All things Sim creator Will Wright no longer helms at Maxis, where Sim things are cooked up. Now he heads the Stupid Fun Club which explores things that could be fun, we guess.
They’re ”not restricted” to one entertainment type. One of their projects is ”toy related,” others aren’t but all have a ”web component.” First commercially ready in ”six months to a year.”
”It’s fun. I’m able to work on projects that are much broader than I could at Electronic Arts,” Wright tells VentureBeat, discussing his new found freedom.
What things are going on over at Stupid Fun Club?
”One of them is toy related. The others aren’t. We are looking at a lot of different industries. There’s the web. Toys. We’re not restricted to one type of entertainment. We’re kind of looking for ideas that cross a lot of different boundaries.”
He adds, ”Every product that we are working on has a web component. The web is like the connective tissue in entertainment today.”
”The opportunities are there when you get outside of one industry and see the creative possibilities between industries. The world is evolving and everyone is connecting in interesting ways now.” The team at Stupid Fun Club is small, the way Wright likes it.
”We are very small and will stay small. We are 12 people right now. I don’t ever want it to go above 30. We’re looking to partners to help develop games.” The veteran developer wants to stick with early designs and R&D, not a fully fledged studio for development.
”Right now we are pursuing three pretty aggressively. We might get up to four or five. I want to stay pretty focused. We have a lot of ideas that we want to do. But it’s just three now.”
”Our first product could be commercialized in six months to a year,” reveals Wright, of which he has his ”fingers crossed.” Publisher EA owns a small stake in this new ‘think tank’ company.
