spore love and purple sharpies
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Will Wright, the father of all things Sim, gave an educational keynote on storytelling in games, and (naturally) demo'd his highly anticipated new game, Spore... which is, of course, the last game we'll ever need to play. I just hope it comes bundled with an upgraded CPU, RAM, and video card.
But enough about that... After his wonderful presentation, I jumped over a few people to make my way towards the stage with my original copy of SimCity (Amiga version) and a purple Sharpie (loaned to me by Ashley) and managed to 1) Shake hands with Will Wright himself, and 2) Get his autograph on one of the SimCity disks.
I was sure he was going to get swarmed after the keynote and fully expected to have to push, squeeze, and bite my way to where he was sitting, which is why I bee-lined it to the front, but all was relatively calm around him (except me, apparently). I stood in front of him, disk and Sharpie in hand, waiting for eye contact. Meanwhile, other attendees verbalized their delight in seeing an original copy of SimCity. Then Will looked at me, I said I was a big fan and asked him to autograph my disk, he looked at the disk, and said "Hey! That's the half-bright version!" just before autographing it.
Wow! I totally forgot about that. The Amiga version of SimCity came with both a 512KB and 1MB version for those with the extra memory. I was handing him the 1MB version, which took advantage of a special graphics mode called "extra half-bright" mode to achieve more colors. It made me wonder if he'd actually worked on coding the Amiga port himself. How cool. :)
Labels: amiga, gaming, sim city, spore, sxsw, will wright
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