You might know Will Wright from “The Sims”, or “Spore”, or some other insanely ambitious project that fell short of its stated goals but was still really, really good. Unfortunately, we probably won’t see Wright’s ambition extend beyond his grasp again any time soon: his company is currently locked down while a lawsuit settles itself.
To give you an idea of just how ugly this is getting, the guy who started all this, Jawad Ansari, recently tweeted that he’s looking for PR professionals to help him plug a YouTube “documentary” called “The Inconvenient Truth about Will”. Yeah, Jawad, if you have to start with the smear tactics, we’re just going to go ahead and assume you don’t have much of a case and are a bit of an ass.
It’s too bad because Wright’s idea was characteristically ambitious: instead of creating a game and making people learn it, his company would design game software that looks at your tastes and interests and instead builds the game around you. Which sounds simultaneously creepy yet neat: in other words, classic Wright. Maybe, when this escapes litigation in twenty years, we’ll see it then.
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