You might not know it, but Electronic Arts has a chink in its armour. You can call their switchboard and when someone answers, they will say, "Good afternoon/morning, Electronic Arts." You can then say, "Oh, hello, is that Electronic Arse?" Due to the limitations of Alexander Graham Bell's telephony device, the person on the other end will be none the wiser.

We hope this practice, now a tradition for almost seven years, was followed today when obtaining quotes from Electronic Arts regarding news breaking on SPOnG earlier this week, when nice guy geek overlord and one-time CIA target Will Wright stated, "We’re looking at all the platforms for Spore, because we’re thinking about Spore as a franchise, not as a PC game. We’re going to do the PC game first, but really, what we’re trying to launch is an entire franchise that will be all across platforms."

He continued, "It will probably take very different forms depending on the platforms. We might even pull out parts of the game – so you might be playing part of the game on a handheld platform, you might be playing the entire game but maybe more avatar-based on a console. The consoles are getting kind of different now – I think there’s a really interesting distinction between the Wii and the Xbox 360 and PS3. Something like the Wii offers a lot of interesting creative opportunities for the editors, with the controller."

Seems like more than basic planning to us. Not so to Electronic Arse [They'll probably notice it when it's written down - Ed] who today issued a statement, presumably from its 'arts'. "As a policy EA does not respond to rumors and speculation. We have stated from the beginning, Spore will be a PC launch and, while the compressibility of the content would make it easy to support on other platforms, we have only stated that at some point we will explore bringing the game to other platforms."

As to why EA would move so swiftly to make this claim we are unsure, though pushing as many people as possible towards the PC version, then reselling follow-up console versions, does stand out as a possible reason.

Stay tuned for the full Will Wright interview in the coming days on SPOnG. You can decide for yourself what this very nice chap makes of it all...