Celebrated game designer Will Wright has a new job: doing whatever he damn well pleases. He’s leaving Electronic Arts, 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.
Electronic Arts is experiencing first hand what it’s like to be on an evolutionary downswing in one of its life-simulation games. Its stock dragged down to its lowest price in seven years Friday after scaling back its earnings forecast and announcing layoffs, EA is on a nasty downward spiral despite strong sales of videogame titles like “Spore” and “Rock Band 2.” And with a market value of about $7.2 billion–down from $19 billion a few years ago–there’s a chance the company may soon find itself cast as the prey to a larger rival’s predator in a nasty mergers-and-acquisitions turn on its Creatiolutionism game “Spore.”
Well, if this rumor proves true, Canada really will have to declare a national day of mourning for the BlackBerry. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs uncrates the 3G iPhone a few months from now, presumably at the company’s WWDC conference in June, the device’s price may draw more oohs and ahs than its feature set.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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