Master of the Universe

Meet the man who proved
videogames don't have
to be about sex and gore.

By NICK WINGFIELD
May 27, 2006; Page A1

EMERYVILLE, Calif. -- In the popular imagination, successful videogames tend to be titles like "Mortal Kombat" and "Grand Theft Auto": violent, hyperkinetic and often racy fare typically played by young men. Will Wright, 46 years old, has created some of the industry's hottest sellers, and they are almost the exact opposite. His games, which draw on artistic and academic sources, encourage players to create, rather than destroy. They're also popular with women and people well out of their teens, an almost unheard of phenomenon for titles of such popularity.

Mr. Wright, creator of "The Sims," the best-selling computer videogame of all time, is now at work on "Spore." In his playful new game that resembles a Pixar cartoon, players start as single-cell blobs that can be transformed into whimsical or even threatening creatures. As they move up the evolutionary scale, the organisms eventually become members of space-dwelling societies, complete with weapons, spaceships and entire civilizations.

"It would take you 79 years if you never slept" to fully explore the "Spore" universe, Mr. Wright says, based on his own calculations.

"Spore" lets players grow their own creatures.

"Spore" is likely to be one of the biggest videogame launches of 2007 and potentially a big boost for its publisher, Electronic Arts Inc., the world's biggest videogame publisher. Electronic Arts has already sold more than 60 million copies of "The Sims" for a total of more than $1 billion. "The Sims" is the gaming equivalent of a dollhouse in which players tend to the romantic, recreational and even hygienic needs of virtual characters.

In his office, overlooking San Francisco Bay, one leg draped over his chair, Mr. Wright showed how "Spore" was influenced by "Powers of Ten," a short film made in 1968 by Charles and Ray Eames, a couple better known for their modern furniture designs. In one of the movie's scenes, a camera zooms from the edge of outer space into the hand of a man as he lies napping in a Chicago park.

Using his mouse to perform a similar, rapid zoom, Mr. Wright pulled a spacecraft from the skies over a planet, all the way to the edge of a galaxy, and then back again.

Mr. Wright's influence might help the industry broaden its appeal still further. Consumers spent about $7 billion buying games last year. To the chagrin of the television industry, games are beginning to cut into the time younger players spend watching TV. In part due to Mr. Wright, the average age of gamers has climbed to 33 and now increasing numbers of women have been drawn into gaming's orbit.

Cynthia Vigni, a freelance graphic artist in Winnipeg, Manitoba, started playing "The Sims" six years ago and now plays for about 30 minutes a day. Ms. Vigni, 35, says one of her favorite activities is renovating her virtual home, which she uses as a model to redecorate her actual home.

Many hard-core gamers -- mostly male players who are among the most prolific buyers of games -- turn up their noses at what they see as "The Sims's" tediousness. Critics have also charged that the game wrongly equates happiness with consumerism, since much of it revolves around buying clothing, furniture and other goods.

Mr. Wright has said the game actually parodies such habits. "The Sims's" more conspicuous consumers spend a lot of time fixing broken refrigerators, tending to malfunctioning cars and otherwise being controlled by their property.

Will Wright

With his large, unfashionable glasses, wrinkled clothing and wispy beard, Mr. Wright looks like a scruffy graduate student, despite earning millions from the sale of his first videogame company. In his office, a Mountain Dew soda dispenser sits next to his desk. A balcony allows Mr. Wright, who chain smokes, to sneak out for cigarette breaks. He has a complete interior of a Soyuz spacecraft housed at his home in Orinda, Calif.

Mr. Wright's office also contains a toy that administers electric shocks, one example of the designer's eccentric brand of humor, which sometimes bleeds into his games. He has given Geiger counters as gifts and often changes the title on his business card, giving himself job descriptions including Future Has-Been and Llama Repair Specialist. During a business trip to Japan several years ago, Mr. Wright made up new cards with a title he says was "vaguely pornographic."

One recent day, he stared at a computer screen, using his mouse to pilot a "Spore" spacecraft as it hovered over a grunting tribe of creatures that seemed agitated by his presence. He clicked his computer mouse, sending a shower of fireworks from his spacecraft over the heads of the creatures. The tribe began genuflecting. "Now they worship me," Mr. Wright said. "I've duly impressed them."

