* Illustration: Nicholas Blechman * Will Wright is the great polymath of interactive design, weaving theories of architecture, astrophysics, and urban planning into his videogames. That may sound like the opposite of fun, but he's created some hugely popular franchises—The Sims alone has sold more than 100 million copies for publisher Electronic Arts. Nowadays, though, Wright is thinking smaller. In April, he stunned the game industry by announcing that he was leaving EA to run a startup called Stupid Fun Club.
If the endeavor has the whiff of a garage operation, that's because it is one—the club began in a Berkeley, California, warehouse space where Wright and his buddies went to tinker and play and escape from the pressures of making blockbuster games. "We were tripping over ideas that were intriguing to us," Wright says. "But I didn't have time to develop them." Now his hobby is becoming his full-time gig (though Wright will do some consulting for EA, which is an investor in his new venture).
Stupid Fun Club has just 10 staffers, a fraction of the number who worked on his last title, the ambitious universe sim Spore. "When a team has more than 80 members, it gets very unwieldy," he says. This may explain why Wright is eager to join the indie movement that's sweeping the industry. Several high-profile developers—like David Jaffe and Neil Young—have formed tiny production teams to make innovative, attention-getting games. Wright crafts a characteristically erudite metaphor on the state of the medium. "Five hundred million years ago, during the Cambrian explosion, all these diverse life forms evolved," he says. "Our industry is going through that explosion now."
Can Wright Go Wrong? You Decide.
There will be robots.
Wright and his SFC pals have tinkered with everything from fighting automatons to AI experiments. "We taught the robots to be social," Wright says. "They can converse, and it was fascinating to see their personalities interacting." For Wright, playing geek Frankenstein goes hand in hand with making games. "Building robots is not that different from programming sims," he says. "On the other hand, a robot may crash into you."
It will go beyond videogames.
Wright's games have always been modular, allowing for lucrative expansion packs and spinoffs: SimFarm, Sims 2: Apartment Life, Spore: Galactic Adventures, et cetera. Expect that to continue with his next offering, which will also play out across multiple media (television, toys, games). "It's a fractal deployment of intellectual property," Wright says. "Instead of picking one format, you're designing for one mega- platform. TV shows are borrowing clichés from games now. We've been talking about this kind of synergy for years, but it's finally happening."
We will all be guinea pigs.
Wright's famously open-ended simulations are social experiments that give players enormous latitude to make their own choices—and he loves to sift through the resulting data. That impulse is also evident in the pranks he's pulled with his SFC cohorts. "We've been building strange little things and taking them out in public to see what happens," he says. For instance, they put a smashed-up robot on the street and set up a hidden camera nearby. "As people walked past, it would beg for help," Wright says. Some ignored the injured automaton. Some stopped to talk to it. And some picked it over for salvageable parts.
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