Game designer Will Wright leaves Electronic Arts to start Stupid Fun Club | Hacker News Reader

Game designer Will Wright leaves Electronic Arts to start Stupid Fun Club

venturebeat.com

26 pointspeter12316 comments

The Stupid Fun Club website is wonderfully cryptic, but ugly as sin.

http://www.thestupidfunclub.com

I kinda dig it, but it was, in the end, a let down. Here I am all ready to cowboy up and join a club for some stupid fun but there is neither club nor fun. It was a very "all flowers and no date" consumer experience.

I remember reading an article in Software Development magazine a while back about it. He's had this Stupid Fun Club for a while. Crazy stuff. I love the "Sad robot"

"Wright: Are you running that … weapon? I don’t know if we want to sit here. [A dancing snowman on a wheeled platform with a circular saw mounted on its front bumper approaches a plastic toy-store robot.]"

"Dr. Dobb's | Inside the Stupid Fun Club | March 1, 2004" http://www.ddj.com/architect/184415104

You know what fuck you money looks like? THIS.

Downmod me if you want, but this is what SFC has been making: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o-g9ZjsZ-s

Looks like they've been making episodes for shows on Adult Swim...

I find myself checking the date, because this sounds like such a professionally stupid move (after looking at what the SFC has actually done... AKA a few unwatched youtube videos) it looks like 95% proof mid-life crisis.

He sunk years and years of his life into Spore only to have EA sweep the legs out from under it at launch with horribly broken DRM. Instead of dealing with the corporate idiots he's moving on.

Spore did plenty to suck all on it's own, by being a set of disjointed non-games that misrepresent evolution (your traits don't matter for survival!)

Except that EA has invested in SFC, and it looks like EA will develop/publish video games based on their work- so it isn't like Wright is moving on from EA totally.

I haven't heard Wright complain too loudly about the DRM, I bet if he had, EA would have done whatever was necessary to appease him.

He says in a Kotaku interview (can't link, on iPhone) that it was something he should have "tuned into more" and "a corporate decision."

No, what broke Spore was the fact that all the really good, technical bits of evolution were ripped out at the last minute to make the game easier to EA could sell more copies to kids.

This pretty much sums it up. Spore was such a disappointment. The first phase was awesome, lots of fun. Then it just turned into a super-simplified RTS with no depth. I enjoyed the game immensely at first, but it just kept getting worse the longer you played.

Why is it a stupid move? It looks to me exactly like when a successful musician gets his own label, which in a sense it is since EA owns half of it. Now he gets even more freedom to play around and, in the end, to get more money out of it. I see no stupid in there.

I've met the Fun Club folk, primarily Mike Winter. They've done some very cool stuff. Will be interesting to see what comes of it.

I think many of us were waiting for this.

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