Geek Gestalt

Electronic Arts said on Tuesday that The Sims 3, the third full iteration of one of the most successful video game franchises of all time, will hit store shelves on June 2.

The game will be released for PCs first, and versions for the Mac, iPhone, and iPod Touch should come later in the summer, EA said.

The original version of The Sims, which launched in 2000, quickly became the best-selling PC game of all time. In the years since, the franchise has surpassed 100 million total units sold, counting The Sims 2 and all of the expansions for both full iterations.

Originally developed by legendary game designer Will Wright's Maxis studio--which is now focused on Spore--The Sims has since become its own division within EA. As such, it is run out of the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters, while Maxis is based in Emeryville, Calif.

On Tuesday, EA also announced its third-quarter earnings and said it would be laying off about 1,100 employees--about 11 percent of its total staff--and closing 12 facilities worldwide.

Electronic Arts' much anticipated evolution game, Spore hits store shelves Sunday in North America, and for those that have been on the project since the beginning, it has been a long road from concept to completion.

The game's creator, Will Wright, who is famous for previous games like SimCity and The Sims said recently that the game has been seven years in the making, meaning the project was getting under way not long after The Sims launched and became the best-selling PC game of all time.

Wright has talked at length about how Spore's origins lie in the SETI project and other flights of his fancy.

"The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore," Wright told me last month. "As we thought about, it became apparent that evolution was a very important component. Some of the very first prototypes involved how you would move around and visualize the galaxy."

In the highly anticipated lead-up to the Spore's release from EA studio Maxis, in Emeryville, Calif., almost all the attention has been on the game itself or on its Creature Creator, which gives users an easy and sophisticated way to create complex beasts and which was made available in June as a free download.

But for many people, an equally exciting element has been the series of prototypes available for free download on the Spore Web site, each of which provides a look at the origins of a small piece of the larger game.

In fact, the prototypes were a crucial part of making Spore a reality. For example, since the procedural animation of the creatures in the game is one of its most-heralded elements, it's notable that before the system was ever built into the game, it started as a prototype.

"The earliest prototypes were making strange topology creatures and seeing if we could teach the computer to make them move plausibly, and later, show emotion and behavior," Wright said. "We had to find out whether the project was doable or not, or if some part of it wasn't doable, where we have to scale it back."

The first programmer on the Spore team was a Maxis veteran named Jason Shankel. Prior to joining Wright on his evolution project, he'd been working on a project known as SimMars, which was essentially a Mars terraforming game that was supported financially by NASA before the plug was finally pulled.

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For Mac users, one of the best pieces of news of the year was the announcement in January by Electronic Arts that it would be releasing a version of its long-awaited evolution game, Spore, on their beloved platform.

But if you're one of those Mac users who is shaking with anticipation at playing the new game by SimCity and The Sims creator Will Wright, and you don't have both an Intel-based machine and the Leopard version of the Mac OS X operating system, I'm afraid you're out of luck.

This news isn't new, as it's been listed on the Spore system requirements for some time. But having noticed it Tuesday morning, I did a search and didn't quickly find any stories out there that talked about it. So, I thought it was worth a quick mention.

On Windows machines, it requires XP or Vista, so a much wider range of fans will be able to play on that platform. But on the Mac, only those that have pretty much the latest hardware and operating system will be able to do so.

Still, that number is probably in the millions, so there's a big market there. It's just a shame those other Mac users are locked out. On the other hand, as one Mac user friend said to me Tuesday, it's an excuse to upgrade.

SAN FRANCISCO--If you're a video game fan, you are probably quite aware that Electronic Arts' evolution game Spore is just days away from launch.

You've played with the , you've read the stories, you've watched the videos. Maybe you've even had a chance to see Spore's creator, Will Wright, give one of his famous talks on the subject.

But if you're not a gamer, you might not have any idea what Spore is. Until now, that is.

As I was returning from lunch Wednesday, I noticed a giant billboard on the side of a building just down the street from CNET Networks' headquarters with the phrase, "Tired of your planet? Flights leaving daily at Spore.com."

