credit Photo: Maxis/Electronic Arts
It’s been a long wait, but Spore is nearly here. Will Wright, one of the game industry’s most fertile minds and the creator of the groundbreaking SimCity and The Sims, said Tuesday that his biggest project yet will be released worldwide Sept. 7. Wired.com got an extensive first look at the latest version of Spore, a grandiose simulation of every stage of life, from the primordial soup to space exploration. Even though the premise sounds daunting (the game was originally called SimEverything), Wright said that it is first and foremost a casual game that everyone can enjoy. "From the outset, I wanted to make something that Sims gamers wouldn’t be freaked out by," he said. "People who play for creativity and expression, I think, are the largest untapped part of the market."
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The "cell" stage is where Spore begins. Much like the classic Snake computer games, you’re swimming around as a tiny bacterium, eating anything smaller than you and trying not to get eaten by larger organisms. As you munch on flagella and other bits of floating protein, you’ll gain levels, grow larger and eventually crawl out of the ocean. While "cell" is the first stage of the game, Wright and company have decided to open Spore up and let players begin at whatever stage they want. "We want the easy player to turn it on ’easy,’ and enjoy just the creativity. It’s more like they’re making these toys and want to play with these toys in a fun way," said Wright.
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Escaping the confines of the primordial soup, you’ll begin the "creature" phase of the game by creating your own land-based monster. You’ll eat other animals, you’ll mate and you’ll evolve. When you evolve, you’ll be able to slap more body parts onto your creature, things that will give it an evolutionary advantage – more legs for faster land speed, perhaps, or a big snapping beak to munch on lesser beings. With thousands of different creature-parts that you can apply, the possibilities are endless. You can even try to create a human-like character: "I’ve gotten pretty close to Homer Simpson," Wright laughed.
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Maxis expects that the creature creator will be many players’ entrance into the world of Spore. They’re even going so far as to distribute this creator for free a few months before the game hits retail shelves. While playing with the creature creator, users will be asked if they want to jump straight into the game with the creature they just made, Wright said. And when Spore debuts, Wright added, "at some point it’s going to light up and say, ’Hey, Spore’s available, do you want to buy it?’"
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After your creature evolves into a sapient being, you’ll jump into the "tribe" mode of the game. This is a real-time strategy, or RTS, game in which you fight against other warring tribes for dominance. Wait a minute – real-time strategy? Isn’t that a bit complicated for casual players? Not so, said Wright. "It’s so easy to go off on a hardcore tangent with this. In some sense, we want this to feel like a light RTS where a lot of fun things can happen, more of a humorous RTS than a hardcore RTS." Plastered on giant posters all over Maxis’ Emeryville, California, offices is the mission statement: "Every player should be able to make it all the way to the space-exploration level."
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Establishing your tribe’s superiority over the rest of the planet means that you’ll get to control your very own civilization. Expect gameplay similar to SimCity games. Cities can be either economic, religious or military, and you’ll have to engage in diplomatic relationships with other cities to ensure your survival. Dropping into one of his cities, Wright pointed out that Spore even procedurally generates its musical tracks. "For any city, for any colony I make, a theme will be generated for it," he said. Wright collaborated with musician Brian Eno to create the music generator, which also allows users to jump in and create their own themes by clicking and dragging musical notes. "I could put in the Star Wars theme if I wanted to," Wright said.
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In addition to creating creatures, Spore will let users make their own buildings, land vehicles and UFOs. Maxis has come up with a fully featured method of sharing all of this content, called Sporepedia. Users will be able to search through everything every other Spore user has created. They can build a buddy list and search just their friends’ stuff. Or they can search by tags, as if they were pulling up YouTube videos. In fact, users can even create videos of their characters and post them automatically onto YouTube directly from the Sporepedia interface. Once you’ve found a bunch of objects that you like, you can group them together in a Sporecast, then give that list a specific title so that others can find it. And in case you don’t want to do all this work, there’s the Pollenator. Even though you’re playing Spore by yourself, it’ll be constantly taking other players’ creations and dropping them into your universe.
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Spore’s final stage, "space," is the culmination of your accomplishments. Your civilization will have attained space travel, and now you’ll be able to go anywhere in the universe. You’ll be able to fly around on millions of procedurally generated planets, each one populated by different creatures and civilizations. The goal of the space game – and the ultimate goal of Spore – is to reach the very center of the galaxy. What’s there? Who knows – Wright isn’t telling. But he said it’ll be worth it: "We want people to complete it, but we also want it to feel meaningful once they have."
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Spore isn’t coming to just PC and Mac. Versions of the game for Nintendo DS and mobile phones will also drop on Sept. 7. Of course, things have been dramatically scaled back for each version. The Nintendo DS game, shown here, will concentrate on the "creature" phase. You’ll build your own critters, then take them out into the world. You’ll be able to use the DS’ internet capabilities to swap creatures with other players all over the world. The mobile version of the game will be based on the "cell" bacteria stage, and you’ll float around and eat up other creatures in a scaled-back version of the real thing.
