GameSpot: Now I recently read that Will Wright was talking about the possibility of a Spore TV show or movie…
Frank Gibeau: In my old job as general manager of North American publishing, we launched a show called the Madden Nation on ESPN, and we had unbelievable ratings. [The next season will be this fall–ed.] What we found was that gamers want to see more of the universes and the worlds and stories and even the players of gaming. So what we thought about now, more strategically than we did in the past, was how we take what we have and bring it into other media forms. In the case of Dead Space, we’ve got an animated feature that’ll be on air this fall, and we’ve got a comic book that we’re doing.
In terms of Spore, we’ve got a ton of feelers from film and television and others that we’re evaluating. It has to be very high quality, though. We don’t make a lot of money off these things, and if you just dump a bunch of garbage out there, you could risk killing the IP. What matters most to us is the IP in an interactive form, but if it makes sense and it’s a high-quality organization, we’ll partner with them to make a movie or to do a television show. I can tell you there are multiple properties inside our label which are attracting interest. In the interview, I think Will was just talking about some of the feelers that we’ve had.
Not only that, but Gibeau also speaks on the Sporn issue letting users know that it is blocked from the official Spore servers, but if that is the players thing, they are welcome to use that kind of content.
