Geek Gestalt

SAN FRANCISCO--For Brenda Brathwaite, a longtime video game designer who avoids flying, the annual Game Developers Conference is such a can't-miss event that she is driving cross-country, from Savannah, Ga., to San Francisco (and back again) in order to be there.

GDC, as it's known, kicks off Monday with a series of two-day topic-specific summits and begins in earnest on Wednesday. And while there may not be too many people driving 5,400 miles round-trip to attend, there is no shortage of people who, like Brathwaite, see the show as indispensable.

"It's the mecca of the game development networking industry," said Brathwaite, a professor of game development and interactive design at the Savannah College of Art and Design. "This is where everybody goes. Every other conference has some fraction, but this is where everybody goes."

While the video game business is growing and may even be recession-resistant, it certainly hasn't escaped the wrath of the downturn, with a series of studio closings like those at ACES, the Microsoft division that made the Flight Simulator franchise, game productions shutting down and people losing their jobs. So as what may well be the world's largest gathering of game developers, GDC could not be more important to those in the industry right now.

And though thousands of game developers will flood GDC's Moscone Center halls for keynote addresses and talks by the likes of Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, The Sims and Spore creator Will Wright, Fable creator Peter Molyneux, and countless others, many say the conference really matters most because there is no other place on earth they can network with more of their peers, talk about jobs with more decision makers, or reunite with more of their friends.

"It's the best place both to get business done, as everyone is here, and to keep an ear to the ground to help gauge where the industry is heading," said Kim Pallister, a business planner on Intel's Larabee project. "These are tough times, especially for some studios that have had publisher funding cut and the like...For those affected, it's a time to scramble for new ground by striking deals, finding new work, or leaning about alternative platforms."

Pallister said this year will mark his 16th GDC, and there are many who see the conference as an annual pilgrimage. But it's also seen by many veterans both as a chance to pass the torch to the next generation of developers and to check in with peers about the state of the industry.

"The core of GDC is about making better games," said Robin Hunicke, the lead designer on Electronic Arts' MySims. "For younger developers and students, it's a chance to meet some of the best minds in the business and learn from them. For developers who have been going for years, it's a time to share war stories, swap best practices, and communicate about what makes life as a developer so challenging--and so fun."

This year also marks a changing of the guard for GDC. Longtime behind-the-scenes organizer Meggan Scavio is heading the conference for the first time after former director Jamil Moledina left for Electronic Arts. But while there will clearly be thousands in attendance this week, Scavio faces a challenging environment.

In an interview in February, Scavio told CNET News that she expected GDC 2009's attendance to be about 18,000, roughly on par with last year. But asked last week about rumors that ticket sales were down, she acknowledged that things have slowed, hardly a surprising development given that many conferences are seeing smaller-than-usual populations.

Still, she said, sales are "strong considering the current economic downturn."

And for people like Ron Meiners, a veteran community manager who recently was laid off from a position in Los Angeles, GDC could not be more important, both as a place to explore possible future employment opportunities and to meet more of the industry's leading thinkers.

"As a consultant or job seeker, the ability to make new ties, or explore existing ties, is key," said Meiners. "I think we're happiest when we have a sense of (who someone is), so we can offer or recommend a job to them. It's a frontier industry still, and there are always very exciting new developments that are hard to understand. The conference gives us a chance to explore them and learn from successful practitioners, those who have made the next great innovations we'll all be talking about for the next year."

Added Meiners, "I think most important, really, for me, (GDC) gets me inspired again about games, about the social aspect of games, about games as a world-changing force and about games as a potentially important part of people's lives."

For many outside the industry, GDC may not have the name recognition of E3, the annual blowout at the Los Angeles Convention Center famous for its ear drum-shattering displays, huge parties, and booth babes.

But over the last few years, E3 has gone through a serious identity crisis, first scaling way down from a 60,000-person free-for-all to a 7,000-person, invite-only show focused on press and analysts. Now, for 2009, E3 looks ready to resume its massive scale, but to some, it may have lost some of its edge.