So far, this is the first advertising for the game that I've seen in public. But I can only assume it's just the beginning of what will be a very large ad campaign.

After all, EA has a ton invested in the game, and the stakes are high, both for the company and for Wright, the highly regarded designer behind SimCity and The Sims among others.

And while I'm sure I'm a couple days behind on this--I was out of the office since last week--I haven't heard any other talk about Spore billboards, so it caught me by surprise, especially since I've been following the progress of the game so closely and also since the billboard is just feet from my office.

Either way, I'll be very interested to see how this presumed ad blitz takes shape: Will there be TV ads? Big glossy spreads in magazines? An alternate-reality game?

If you happen to run across something interesting, please do consider dropping me a note. I'd love to hear about it.

On September 7, Electronic Arts will release its long-awaited and much-anticipated Spore. For many, this will be the biggest video game event of the year, and possibly even the last several years.

Spore, which was first announced in 2005, takes players through the process of evolution, from simple cell-like creatures, step by step, on out into space, is the latest from The Sims and SimCity designer Will Wright.

There is little question that Wright is one of the industry's most important figures, as evidenced by the packed houses he always speaks to and the reverence everyone from gamers to other designers to reporters have for him.

For Wright, the release of Spore, is the completion of seven years of work and the finished product is a far cry from its earliest concepts, which he and a small team were first discussing while The Sims was still fairly new. Yet by then, he was already seen as perhaps the industry's leading innovator for the entirely new genre of games he'd created.

Now, Spore is set to push that innovation envelope even further. And while no one yet knows if it will be a commercial or even critical success, it's safe to say that the excitement over the game--which has been raised in part due to the fact that it has taken Wright and his Maxis studio much longer to get the game to market than originally planned--is as high as any game in recent memory.

Proof of that excitement level was borne out by the more than 2 million people who downloaded the Spore Creature Creator after its June release. This free feature allowed anyone to make creatures for the game in advance of its release, something that served two key purposes. First, it got people energized and gave them something to play with before the game was out. And second, it provided millions of creatures to populate the game with on day one, since everything that individual users created for the game is shared with everyone else, despite it being a single-player game.

Earlier this month, the day before Wright set off on a worldwide, four-week publicity tour, I sat down with him at Maxis' Emeryville, Calif., headquarters for a discussion about the evolution of his evolution game. I wanted to know about the conceptual origins of a game unlike any other, and Wright was happy to tell me all about it

Q: What were the origins of Spore?
Will Wright: The earliest evolution of it had to do with the SETI Project. The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore. As we thought about, it became apparent that evolution was a very important component. Some of the very first prototypes involved how you would move around and visualize the galaxy. And then on procedurally generated creatures. Could we actually generate creatures through evolution so there was a vast variety of creatures rather than just the 20 or 30 fixed things that games typically include.

Were you inspired by other video games?
Wright: I played a lot of space and strategy games, but one thing that always disappointed me in space games was that you're presented with a galaxy with maybe 100 worlds. It was never vast like a real galaxy. Even the Spore galaxy is a tiny percentage of a real galaxy, but you get the sense it's immense, with countless worlds to explore. And I'd never seen an evolutionary game where, again, there was a vast set of possible creatures you could come across and that could convey the diversity of real biology. So we started thinking about procedural solutions. Very early on we wanted to give players a really cool design editor so they could design a wide variety of creatures. A lot of our early prototypes explored whether we could do procedurally generated animations and textures and could we build an editor that was easy to use?

You had to invent all the systems, right?
Wright: We researched what little had been done in computer science around things like procedural animation, which was mainly around humanoids, procedurally generating human animations. But almost nobody was generating animations where you didn't know what the shape of the creature was. We had to basically invent our own kind of computer science for that.

