Gaming and Culture

Sims players will soon be able to journey to countries such as China and Egypt, search for hidden treasures, and meet fellow Sims along the way.

Electronic Arts announced Monday that it's developing the first expansion pack for its popular Sims 3 game. The new pack, Sims 3 World Adventures, will take players on a journey to real-world locales, says EA, from ancient tombs in Egypt to romantic getaways in France. While trekking across the globe, players can take on new challenges, develop different skills, and interact with other Sims.

The Sims 3

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

"We're thrilled with the global success of The Sims 3 over these last few months and are looking forward to expanding on the gameplay experience with one of the most robust expansion packs to The Sims yet," said Scott Evans, General Manager of The Sims at EA.

Designed for the PC and Mac, the Sims 3 Expansion Pack will hit store shelves the week of November 16, says EA. A portable version for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch will be out early next year.

Since its release in early June, Sims 3 has been a hot product. The game sold 1.9 million copies in its first week alone, making it EA's best PC game launch ever.

Electronic Arts may get criticized in the press for its reliance on long-running franchises, but if the record first-week sales of The Sims 3 are any indication, gamers aren't concerned with such matters.

The game giant reported Tuesday that The Sims 3, the latest full iteration of the storied Sims franchise, sold 1.4 million copies in the first week following its June 2 release. That made it, according to EA, the best launch of a PC game in the company's history.

In the newest version, as in the previous iterations, players can create sims--lifelike simulated people with unique personalities--and control their lives while trying to keep them happy and alive. The new game also allows players to create and edit videos they make in the game.

For any new Sims title to set such records is particularly noteworthy, given that the original version of The Sims, released in 2000, quickly became the best-selling PC game of all time. Further, the games and the many expansions released over the years have sold more than 100 million copies.

In addition, the iPhone version of The Sims 3, which costs $10 on Apple's App Store, rose to the top spot among paid applications.

All of this goes to show that just when you think a franchise may have reached its limits, gamers make it clear that they have their own ideas about things. And for that, EA is smiling all the way to the bank.

LOS ANGELES--Start saving simoleans, everyone: "The Sims 3" has finally launched.

The latest full iteration of the famous "Sims" franchise--"The Sims" launched in 2000 and became the best-selling PC game of all time, and "The Sims 2" released in 2004--the new game presents a chance for its publisher, Electronic Arts, to bolster its bottom line, even while trying to push the boundaries of what game players are used to.

The original "Sims," from the hit-making game designer, Will Wright, was a game in which players could control a household of, yes, "sims," little people whose daily lives depended on players' attention. The innovations in the game, plus its non-goal-oriented nature, its unique graphics, its ahead-of-its-time game play and a number of other factors quickly made it into a success far beyond what anyone could have imagined. It also spawned a series of expansions that were also successes.

Then came "Sims 2," which improved upon the original title's graphics, incorporated more user-generated content--players could now use a movie feature that allowed players to script and make films starring their sims, while players of the original version figured out a way to do so themselves using the game's "family album" feature--and also spawned a series of hit expansions.

As a result, EA spun "The Sims" off its original studio, Maxis, and turned it into one of the company's main labels. And now, with the release of "Sims 3," EA has both a chance to prove it can continue to maintain its most popular and lucrative franchises, and to win over a new generation of players unfamiliar with the little green diamond that floats over players' characters' heads.

But EA has had a series of layoffs, its much-anticipated "Spore" franchise, which moderately successful, has not been the mega-hit the company likely hoped it would be and it is facing an environment in which the games industry, while still stronger than most, is finally starting to show some cracks.

So how important is "Sims 3" to EA? Well, it's not bet-the-house important--no game could be to such a large company--but it's certainly got to be up there.

And now, as the latest iteration incorporates even more social media, and more user-generated content--players can now not only make films starring their sims, but can also have full editing control over the footage--EA has to deliver with bottom line figures. Will it? Only time will tell. But there's certainly a lot of excitement around the game. And given the franchise's history, it would be tough to bet against them.

Update at 2:58 p.m. PDT: Launch date for The Sims 3 corrected.

Apple is using its retail stores to demo one of the most anticipated games on the Mac in recent memory, The Sims 3.

The Electronic Arts game doesn't go on sale until June 2, but Apple stores are offering a sneak peek. The game is running on every Mac in the store, so you can try out a few of the features before you buy it.

The Sims 3 gives you tools like "Create a Sim" to customize your Sim more than ever before. You can change facial features, hair color, eye color, and determine the body shape of your Sim.

Another feature, "Create a Style" allows you to customize everything from your Sim's clothing to its furniture.

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.

... Read more

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.