Last night, Will Wright broke ground – being the first video game designer I can remember who was on late night TV. His appearance, including a rather surreal exchange regarding Spore and Intelligent Design, can be found here.

For all the talk about how video games now earn as much money as Hollywood (a largely bogus stat, btw), it’s always been kind of surprising how those who create them haven’t gotten more rock star treatment. Overall, the appearance was relatively slow going, although near the end, I do believe that Will managed to succeed blowing Stephen Colbert’s mind when talking about the more ambitious aspects of Spore.

Stephen (who mentioned that his staff had ‘nerdrections’ over Will’s appearance) has shilled geekalicious product before. Most notably, he gave a shoutout to DDO the week they launched. That being said, the appearance of Will Wright was mysterious for another reason: Will wasn’t promoting anything. Spore won’t be out for at least a year, and there was only a high level mention of the Sims, so selling a new expansion wasn’t the goal. One kind of wonder how this appearance came to be.

Edit: Newsweek has a behind the scenes of the appearance, with this amusing quote from Will Wright re: World of Warcraft inside of the EA culture:

He replied that the joke among game creators at EA is that the best way to guarantee a greenlight is to say that one’s new game will be like the wildly successful WOW, only different… He also told us that some of EA’s junior employees would play WOW in order to hang with the company’s execs. “It’s the new golf,” he said.