What was that like to have to do that invention?
Wright: It was risk assessment: Can we solve enough of this problem to be confident we could solve it well? The earliest prototypes were making strange topology creatures and seeing if we could teach the computer to make them move plausibly, and later, show emotion and behavior. We had to find out whether the project was doable or not, or if some part of it wasn't doable, where we have to scale it back.

What are some steps or systems that you found weren't doable?
Wright: Surprisingly, some I thought weren't doable were. I'd never heard decent procedural music and I'd given up on it until Brian Eno came on the project. He'd been thinking about the problem for years. So we reincorporated it after rejecting it in the early phases.

Does Spore seem like the same game as what you showed at E3 in 2005?
Wright: It seems like basically the same game. We expanded areas that we didn't originally think would be important or fun, especially things like content sharing. We'd thought you would just play the game and stuff would appear. But as we developed more content and the ability to browse and explore it, we discovered how fun that process was and the social currency you get making something really cool and sharing it with other people. We borrowed the language of social networking and Web 2.0 to present what we're calling the Sporepedia.

Did the development of Sporepedia and the Web 2.0 elements contribute to the game taking until now to finish?
Wright: You can't really say it took five months, three days and 47 seconds more because of that. We're always looking at what we have, like we realized on the browser side that, Wow, it'll be great if we add these extra features but that's going to push us out a few more months, so let's also change the Creature Editor and some game levels and add achievements and mission-based systems. You're doing these things in parallel. Eventually, they have to be ready the same day. If one thing slips, you continue to polish and add a few little features you didn't think you'd have time for.

What are some ways creating Spore has been different than your other games?
Wright: One big way is the art team. Typically, we would just build a larger and larger army of artists to make more and more content, like in The Sims. But because we were doing this procedurally, our art staff was mainly concentrated on teaching the computer and giving players tools to make stuff. Another difference was the design density in Spore. Because there's so many different genres and levels, I had a designer for every game level and the editors and Sporepedia.

Originally, you referred to Spore as "massively single player." And now?
Wright: Spore is a hybrid. There's huge unexplored space between single-player and multiplayer games. With multiplayer games, there's tremendous design limitations: Nobody can peak, nobody can pause time, no one player can be super powerful. These limit the experience you can give someone. But there is a huge benefit of getting a million people collectively building an interesting world. So our hybrid model aims for the best aspects of a multiplayer game without the worst drawbacks.

Virtual world publishers talk about the benefit of aggregating the all the content their users make. What's your take on that?
Wright: I like the idea. I was trying to figure out how to lower the friction of creation to getting into the game but also how do you make the creation process fun, so you don't have 1 percent of people making stuff for the other 99 percent. Rather, how do you get 99 percent of people making stuff for the 100 percent.

What are some of the research influences for Spore?
Wright: A lot of Richard Dawkins' work. Edward O. Wilson, back in the very early origin of light phase. Stuart Kauffman wrote about autocatalytic sets, which are theories about the origin of life, like did life come to Earth on a comet or did it originate out of self-organizing chemical sets.

How would something like that manifest in the game?
Wright: Well, we actually took a different direction. At the beginning of the game you see this comet hitting the planet, which is a panspermia theory, which is the alternative theory to bio-genesis, which is that life formed naturally through chemical complexity on Earth. We ended up prototyping and exploring a lot of spaces that are not in the game. We're trying to look for the most interesting 20 percent out of the 100 percent of what we could put in the game.

What's the prototyping exploration like?
Wright: In the early phases it entails me talking to a programmer about some system we want to explore and we build a very simple prototype like the ones we're putting on our website. So start poking and prodding and playing with this little toy. It's fun to watch stellar formation animation. It's fun to play with autocatalytic sets. We'd build prototypes for each one of these and play with them and imagine a singular experience that involves some subset of these prototypes that use similar concepts that can be ramped in the players' mind so they're not having to learn, you know, 20 different things that are totally unconnected.

