EA Announces “The Sims: Will Wright” Expansion Pack
by John Paczkowski
Posted on April 8, 2009 at 1:24 PM PT
“The human imagination is an amazing thing. As children, we spend much of our time in imaginary worlds, substituting toys and make-believe for the real surroundings that we are just beginning to explore and understand. As we play, we learn. And as we grow, our play gets more complicated. We add rules and goals. The result is something we call games.”
Celebrated game designer Will Wright has a new job: doing whatever he damn well pleases. He’s leaving Electronic Arts (ERTS), the game publisher for which he developed Spore and the wildly successful Sim City and The Sims franchises, to run Stupid Fun Club, an entertainment think tank developing ideas for everything from toys to TV. “The entertainment industry is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary change,” Wright said in a statement. “Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms.”
Wright and EA each own equal percentages of Stupid Fun Club, and the company has first right of refusal for game concepts that arise from the venture, so this isn’t quite the blow to EA it might at first seem. In fact, it may turn out to be a boon. With the novelty of EA franchises like Madden NFL, Need for Speed and the Sims fading and sales declining, the company desperately needs some big, new, innovative ideas. And who better than Wright to fish them out? Certainly, there must be far better games than Need for Speed XXX waiting to be developed in that “sublime chaos” Wright hopes to explore.
