One man watches the spectacle unfold from the front of convention hall six, where thousands of fans are filing in to hear him speak. Will Wright can relate to the fans here, and he'll say as much when his speech begins. Comic-Con is about fans taking popular culture and making it their own. The costumes and props are homemade. The swords are painted cardboard and duct tape. People at Comic-Con take the worlds they love and use that inspiration to create something wholly their own.
"This is a show that the fans kinda own," he explains, as his talk begins and flashbulbs click. Half of the entertainment, he asserts, is seeing the other fans. In classic Will Wright fashion, he launches into a presentation featuring a rapid-fire slideshow of images and ideas. Parts of his presentation reiterated his Game Developer's Conference talk about what makes fictional worlds work, albeit in a new light. He also delved into his childhood passions and fascination with pop culture, and explained how it all comes together in his work... especially with Spore, his most ambitious project to date.
Will Wright addresses the Comic-Con crowd.
Of Jetpacks and Aliens
"Everyone has an inner otaku," Wright explained to some applause. His own personal obsessions were rooted in his childhood, growing up in the '60s. Despite the grim reality of war overseas and rioting stateside, he explained that the '60s was a time of "interesting optimism about the future." He quickly flicked through images of people experimenting with jetpacks, exploring the possibilities of nuclear power, and landing on the moon. Fiction was alive with possibility as well; he showed a screencap of the "Jetsons" cartoon, with its flying briefcase cars and robot maids. "Star Trek" was born in the '60s.
One of Wright's own personal otaku-style obsessions kicked off when he was seven years old and saw the movie "2001" for the first time. It opened up new worlds to him, worlds where people hopped on commercial flights to the moon or held conversations with computers. (He notes that audiences at the time took for granted that computers could someday hold conversations or read lips, but the idea of a computer playing chess was, for them, way too unrealistic.)
"2001" taught Wright that adults didn't necessarily know everything. He looked back on the movie in later years and realized that the future is in fact completely chaotic and unpredictable, a theme he returned to later in his talk.
