After the roundly panned and universal failure known as The Sims Online (you mean you don’t want to go to a virtual party at 1 AM?), Electronic Arts and Sims creator Will Wright are trying to get this whole “massive single-player online game” down right with Spore. The game, which will be released on September 7th, takes you on an even deeper journey than any MMO before it—making you develop yourself from a single-cell organism into a full blown character. With YouTube channels, RSS feeds and music by Brian Eno, the company is putting it all out there, but the question is—did EA put too much faith into Wright, who couldn’t make an MMO based on his genius creation work?

Evan Wilson, analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, describes 2009 as a “do-or-die year” for EA. Though the consequences of Spore’s failure for EA are uppermost in analysts’ minds, Wright is widely seen as up to the task.

There are no guarantees, as Wright knows to his cost. His most striking flop was The Sims Online, a multi-player version of The Sims that never caught on and was shut earlier this month.

“He clearly didn’t understand what makes those kinds of games work well, so The Sims Online was a pretty serious failure,” said Timothy Burke, a cultural historian at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

Wow, you know it’s pretty bad when the academics are on your ass. We’re going to try it out because we love the Sims series, but it seems to us that Spore is for pretty hardcore gamers. EA’s mistake might be that they think the 100 million people who’ve played the Sims to create a virtual social life have the time to play a virtual God.

EA needs creative guru’s gaming spore to click [Reuters]
Image [Businessweek.com]