"Spore" is peppered with references to the great space operas of the silver screen, including "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "War of the Worlds" and "Star Trek." In homage to Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," one of Mr. Wright's favorite movies, players can deposit a mysterious monolith on a planet to befuddle its inhabitants.

Mr. Wright's games are shaped by a lifelong fascination with building things. He was born into an affluent family in Atlanta where his father owned Wright Plastics, a maker of packaging material, then a cutting-edge business. His mother, Beverly Wright, recalls walking into a room to see her son, then about 6, next to her completely disassembled sewing machine.

Dweeble, a prototype creature from Will Wright's new game, "Spore."

Mr. Wright started building plastic models of ships and other objects, later moving on to elaborate custom models made of balsa wood. When a friend's uncle sold an office building, Mr. Wright was allowed to strip the place of electrical outlets, wires and other materials, which he used to cobble together home-made robots.

"He was thrilled to pieces," his mother says. "I could never have bought him anything he would enjoy so much."

College didn't suit Mr. Wright. He attended three schools -- Louisiana State University, Louisiana Tech and the New School in New York -- and majored in architecture, electrical engineering and computer science before dropping out. The schools couldn't teach him quickly enough, he felt.

Instead, he learned the value of tacking against conventional wisdom. Planning for a cross-country auto race in 1980, Mr. Wright plotted a route through the southern states that was hundreds of miles longer than the more popular path. It avoided the northern roads likely to attract more contestants and, as a result, police.

He and a partner, the race organizer, zoomed across the country in a Mazda RX-7 outfitted with a souped-up engine, a roll cage, an extra fuel tank, a night-vision scope, two police radar detectors and a prototype of a radar jammer. The team got one speeding ticket near Indianapolis and Mr. Wright talked his way out of two others, once by pretending to be a lost local resident.

The duo crossed the finish line in 34 hours and 9 minutes for first place, minutes before the second-place car.

"Spore" prototype L'il Hero

In 1986, Jeff Braun, a high-tech entrepreneur in the San Francisco Bay area, was nursing an urge to get into the fledgling world of videogames. To meet game designers, Mr. Braun held a party with free pizza and beer. Mr. Wright took the bait.

Mr. Braun visited Mr. Wright at his home, where he saw an early version of a game Mr. Wright created on a Commodore 64 PC, which simulated the buildings and landscape of a city like San Francisco. The idea evolved out of a conventional combat game he designed called "Raid on Bungeling Bay." Mr. Wright pursued the design project because he preferred creating the landscapes for Bungeling Bay over destroying them with an attack helicopter.

The new game gave users the tools to design buildings and cityscapes. There was only one problem: Mr. Wright couldn't find a publisher to sell what was essentially an urban-planning tool.

Mr. Wright complained at the time: "No one else likes it -- you can't win. The definition of a game is you have to win," recalls Mr. Braun. That's not a problem, Mr. Braun says he replied.

Messrs. Braun and Wright founded Maxis Software in Walnut Creek, Calif., and put finishing touches on Mr. Wright's game, which they called "SimCity." After securing a publisher, Broderbund Software, Maxis began selling it in 1989.

"SimCity" gradually became a hit. Players could pave roads, build subways and establish other civic infrastructure. They could set tax rates to pay for public-works projects. Players who cultivated a good quality of life attracted happier citizens with a lower propensity to commit crime.

Tash, another prototype

The game's simulation of real-world processes was so novel that Maxis started getting calls from government bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, though Mr. Wright won't reveal what it wanted. "SimCity" helped establish a genre known in the industry as "God games," in which players manipulate virtual microcosms of the real world as they see fit.

"The audience I envisioned was a megalomaniac who wanted to control the world," says Mr. Braun.

Over the next eight years, Maxis released a string of games based on "SimCity," inspired by whatever was preoccupying Mr. Wright at the time. "SimEarth," which allows players to control conditions on the planet, was based on the Gaia theory of chemist James Lovelock, which views earth as a single, giant organism. Mr. Wright came up with "SimAnt," which replicates life in an ant colony, after reading E.O. Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Ants."

Eventually, Mr. Wright decided to create a game focused on people. The business executives running Maxis at the time had little faith in the idea and recommended the project be killed. Mr. Wright responded by moving his development team to Silicon Valley, about 40 miles away from Maxis's headquarters.

Don Mattrick, a former top Electronic Arts executive who was involved in the company's 1997 acquisition of Maxis, said the company's then-management didn't know how to deal with Mr. Wright. "They had a hard time communicating with Will," Mr. Mattrick recalls.

