Last night, Stephen Colbert found out something we've known for a long time: Will Wright is one of the most engagingly polymathic interviewees around. Electronic Arts invited us to shadow Wright, the creator of Sim City and The Sims, for his appearance on "The Colbert Report." And so off we went, using our drive time with Will in the back of a black town car to get an update on his much anticipated new game, Spore.

Wright told us that Spore is slated to come out sometime during the second half of 2007. It's currently at a stage that he calls Pre-Alpha Five. In non-geek, this means that the game is finally at a point where EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned. The project's subsequent milestones--Pre-Alpha Four, Pre-Alpha Three, etc.--are expected to be achieved monthly until it finally hits Alpha next spring. Wright says that this team, which he handpicked from within EA and at a number of college campuses, is the best he's ever worked with. And that's good, because Spore is also the most difficult game that he's ever worked on, largely due to the challenge of developing the procedural animation system that brings each of Spore's user-designed creatures to plausible life.

Upon settling into "The Colbert Report's" green room in midtown Manhattan, we asked Wright if he was feeling any additional pressure given that his boss, CEO Larry Probst, had told us that Spore could be EA's World of Warcraft. 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. Wright himself doesn't play WOW, nor does he play any other massively-multiplayer online games, mainly because he doesn't like the rote treadmill of getting your character to level up. (EA's Battlefield series is more his speed, and Wright says that he's been playing Battlefield 2142 during his downtime.) 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.

Colbert came by the green room fifteen minutes before showtime to shake Wright's hand (pictured above) before finalizing his own preparations. We observed the taping from the stairs next to the audience's seats, and witnessed Wright more than hold his own with the faux-cable news blowhard. Afterward, Wright signed Colbert's guestbook, graciously posed for a photograph at our behest, then rode back to his hotel in search of dinner.