In the recent Electronic Arts quarterly earnings call, CEO John Riccitiello suggested Spore might one day become a label of its own. Are some of tehse directions you're talking about the basis for the expansion packs an ongoing label requires?
Wright: When a game is released, we have a good sense of how we can expand it in different directions. But you do first have to get it out to the public and see what they do with it. As we see the fans doing various things with it, it will become pretty clear to us that, Oh, yeah, this would be probably the best direction and we already have an expansion map, so we know how to navigate that terrain. But we're also exploring entire other forms of media and starting to think, what does this brand mean. We want Spore in a very general sense to become this intersection between science and creativity.

What do you hope fans will learn about science from Spore?
Wright: I want this to be more on the motivational side than the education side. I really want to spark people's interest in these subjects. People still tell me they went into, you know, civil engineering because of SimCity. It wasn't that SimCity taught them how to build a city, but it got them interested in how fascinating the subject is. That motivation is far more powerful than just trying to pour facts into their head. So, if nothing else I'd like people to come out, sit back, look up at the stars and think a little bit deeper about what a galaxy is.

I've heard Spore was originally known as SimEverything.
When I design a game, at the very beginning, I design a box, and with Spore many, many years ago, the title on the box was SimEverything. I can show the team my box and say, Look, we want to build this, imagine what will be in this box. Spore was feeling pretty unique and SimEverything almost felt like a parody of the Sims brand, which is why I liked it. But my lead artist, Ocean Quigley, actually came up with Spore as the code name for the project. But after a couple of years of calling it Spore, the name seemed to fit on so many different levels, especially as we thought deeper about the pollination and things like that. At some point we said, Let's just call it Spore.

What is it like to be at the end of this process?
Wright: It feels nice. It's a big transition, because we've been working, working, working on this thing and it's kind of like, a Frankenstein thing where you flip a switch and it comes alive and roars off into the world, and you don't know what kind of hell it's going to raise. So it's kind of scary and exciting at the same time.

Electronic Arts, the world's largest video game publisher, announced Thursday that its long-awaited Spore had gone "gold."

The announcement means that the game, the latest from famous designer Will Wright, is finished and on its way to manufacturing for a September 7 release. It's a momentous step for EA given that it is probably the most anticipated video game of 2008, and one of the most important titles the company has worked on in years.

Last year, the company reorganized into four separate divisions, or labels: EA Games, EA Sports, EA Casual Entertainment, and The Sims, each of which is responsible for running several studios and producing its own revenue.

Spore is produced by Maxis, one of the 14 EA-owned studios that fall under the EA Games label, which is headed up by Frank Gibeau.

In June 2007, Gibeau was named the inaugural president of EA Games, and as such is responsible for approximately $1 billion in revenue from the studios that make game franchises like Need for Speed, Medal of Honor, Burnout, Battlefield, Warhammer, and others, including Spore.

On Thursday, as EA was hosting the game press as its annual summer Studio Showcase event, I sat down with Gibeau to talk about, among other things, Spore going gold, as well as his management style, the biggest challenges facing his label, and the skills the next person to take his job would need to have.

Q: Spore's just gone gold. How big is that for EA?
Gibeau: It's a huge milestone for our label, and especially for Maxis. Everybody is just feeling so pumped and excited to get it into people's hands, and get the feedback on what they're enjoying, and what people are doing.

Given that it's taken so long to be finished, how important is it that it's finally launching?
Gibeau: It's that much more important and that much more of a relief to finally have the game done at a quality level and potential that we all saw in the project, and especially for the folks at Maxis who lived it day to day. What's really powerful about this idea is that it's essentially going to be a platform for a lot of different types of creativity and imagination to have the editors with the creatures, the vehicles and the buildings. But you also have the mini games of Tribe and Cell and Space, and it's an incredibly flexible product. You can have user-generated content coming in, you can build modules out. You can come up with new expansion packs and you can have other platforms. This is just the first step in the Spore story. It's not just a level-based game that once you complete it you never come back. It's going to be something you can commit to and constantly be evolving and constantly be adding new things to it.

In the recent quarterly earnings call, EA CEO John Riccitiello suggested that Spore could someday be its own label, like The Sims.
Gibeau: The potential of Spore is so big that that's what we're shooting for. We're not going for a single or a double here.

