Try the powerful Gadget4Life search:
Selected Gadget4Life searches:
Apple Technology Shopping Microsoft Google Videos Blogs iPhone
Spore already spawning spin-offs
Published: February 14, 2008
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.
