Will Wright

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Nom de naissance William Ralph Wright
Nationalité Etats-Unis
Naissance 20 janvier 1960 (64 ans) à Atlanta (Etats-Unis)

William Ralph "Will" Wright (born January 20, 1960) is an American video game designer and co-founder of the former game development company Maxis, and then part of Electronic Arts (EA). In April 2009, he left EA to run "Stupid Fun Club Camp", an entertainment think tank in which Wright and EA are principal shareholders.

The first computer game Wright designed was Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984, but it was SimCity that brought him to prominence. The game was released by Maxis, a company Wright formed with Jeff Braun, and he built upon the game's theme of computer simulation with numerous other titles including SimEarth and SimAnt.

Wright's greatest success to date comes from being the original designer for The Sims. The game spawned multiple sequels like The Sims 2, The Sims 3, and The Sims 4 and expansions packs, and Wright has earned many awards for his work. His latest work, Spore, was released in September 2008 and features gameplay based upon the model of evolution and scientific advancement. The game sold 406,000 copies within three weeks of its release.

Biographie

In 1980, along with co-driver and race organizer Rick Doherty, Wright participated in the U.S. Express, a cross-country race that was the successor to The Cannonball Run. Wright and Doherty drove a specially outfitted Mazda RX-7 from Brooklyn, New York to Santa Monica, California in 33:39, winning the illegal race. Wright only competed once in the race, which continued until 1983. Wright had a daughter, Cassidy, in 1986, which motivated him greatly over the next five years to hone his craft.

I'm uncollecting. I buy collections on ebay, and I disperse them out to people again. I have to be like an entropic force to collectors, otherwise all of this stuff will get sorted.

Since 2003, in his spare time, Wright has collected leftovers from the Soviet space program, "including a 100-pound hatch from a space shuttle, a seat from a Soyuz... control panels from the Mir", and the control console of the Soyuz 23, as well as dolls, dice, and fossils. During E3 2004 he passed off an old lapel pin commemorating the Soviet space program to a reporter.

He once built competitive robots for BattleBots with his daughter, but no longer does so. As of November 2006, Wright still had remnant bits of machined metal left over from his BattleBots days strewn about the garage of his home. Wright was a former Robot Wars champion in the Berkeley-based robotics workshop, the Stupid Fun Club. One of Wright's bots, designed with the help of Wright's daughter, Cassidy, "Kitty Puff Puff", fought against its opponents by sticking a roll of gauze onto its armature and circling around them, encapsulating them and denying them movement. The technique, "cocooning", was eventually banned.

Following his work in BattleBots, he has taken steps into the field of human-robot interactions.

We build these robots and we take them down to Berkeley and study the interactions that people have with the robots," says Wright. "We built this newer one that has a rapid-fire pingpong cannon. It will fire about 10 per second. So we give people this plastic bat and we say, 'It's set up to play baseball. Do you want to play baseball? It's going to shoot a little ball and you try to hit it.' And all of a sudden it's like da-da-da-da, and it's pelting them with balls.

Wright currently lives in Oakland, California with his wife, Anya, and their three sons.

Gameography

Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984)
SimCity (1989)
SimEarth (1990)
SimAnt (1991)
SimLife (1992)
SimCity 2000 (1993)
SimFarm (1993)
SimCopter (1996)
The Sims (2000)
SimGolf (2002)
The Sims Online (2002)
The Sims 2 (2004)
Spore Creature Creator (2008)
Spore (2008)

References

Further reading
Cifaldi, Frank (May 20, 2005). "E3 Report: The Path to Creating AAA Games". Gamasutra.
"Lifetime Achievement". PC Magazine. December 22, 2004.
Huck, James; Remo, Chris (June 9, 2008). "Will Wright – Video Games Close To 'Cambrian Explosion' Of Possibilities". Gamasutra.
Lobo, Chris; Schooler, Larry (October 2004). "Playing With Urban Life: How Simcity Influences Planning Culture". Archived from the original on December 11, 2004.
Remo, Chris (November 16, 2005). "Will Wright Feature Interview". Shacknews. Archived from the original on October 17, 2006.
Wright, Will (April 2006). "Dream Machines". Wired.
"Will Wright: Celebrate Failure (Interview At NY Times)". The New York Times. June 14, 2009.
External links

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