February 13, 2008
Spore already spawning spin-offs
Spore, the game that has been spawning cell-like in Will Wright’s imagination since 2000, was born as a fully-formed franchise idea.
At the Electronic Arts analyst day yesterday, the creator of The Sims showed off the eagerly awaited title and detailed numerous commercial spin-offs.
The Sims itself was not thought of as a franchise originally, he told us, with sales initially only expected to be in the hundreds of thousands.
But 98m units later, The Sims is not just a franchise but a whole division, one of four “labels” that now constitute EA.
Plans for this year include Simanimals, the expansion of MySims on the Nintendo Wii, a Sims movie, Simsonstage.com offering karaoke user contributions and SimsCarnival.com, a casual games site.
Mr Wright said Spore was conceived as a franchise from the start and deals have already been worked out with the likes of National Geographic, Comic Book Creator and Zazzle.
Spore is a game about evolution, with users creating creatures and moving on to shape entire planets. EA plans to release its Creature Creator software ahead of the game’s launch in September so that players can get a headstart on the life forms that will populate their individual worlds. Its Sporepedia will be a catalogue of parts and objects that can be acquired from both EA developers and user-creators – “pollinated content” that can populate other people’s universes.
Wright and his Maxis team, based in Emeryville in the Bay Area, seem to have caught the social networking bug as well. Players will have their own profile pages and can share movies of their worlds and inhabitants, with easy uploads to YouTube.
The demonstration made the personalisation available in The Sims look very Sim-plistic, while the creation tools seemed a major advance in ease-of-use compared to those of Second Life.
