as mentioned in an earlier post). It’s a lengthy read, but it goes quite in-depth and does shed to light what it has been like behind the scenes.
“The Toliet Game”
Jan 18th
Would you play a PC game if it was called “The Toliet Game”? Before you answer no, think twice. That name was the nickname to The Sims before it became a huge hit. Will Wright had to work on this game in secret due to the fact of being shot down by Maxis when he came up with the idea.
“It was a battle, the first few years, inside Maxis,” said Wright. “It was referred to as ‘The Toilet game’. It was the game where you clean the toilet.
“We had a product review meeting at Maxis where we had to decide whether we’d publish this thing or not…and the executive said ‘No, let’s do [something else]‘.”
I wonder what those same people are thinking now…or even if they are still employed. A little creativity, even if it doesn’t sound good on paper, can lead to a major sucess in the end.
Source: Eurogamer
“I’m Will Wright, B**tch!”
Oct 20th
Oh man, this is too great to pass up! I planned on getting The Simpsons Game for the Wii when it comes out, but this makes it a Day 1 purchase. Check out the :24 second mark in the video below to see what I mean.
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