How does that decision get made?
Gibeau: It's a variety of metrics. Part of it has to do with critical mass, how many platforms you're on, how much business is coming in, and how stable the business is. How global is it? Do you have the leadership team in place that allows you to step off and break away and become a standalone label? But we're starting off being very cautious about not getting too far ahead of ourselves, and we're making sure that Spore is a success after it launches.

How do you manage all the different studios under your label and their cultures and products?
Gibeau: What I've learned in my career, having worked inside a lot of businesses in the industry and at EA, is that the studios that have creative autonomy and cultural autonomy create the best games. So my concept is a decentralized organization. Let's look at each independent studio as a city-state. They have autonomy and they have authority. But they also have the ability to leverage the large organization where they need it. The next step is making sure I have strong leadership in each studio, people who can make this a scalable and well-run organization.

What do you see as some of the biggest challenges facing your label?
Gibeau: Job one is keeping our talent very high quality and very engaged in what we do. Ultimately, nothing happens unless we have the very best creators. I'm also trying to acquire new talent, either through relationships like EA Partners, or picking up companies like Pandemic and Bioware, or just recruiting outstanding individuals.

Job two is I need to move to an online model as fast as I possibly can.

How come?
Gibeau: If you look at our customers' behavior patterns, you're seeing them engaging with fully connected experiences. And I think we have IPs and ideas and expertise that can really allow us to do that. I think Spore is a connected experience. I think Battlefield is, and Warhammer. These can be very lucrative for us, and they can be very exciting from a developer standpoint, because you're moving from a fire-and-forget model to more of a service model, where you launch the game but you're thinking 24-7 about when's my first content pack, what's happening with telemetry, how are people playing the game, and how do I make their experiences better?

Does that mean we're likely to see an EA version of Xbox Live down the road?
Gibeau: I don't know how it'll manifest itself in terms of an overall platform service. But I'm just not interested in single-player-only experiences anymore. When we're green-lighting new ideas, we look at the team, we look at the IP and an important part of this is also looking at what is the online experience like, and how do we measure and capture an idea that's bigger than just a fire-and-forget model?

It seems like EA is turning out a series of all-new titles, like Spore and Mirror's Edge, while it was for a long time known for only making franchise games. How important is it to have these new games?
Gibeau: It's vital. It is what we need to do as a company. For a while there, we lost faith with our customers because we were churning out games that might have made sense from a financial standpoint, but frankly we had walked away from the art of making games and offering breakthrough creative experiences. There weren't as many games in our lineup that I wanted to play anymore. So part of what we embarked on here is to make more things that our people care about making and making more things that we own. That also puts you into a place where when you go online, you have a lot more flexibility and a lot more freedom to do things with that IP that in some cases licenses preclude you from doing.

In any organization there's competition between divisions for resources and attention from corporate. What's that dynamic like at EA?
Gibeau: Typically, we have everything we need in order to execute the business inside of our labels. We're fully resourced, and have a fair amount of capabilities and autonomy. I haven't found myself in the situation where I'm arguing with another label for resources. When we restructured, a lot of the big stovepipes and other organizational stuff that was in corporate got spread out into the labels. There's this concept of what we call "swim lanes," which is, this is what The Sims does, and we stay in our swim lanes, for the most part.

What skills would the next person in your job need to have?
Gibeau: What's absolutely vital is you have to have passion for interactive. You have to have passion for games. If you don't have insight into why these things are the coolest things ever and in your free time play them and understand why they're good, it'd be like having a film executive that doesn't like movies. And you have to have some vision about where this business is going. You have to be constantly looking for what's happening in your consumer base, and what is really innovative on the technology side. You also have to surround yourself with fantastic people that are smarter than you.

