Having recently had his face plastered on the cover of WIRED Magazine, Wright has reached a new kind of celebrity status few game designers will ever see. He is, for lack of a better term, the game designer for the masses. Cliffy B, Peter Molyneux, and the team at id Software may make the games that get gamers frothing at the mouth, but when it comes to computer games that appeal to a truly wide audience, no one competes with Wright.
As E3 2006 gets underway, here is what Will Wright has to say for himself.
WW: We're saying that Spore is coming out in 2007. The message that we are getting from [Electronic Arts] corporate is "Don't screw it up," which is great. What they mean is, "Lets get it right." This will be the game's last E3.GameSpy: So it will come out in the first quarter of 2007?
WW: Probably just after that, though we are not being precise. What we are saying is just outside the fiscal year, which is March.GameSpy: So April or early May?
WW: Yeah. Right.
GameSpy: Still PC only?
WW: Well, actually we are going to go on all platforms, but we will come out on PC first. We will even come out on cell phones and stuff. One of the things in the game is that as you go around and encounter things… creatures and plants, or whatever, you make trading cards of each thing. That is the metaphor for the database -- trading cards. So you can collect your cards. You can print them out. You can now play your own card game. That might be like the cell phone part. That stuff is so light. It's more about collectability as opposed to interaction. Every creature in the PC game is three or four megabytes. But the cards, that is the database that the player is building.GameSpy: But the game itself is still "massively single-player"? (The term "massively single-player," which Wright created to describe Spore, refers to the concept that the creatures and plants and even cities that players create will be duplicated in an online database and duplicated in other players' games.)
WW: We could build a persistent world around Spore quite easily. First of all, 95 percent of the stars and planets will be offline. Nobody can speed up time. You cannot be all-powerful all of a sudden. I think it [a multi-player arena] is a separate universe that you need to go into. It's a new galaxy.GameSpy: Have you started on your next project for after Spore?
WW: Oh, I always have so many ideas. No, I haven't actually started to work on a project. Usually about six months before I finish a game, I start to get serious about the next one. I'm still kind of batting around ideas. I am working on a book right now. I'm about halfway through the organization of it. The book is on design; it is a general design book. It's going to be a very graphic book.GameSpy: How big is the Spore team?
WW: Our maximum team size is about 70 people, which is very small by today's standards.GameSpy: I keep hearing about blockbuster games made by teams of 300 people.
WW: The Godfather had about 240, so having a team of about 70 feels really good. Basically we are outsourcing the artwork to the players. They are designing the creatures, vehicles, cities, planets. They are designing everything… the plants. Pretty much everything in the game.
To build the creatures, you are starting out with parts. We have seven part categories -- feet, mouth, weapons… Each category has four columns of parts, and each column has eight or nine choices. As your brain level increases, you unlock more columns. All in all we have about 400 creature parts. Each of these parts also has morphs.
