What do you do after you've designed some of the bestselling games of all time? If you're Sims and Spore creator Will Wright (pictured), you quit your day job at blockbuster factory Electronic Arts to concentrate on a relatively tiny startup, the Stupid Fun Club.
Wright's ambitious (and still nascent) plan: Make new kinds of entertainment experiences that combine robotics, videogames, TV shows and toys. A story predicting what we can expect from Stupid Fun Club appeared in the August issue of Wired magazine. Here's an extended interview with Wright about his move.
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What to Expect From Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club
Wired.com: Why'd you call the group the Stupid Fun Club?
Will Wright: I don't have a good answer. We wanted something that evoked irreverent silliness.
Wired.com: You started the club years ago. How'd it come together?
Wright: I met [co-founder] Mike Winter when we were both doing Robot Wars. It was in Berkeley in a 4,000-square-foot warehouse with machine tools and computers and electronics. It was creative exploration with no set goal. At that point, we didn't see this as something we had to monetize.
We had these weird robotic inventions, and we'd study the way they interacted with each other. We made short films as interstitials for NBC. One time, we had this robot waiting tables in a restaurant. We said it was a Stanford experiment, and asked people if they wanted to sit in the robot section. We learned a lot from that.
Wired.com: What happened to those films?
Wright: They never aired. They were very short one-minute movies, like interactive commercials.
Wired.com: Why the fascination with robots?
Wright: Robots and games are not all that dissimilar. In some sense, robots are just like simulations of models. Building robots is not that different than programming the Sims. On the other hand, the social interactions are very different — a robot may crash into you and hurt you.
Wired.com: How will you combine your work in robots and games into something new?
Wright: We're mainly looking for ideas that have synergy across platforms — ideas that we can have a unique advantage in, ones that work as computer game, toy and television show, all at once.
Part of the challenge is getting literate in other formats, cross-media literate. We're looking at the toy industry and television industry and seeing how they're produced, what the economics are, what the creative language is. In some sense we're inventing a new language for the way you think about entertainment. We're making that our specialty.
Photo of Will Wright: Paul May
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