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Will Wright Dusts Off Old Comments Comparing The Sims To Herpes
August 07, 2008
Before taking the stage for his first-ever Comic-Con International keynote address, Spore creator Will Wright sat down to talk about video games. It had been a fairly long week for Wright, coming off E3 and delivering a presentation that compared the users of the Spore Creature Editor to 38% God, discussed his partnership with SETI and accused the chemistry sets of today for being too nerf. Out of context these kinds of elements sound more like a Dr. Evil monologue than one of the brighter minds in games business today.
Check out what the man behind SimCity and The Sims had to say about the popularity of his 100 million unit-selling franchise and his hopes for appeasing the hardcore crowd with his upcoming September 7 release, Spore, after the jump.
“With The Sims the hardcore players brought it home because they thought it looked cool and after a few weeks they went on to play Half-Life and other games,” said Wright. “But The Sims sat in the house and attracted wives and girlfriends and non-gamers and it transmitted over to that group. Once it traveled over to this group it was almost like a sexually transmitted disease. It just spread all over the place and the numbers just went up. And we ended up with over 50 percent female players, which was unheard of for a computer game.” It’s a phrase he’s used before to describe The Sims before, but the comment still rings true.
Wright added that with Spore, he was looking at how to retain most of The Sims gamers but really capture the hardcore gamers. Whether Spore can replicate the (relative) success of gonorrhea or the scourge of New York, herpes, remains to be seen. But given the fact that the Creature Creator editor has already resulted in over 2 million creations and growing before the release of the actual game, it looks like they’re off to a good start.
Wright does have projects in the works for the casual crowd. 20th Century Fox has a feature film adaptation of The Sims in the works at and a new TV series based on My Sims, the Wii spin-off. The Sims 3 is shipping next year. And for the new Wii fans, there’s SimAnimals, which allows gamers to control forest creatures. If people can play the game in anywhere the same style as they play The Sims, YouTube will get a flood of animal torture videos not seen since the incarceration of Mike Vick.
–John Gaudiosi