What is your typical day like?
Gibeau: I'm on the road a lot, visiting my studios. It's really important to go where the games are being made, and sit down with the teams, play the games with them and see where they want to go with them. So my day can start in Stockholm or Vancouver, or Montreal. I was in Edmonton last week with the BioWare guys going over their future SKU plan. I see my role as really helping to make the games better and giving people the broader visibility as to what's happening in the label. Like if they need a PS3 optimization engineer, I know where one might be at Criterion.

Is it more like being a shepherd than a director?
Gibeau: I don't manage. I influence. I have to convince you on the merits of my argument. If your argument's better, you win. I'm not a big hierarchical guy. I'm either going to win the argument or lose the argument, and if I lose it it's because you have a better one, and that's fine. I believe much more in the influence model and the inspire model than command and control.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--Electronic Arts announced partnership deals with two independent games companies Thursday, including Gears of War publisher Epic Games.

The news of the two new members of the EA Partners program, which also revolved around Japan's Grasshopper Manufacture, publisher of games like No More Heroes, was part of EA's annual Studio Showcase event here.

During just over an hour of announcements and presentations, EA showed off 17 games it didn't show at E3 last month, as well as unveiled the partnerships.

Grasshopper Manufacture will create an all-new action horror game for EA. It will be produced by Shinji Mikami and directed by game designer Suda51.

It was too early, however, for EA or Grasshopper to go into any specifics about the title, and no launch date was given.

Similarly, the Epic announcement was solely about the relationship and no details at all were given about the substance of that partnership, other than that Epic's Poland-based People Can Fly studio would be building an action game for EA.

Beyond the new partnerships, there was little substantial news.

EA's vice president of corporate communications, Jeff Brown, started off the event by holding up a disc he said contained the first full "gold" version of Spore, the forthcoming evolution game from Maxis Studios and famous designer Will Wright.

Spore went gold Thursday, meaning that development on the game is finished and it has now gone to manufacturing. It will be released September 7.

Brown also joked that in the aftermath of the much-hyped signing of football quarterback Brett Favre by the New York Jets, EA had decided to post a new version of Madden Football online, since the boxed version had just come out featuring the then-retired Favre wearing his iconic Green Bay Packers uniform.

"Within two hours...100,000 people downloaded the new cover," Brown said. "That's not a lot of people for the Internet, but about 75,000 people more than went to the last Jets game."

There was also a short presentation on The Godfather 2, the sequel to EA's The Godfather, and it appears that that game will be released in February 2009.

Later, Paul Barnett, the creative director for Mythic, which is producing Warhammer Online, a full massively multiplayer online game, for EA, said that the title will be released on September 18. He also said that more than 800,000 people had signed up to play the game and that there had already been 120,000 pre-sales.

All in all, that was the extent of what seemed newsworthy. But it's not surprising that there would be a lack of big news, given that the E3 conference was just a month ago. Things move fast in the video games industry, but not that fast.

As was first reported here last month, Electronic Arts' hotly-anticipated new evolution game, Spore, was about to go "gold."

Now, EA says, the game from SimCity and The Sims designer Will Wright has indeed done so, meaning that development on it is finished, and Spore is off to manufacturing.

Now all that's left is for the Spore marketing operation to kick into high gear, getting ready for the game's September 7 launch.

It's hard to imagine that this video game, which was first announced in 2005, and which has had its ship date redefined several times, is about to come out. But that's exactly what's happening.

And that means that you and I, and likely millions of others, will soon be playing around in primordial ooze, learning how to make friends with new tribes, conquering foreign civilizations, and colonizing space.

If, after September 7, I seem to disappear for a few days, well, you might check my home office and see if I'm sitting there, sort of catatonic, trying to get just a little further in the game.

If you want to whet your appetite in the meantime, you can check out a few of the creatures from the game here.

After several years of waiting, video game fans will soon be able to get their hands on the long-awaited new title from legendary designer Will Wright, Spore.

But if the game's publisher, Electronic Arts, has its way, a much wider audience of fans may someday be exposed to the game. Or at least a version of the game.

That's because, according to a Reuters report Wednesday, EA is hoping that it may one day be able to license the film and/or TV rights to Spore.

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