Electronic Arts, an increasingly powerful developer and publisher of games, acquired Maxis for $125 million. At the time, Mr. Wright's stake in the company was valued at about $17 million, according to regulatory filings. The company declines to discuss Mr. Wright's compensation.

Even though Mr. Mattrick encouraged Mr. Wright to continue the project, there remained considerable skepticism among sales and marketing types. In the past, "people games" had bombed because players were unforgiving of the graphical flaws in human characters imposed by computers' limitations.

In December 1999, just months before "The Sims" was scheduled to ship to retailers, the sales and marketing department at Electronic Arts forecast it would reap only 400,000 sales over its entire life.

Two months after the game was released, Electronic Arts had shipped more than a million copies. The game allowed players to create nearly any character, or Sim, their imagination would allow, whether a glamorous beauty queen or a shy child. Players could send Sims out hunting for a job to buy furniture and other possessions, or they could turn them into criminals who steal from other people. Most importantly, to keep their characters happy, players could exercise or strike up romantic relationships with other Sims.

Mr. Braun, the Maxis co-founder, who is now working on an entertainment-technology startup, believes the game's appeal to teenage girls and women reflects Mr. Wright's relationship with his daughter, Cassidy, now a college student. "I know he's really interested and watches her closely and creates things that stimulate her," says Mr. Braun. In "The Sims," "there's a lot of Cassidy in there."

At the same time, Mr. Braun recalls his own daughter becoming upset playing an early test version when a character caught fire in a kitchen. Mr. Wright wanted people to suffer the consequences if they used a stove without first learning to cook. Mr. Braun pleaded with Mr. Wright to take the scene out of the game. He refused.

Mr. Wright couldn't see how the scene would be upsetting, his partner recalls. "He had a demented sense of humor."

For "Spore," Mr. Wright went into an intense research mode common to his new projects. He was fascinated with the Drake equation, a formula devised in the 1960s by the astrophysicist Frank Drake to help scientists quantify the probability of extraterrestrial life in the Milky Way galaxy.

Sitting in his office, Mr. Wright plucked from a shelf books that have influenced the game, including "The Life of the Cosmos," by theoretical physicist Lee Smolin and "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle," by cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler. Out of those and other influences came "Spore." At one point, Mr. Wright made a quickie label and glued it to a cardboard box with a working title for his new game: "Sim Everything." Mr. Wright easily sold the idea to Electronic Arts.

Electronic Arts won't discuss "Spore's" developments cost, but analysts estimate it could be in the range of $20 million. As games get more sophisticated, they're also getting more expensive to make, upping the ante for publishers trying to turn a profit.

One of "Spore's" features allows individual players to populate the game with content they -- and not professional game designers -- have created. The most interesting creatures, planets and civilizations built by users with "Spore's" design tools will automatically show up, through the Internet, inside other players' games.

In the Spore offices, located in an industrial neighborhood across the bay from San Francisco, there's a wall featuring huge posters of the anatomical units -- toes, legs, fins, eyes, noses -- that "Spore" players will be able to customize to compose their creatures. Players will also be able to "terraform" their planets, setting up volcanoes, for example, to cultivate atmospheres. A team of 72 people is working feverishly to finish the game by next year.

"It's Mr. Potato Head plus Play-Doh plus an erector set," says Lucy Bradshaw, the executive producer of "Spore." The game could cost around $50. Electronic Arts says it hasn't finalized its pricing.

It's possible "Spore" could be Mr. Wright's last big videogame. His wife, Joell Jones, an artist, suspects that's the case because of the grueling length of such projects, which can take years to complete.

Mr. Wright hopes to make a docudrama about the Russian space program and has consulted with Peter Guber, the chairman of Mandalay Entertainment, about the project. He also founded a laboratory dubbed the Stupid Fun Club to develop robots, most of which have electronic approximations of bad tempers. One machine controls access to a refrigerator with a clamp. "If she's mad, she'll keep your food in there," says Mike Winter, Mr. Wright's partner in the venture.

Mr. Wright's Hollywood agent is talking to a broadcast network about a possible deal for a reality-TV show featuring robots. Mr. Wright, however, says he isn't yet ready to give up designing games. "I have no idea where my future is going to take me," he says.

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com