f13.net

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Influential video-game designer Will Wright said Wednesday he is leaving Electronics Arts Inc. (ERTS), a likely blow to the company for which he created best-selling hits like "The Sims" and "Spore."

Wright, who is in his late 40s, said in a statement he was resigning from the Redwood City, Calif., game maker to concentrate on Stupid Fun Club, an entertainment think tank he founded in 2001. Wright had been at Electronic Arts for 12 years. A company representative didn't comment when asked if there were any additional reasons for the departure.

Electronic Arts and Wright will own an equal share of Stupid Fun Club, with a third, unnamed investor owning a much smaller share. Electronic Arts will also have the right of first refusal to commercialize any concepts the think tank generates. It didn't disclose the amount of its investment.

"This is definitely a loss of talents for Electronic Arts," said Signal Hill analyst Todd Greenwald. "He was one of their most well-known and respected elders there, and was responsible for its most profitable franchises."

Wright's departure comes as Electronic Arts struggles with its product lineup. Though the game maker has established franchises in sports titles, like the "Madden NFL" series of football games, Electronic Arts has had trouble developing new games with mass appeal, increasingly important to game companies as the development of titles becomes more and more costly.

The news shook Electronic Arts shares, which went from trading 2.5% higher to falling 0.2% to $19.14 in the minutes after the news was released. They were last trading up 1% to $19.56. Shares are down more than 60% from a year ago, which is worse than rivals' share performance.

Electronic Arts continues to count on games Wright developed for a significant part of its annual sales, particularly "The Sims." Electronic Arts has already sold more than 100 million copies of "The Sims" franchise for a total of more than $1 billion.

Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of game-development company Maxis, where Wright was chief designer, expressed confidence in the company's future performance. "Will is such a unique person, so nobody can take his shoes," she said. "We have incredible talent at the studio, and we continue to invest in those individuals."

Wright founded Maxis along with Jeff Braun in the mid-1980s, and rose to prominence after releasing the first of "The Sims" games. The games were novel at the time because they can't be won or lost; rather the game play is in managing characters interactions with other characters.

Maxis, a publicly traded company, was bought by Electronic Arts in 1997 in a stock-swap deal valued at $125 million. The company then published "The Sims" in February 2000, which remains Wright's biggest success. It appears Wright's last significant game developed for Electronic Arts will be "Spore," which has sold more than 2 million copies since it was released last September.

So what is the Stupid Fun Club? Well, the group’s web site is rather cryptic, but here’s a profile Newsweek published back in 2002. At the time, it was described as an effort Wright founded and funded to break into Hollywood, with a focus on robots. The announcement doesn’t say whether the group will still be all about the robots, or whether it will broaden its scope now that Wright is working there full-time. It does sound like the vision has expanded beyond Hollywood to include video games (hence EA’s involvement), as well as television shows, toys, and more. For the non-game projects, the Fun Club will probably work with other media companies.

Without Wright's protection I'll bet Maxis is going to be absorbed into the collective now.

Without Wright's protection I'll bet Maxis is going to be absorbed into the collective now.

Most of Maxis was absorbed into the collective a while back. They moved everybody but the Spore team from Maxis' old East Bay office to the EA offices on the Peninsula side of the Bay Area.

Most of Maxis was absorbed into the collective a while back. They moved everybody but the Spore team from Maxis' old East Bay office to the EA offices on the Peninsula side of the Bay Area.

EA used to be good. You can pinpoint the moment they turned EVIL - it's when they stopped using their old cube-sphere-cone logo.

He hasn't done anything wonderful since The Sims, it takes him 7 years to come up with a good idea and even then it's a mess and before the Sims, he had a period of genius in DOS. Here's to hoping the Think Tank has a door that only opens when he has a truly, truly good idea.

Oh well, that's the end of the last game development house left from my gaming childhood then - Unless you count EA itself which I thought was an awesome company back when I was first playing Bard's Tale on the Commodore 64.

The game gained controversy when a designer inserted sprites of shirtless "himbos" (male bimbos) in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other, who appear in great numbers on certain dates. Their fluorescent nipples were drawn with a special rendering mode usually reserved for fog-piercing runway landing lights, so they could easily be seen from long distances in bad weather.

Which should be seen as a blessing because the East Bay sucks.

EA used to be good. You can pinpoint the moment they turned EVIL - it's when they stopped using their old cube-sphere-cone logo flat boxes.

Ohh...Descent to Undermountain 2! Obsidian can make it another buggy and unfinished pos, since the lead dev works there now.

I've said this to others, but I think he was asked to leave.

If he came up with Spore he probably should have been asked to leave.

This was the first truly great PC game I owned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon_(computer_game) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon_(computer_game))

That's right, nineteen eighty fucking three bitches!

/first comp was an Atari 800