14 DAY TRIAL // The New York Times has an interesting piece on Spore creator, Will Wright. The publication took some time to discuss less gaming-focused aspects, and more personal ones related to the creator of the most popular simulation game currently available for Mac.
Facts about Wright range from the worst thing about job and preferred brand of cigarettes, to his favorite place to shop and the car he drives.
Speaking about the worst thing about his job, Wright stated: “It’s so easy to come up with a cool idea, and it takes so long to manifest it well. I worked on Spore for about seven years. The first two years were me doing research.”
The man also revealed to the NY Times that he collected hardware from the old Soviet space programs - “strange things that were on Russian spacecraft.I get them on the gray market from a lot of different guys that have to be named Alexei.”
Wright also has an object that’s reminiscent of his childhood: “Since I was a kid I’ve had robot toys. What amazes me is that now, for $200, you can buy a robot toy that has more technology than NASA had during the lunar program,” he said. All grown up now, he drives A BMW M3. “It’s a two-door sedan. It’s astoundingly fast for how boring it looks, which is what I like about it. I always get a black car, and never wash it. It becomes bland looking, like urban camouflage,” Wright explained.
The co-founder of development studio Maxis also revealed he was a smoker. “I smoke Marlboro Lights. You get used to a certain kind of cigarette and it’s hard to say why, but when you smoke a different cigarette, it tastes wrong.” True...
Speaking of his favorite place to shop, Wright proclaimed McMaster-Carr as “the Amazon.com of stuff. It has tools and materials. You could build a rocket ship to Mars with what you can order there.”
An obsolete item he won’t let go has some connection to Spore. “There was a guy, Stanley Miller, who did the first origin-of-life experiments,” he said. “I have this ruined beaker he used in those experiments. It might be useless, but it’s historically very cool.”
Many, of course, wonder whether Will Wright likes playing his own game, Spore. Well, he does actually! Wright revealed to the NY Times that he had been trying to beat Spore on the hardest level of difficulty, and had gotten quite deep into the game. He's currently building a long, but slow campaign to colonize different galaxies.