News Archive - February 2006

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Sunday 26 February 2006
Wright's Speech at Entertainment Gathering
Written at 00:13 by ChEeTaH - 0 comments.

At the beginning of this month, J. Allard (Gaming Vice President, Microsoft), Bing Gordon (Chief Creative Officer, EA), James Korris (USC Institute for Creative Technologies) and Will Wright (Designer of Spore, Maxis/EA) held a speech at the Entertainment Gathering. The topic was Interactivity & Gaming, and the main message probably was that games are gearing more towards an open community style. Comparable with Wikipedia, it'll be the players, the audience of old, that create the game as they play it. Spore is an example of a game that works this way. Wright said that the player should be able to create something that looks as if it could be done by a Pixar animator. Rather than putting the player in the role of Frodo Baggins or Luke Skywalker, the player should have the role of George Lucas when playing a game - developing a story rather than following a preset one. Games should move away from being "the new movie," which they have been considered to be for a long time.

More details about the speech, in which Wright also showed Spore to the audience, can be found at CNet News, Shacknews, J. Miller's blog, the Washington Post and a somewhat smaller article at Business2Blog. Thanks to SnootySpore for the latter two links, and Spore.es for the Shacknews and J. Miller link. The picture below was posted on J. Miller's site, and shows a city as it can be made in Spore.

Spore @ Entertainment Gathering

Wright to speak at GDC
Written at 00:36 by ChEeTaH - 0 comments.

It's about a year ago when Will Wright surprised a big audience at the Game Developers Conference, when showing his latest creation, Spore. The GDC 2006 is coming soon, and besides the two talks we mentioned late last year already, Wright will also be holding a keynote speech this year. He's recently been added to the list. He'll "explore topics related to next-generation game design and development strategies," which at itself is a pretty vague description. GameSutra also reports that the Game Developer Magazine will have an exclusive interview with the man behind Spore in its April issue. The keynote speech will be held at 23 March, from noon to 1pm. Some details can also be found in GameSutra's announcement.

Spore possibly coming to Handheld
Written at 00:57 by ChEeTaH - 0 comments.

EA has confirmed a PC version of Spore, and also an XBox 360 version has not been ruled out. Now there's another type of platforms that Spore might be released on: handhelds. Our affiliate Planet Spore posted a link to a job opening for a Handheld designer, to work on Spore. The full-time job involves "designing, creating and maintaining game systems and content for Spore Handheld titles." Naturally there's no further confirmation, and if anything the game will quite likely be very different from the PC version, but we'll keep you updated if any news around this appears.