Will Wright leaves EA Games

Announced today, Will Wright has left EA games and will be running the Stupid Fun Club, an organization he started in 2001 with EA and had used for robot experiments, TV pilots and other offbeat ideas for years. Read the full article at MTV.com.

I’m left wondering if this was because of the disappointment in Spore? Or has this been planned all along. He owns half of the Stupid Fun Club with EA so he didn’t really cut all ties. It makes me wonder how much support will be given to Spore in the future. Time will tell.

This was posted by Will Wright on the Spore forum:

Hey everyone.

There’s a little press release going out today as we speak (well actually I’m not speaking, I’m typing… (and I guess you’re not even listening, you’re reading (unless you’re having your new Kindle read this to you in which case you are listening) but you’re definitely not reading this “as” the press release is going out, and I’m certainly typing this hours before the fact….) anyway. (I suck at writing)

The gist of the story is that I’m leaving EA (well, not really, I’ll explain) to start (well, not quite start, it’s actually been around for quite a while in a rather different form) … let’s say dive into a new venture, The Stupid Fun Club. The Stupid Fun was actually started many years ago by myself and my friend Mike Winter, we met while competing in Robot Wars and Battlebots. It was apparent to us that one day the robots would take over the world and we decided we wanted to be on the winning side, so our initial charter was to do whatever we could to usher in our new mechanical overlords.

Along the way we ending up building and prototyping a lot of… odd stuff. People would come by our shop and get interested in this stuff for various reasons. Some of this stuff sparked new creative ideas, even (*gasp*) ideas that may have “commercial, entertainment value” (this is how you talk when you’ve been around lawyers and MBA’s too long).

At some point we started showing some of this stuff to the people at EA. They got excited by the prospect of us pursuing these projects commercially (or that’s what they said anyway, I think they just want to be on the winning side of the coming robotic revolution as well). So we started talking to them (EA, not the robots, though we do talk to them as well, but the robot responses are cryptic at best) about getting involved and investing in The Stupid Fun Club (we asked the robots first but they’re all broke).

So as things worked out I decided to jump into my work at the club more or less full time. But at The Stupid Club we’ll be working on new games (along with EA) as well as other kinds of projects with different partners.

I can’t talk about specific projects coming out of SFC just yet (alas, the robots won’t let me), but as things develop I’ll find a way to keep those of you who are interested informed about what we’re doing (but not with a blog…I’ll never have a blog). A major aspect of the projects I’ve worked on has always been the player community, that won’t change.

-Will Wright