Despite leaving Electronic Arts to helm his new Stupid Fun Club venture, Will Wright says he’ll still be involved in the future development of the Spore franchise.
Wright revealed in early April that he was departing EA to launch Stupid Fun Club, an “entertainment think tank” that will go beyond videogames to include movies, television, the internet and toys. EA has a stake in the new project, holding the same percentage in the company as Wright, and both Wright and EA CEO John Riccitiello said following the announcement of the new company that they looked forward to working together again in the future.
But the sundering of Wright and EA doesn’t appear to be as complete as it originally sounded. “I don’t think it was widely reported, but alongside this whole [Stupid Fun Club] thing, I also entered into a consulting agreement with EA,” Wright said in an interview with GameDaily. “I’m spending a certain amount of time every month actually working with the Spore team on future versions of Spore and expansions. So I will [still] be involved with EA on developing the Spore franchise as well.”
Wright also touched on the possibility of Spore coming to consoles, which he described as an “opportunity/cost” decision. He said that while there have been some discussions about bringing the game to other platforms, he’s more interested in how to “evolve” Spore rather than just port it straight from the PC. “I can’t specifically say what the plans are right now, but really all these things are measured against each other. We can’t do everything at once, so we have to say, ‘What platforms would it kind of evolve the fastest on?'” he said. “So you can sort of look at a straight port to the PS3 and Xbox 360 and basically have the same game we have on the PC… or we could say, ‘What can we do on this platform that will help us explore different parts of the design?'”
“I think the Wii is really unique in that sense, with the things you can do on Wii that you can’t do on other platforms right now,” he continued. “It’s represented a lot of learning for us in terms of the directions we might take it. So I’d say that’s one of the under-appreciated aspects of how we choose to deploy this on different platforms.”
