Nick Wingfield, of the Wall Street Journal, calls game designer Will Wright (The Sims) the Master of the Universe:
In the popular imagination, successful videogames tend to be titles like “Mortal Kombat” and “Grand Theft Auto”: violent, hyperkinetic and often racy fare typically played by young men. Will Wright, 46 years old, has created some of the industry’s hottest sellers, and they are almost the exact opposite. His games, which draw on artistic and academic sources, encourage players to create, rather than destroy. They’re also popular with women and people well out of their teens, an almost unheard of phenomenon for titles of such popularity.Mr. Wright, creator of “The Sims,” the best-selling computer videogame of all time, is now at work on “Spore.” In his playful new game that resembles a Pixar cartoon, players start as single-cell blobs that can be transformed into whimsical or even threatening creatures. As they move up the evolutionary scale, the organisms eventually become members of space-dwelling societies, complete with weapons, spaceships and entire civilizations.
“It would take you 79 years if you never slept” to fully explore the “Spore” universe, Mr. Wright says, based on his own calculations.
“Spore” is likely to be one of the biggest videogame launches of 2007 and potentially a big boost for its publisher, Electronic Arts Inc., the world’s biggest videogame publisher. Electronic Arts has already sold more than 60 million copies of “The Sims” for a total of more than $1 billion. “The Sims” is the gaming equivalent of a dollhouse in which players tend to the romantic, recreational and even hygienic needs of virtual characters.
It takes a certain breed to design games like Wright’s:
“Spore” is peppered with references to the great space operas of the silver screen, including “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “War of the Worlds” and “Star Trek.” In homage to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” one of Mr. Wright’s favorite movies, players can deposit a mysterious monolith on a planet to befuddle its inhabitants.Mr. Wright’s games are shaped by a lifelong fascination with building things. He was born into an affluent family in Atlanta where his father owned Wright Plastics, a maker of packaging material, then a cutting-edge business. His mother, Beverly Wright, recalls walking into a room to see her son, then about 6, next to her completely disassembled sewing machine.
Mr. Wright started building plastic models of ships and other objects, later moving on to elaborate custom models made of balsa wood. When a friend’s uncle sold an office building, Mr. Wright was allowed to strip the place of electrical outlets, wires and other materials, which he used to cobble together home-made robots.
“He was thrilled to pieces,” his mother says. “I could never have bought him anything he would enjoy so much.”
College didn’t suit Mr. Wright. He attended three schools — Louisiana State University, Louisiana Tech and the New School in New York — and majored in architecture, electrical engineering and computer science before dropping out. The schools couldn’t teach him quickly enough, he felt.
Instead, he learned the value of tacking against conventional wisdom. Planning for a cross-country auto race in 1980, Mr. Wright plotted a route through the southern states that was hundreds of miles longer than the more popular path. It avoided the northern roads likely to attract more contestants and, as a result, police.
He and a partner, the race organizer, zoomed across the country in a Mazda RX-7 outfitted with a souped-up engine, a roll cage, an extra fuel tank, a night-vision scope, two police radar detectors and a prototype of a radar jammer. The team got one speeding ticket near Indianapolis and Mr. Wright talked his way out of two others, once by pretending to be a lost local resident.
The duo crossed the finish line in 34 hours and 9 minutes for first place, minutes before the second-place car.