Electronic Arts struts its stuff at E3: Spore and more

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Electronic Arts showcased a broad suite of games at E3 today, demonstrating that one of the world’s largest game developers has the breadth of titles to reach virtually any player on the planet, and the chops to bring on dozens of new games each year.

For sports fiends, there are new versions of Tiger Woods Golf and NBA Live. For music buffs, there’s Rock Band 2, which will come with more than 100 songs. Boxing fanatics can feast on Facebreaker. And action addicts can take in Mirror’s Edge, an original title being developed in EA’s European studio.

For everyone else, there’s Spore, a cosmic evolution game from Will Wright, whose prodigious yet quirky mind brought us The Sims. That game, which shipped a ‘creature creator’ software a few weeks ago as a preamble to the actual game set for launch in September, has already garnered more than 2 million ‘creatures’ from players who have uploaded their beasties onto the Spore website, Wright said at the press conference. Players have also uploaded 85,000 YouTube videos.

To see a sample of the titles EA unveiled at E3, watch the trailer.

The event reflects EA Chief Executive John Riccitiello’s emphasis on innovation and new intellectual property to reinvigorate the storied game company. With a few exceptions, including The Sims 3 and NBA Live ‘09, most of the titles highlighted at the event were brand new franchises. And NBA Live had a fresh twist -- the ability to download NBA game statistics and individual player performances every day. The updates would affect the strengths, weakness of players and teams within the video game, depending on how these they did in real life games.

‘I frankly believe it’s the best lineup in EA’s history,’ Riccitiello said at the conclusion of the event.

-- Alex Pham

Video courtesy of Electronic Arts