"We're thinking of vastly scaling down our presence at E3," said Jane Pinckard, a business development analyst for game developer F9. "GDC remains our most important show, in terms of business development...Part of it is, of course, the density of clients and partners and the ability to really focus on meeting them. But also, it's a show that celebrates development qua development. More than E3. So in terms of PR and perception, it's important that we are involved...GDC has credibility."

Asked to quantify GDC's credibility, Pinckard said, "We just look at new business opportunities we can generate by the end of the week. And for GDC, that has historically been really high. Publishers are there to meet with developers specifically. Whereas, at E3, for example, there's some of that, but there are other distractions for them."

Pallister agreed.

"E3 is still trying to find itself following the 'E3 Supernova' of a few years back," Pallister said. "Even in its heyday, though, E3 was a very different show than GDC. E3 was aimed at showing the industry's upcoming wares to the channel and to the customers who would buy them. GDC has always been about developers, about making games."

Electronic Arts said on Tuesday that The Sims 3, the third full iteration of one of the most successful video game franchises of all time, will hit store shelves on June 2.

The game will be released for PCs first, and versions for the Mac, iPhone, and iPod Touch should come later in the summer, EA said.

The original version of The Sims, which launched in 2000, quickly became the best-selling PC game of all time. In the years since, the franchise has surpassed 100 million total units sold, counting The Sims 2 and all of the expansions for both full iterations.

Originally developed by legendary game designer Will Wright's Maxis studio--which is now focused on Spore--The Sims has since become its own division within EA. As such, it is run out of the company's Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters, while Maxis is based in Emeryville, Calif.

On Tuesday, EA also announced its third-quarter earnings and said it would be laying off about 1,100 employees--about 11 percent of its total staff--and closing 12 facilities worldwide.

SAN FRANCISCO--Electronic Arts said Wednesday that it plans this summer to release an all-new, stand-alone version of Spore for kids.

The new game, which will allow multiple children to play together in a very Spore-like universe, will be called Creature Keeper, said Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of EA's Emeryville, Calif.-based Maxis studio, which created Spore.

In addition, at its "State of the Universe" event here, EA also unveiled plans for Galactic Adventures, the first expansion to Spore. It is planned for a spring release and will feature a set of new tools for the massive space stage of the hit evolution game that, in addition to the existing "play," "create," and "share" tools, will let players choose to create their own adventures in space.

And EA topped off its set of announcements by saying that it expects to release all-new versions of Spore for the Nintendo Wii and DS game consoles, titled Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena, respectively.

The announcements were the first EA has made that showcase the video game giant's future plans for Spore, a game that it has clearly invested huge resources in. The game, from legendary designer Will Wright, tasks players with navigating five distinct stages--cell, creature, tribe, civilization and space. Though it has sold fairly well, some have argued that it hasn't lived up to its advance billing, particularly because it was years in the works. Also, the game was originally released with a version of digital rights management that limited the number of installs consumers could have. Many people resisted the DRM restrictions, and late last year, EA removed them.

However, either because of the DRM or in spite of it, Spore became one of the most pirated games of 2008.

Now, with Creature Keeper, EA and Maxis hope they can attract a much younger audience to the Spore universe. Unlike the original game, the kids version will allow multi-player play. It does not require Spore to play, but it will allow kids to import creatures from the original game. It will be released for PC and Mac, just as the original game was.

The idea, said Bradshaw, is to give kids an easier way to experience the fun and exploration of Spore, and to do so with other friends.

"They can invite friends over," Bradshaw said, "and have play dates with their creatures."

With the Galactic Adventures expansion (see video below), meanwhile, EA is attempting to address one of the biggest criticisms of the main space stage of Spore: That players could not directly interact with the worlds they encountered during their interstellar journeys. Instead, they would be restricted to flying above any planets they found along the way.

Now, however, they will be able to beam down to new planets. More important, however, may be that Maxis is making available to Spore players a set of planetary adventure creation tools they've previously only had in-house.

Among other things, the expansion offers players terra-forming tools, making it possible to build all-new planets from scratch, and populate them with all manner of buildings, creatures, rivers and other geographical features. Players can choose any creation from the 65 million item-strong, player-created Sporepedia, the official Spore social media system.

Bradshaw said that the tools that will be available in Galactic Adventures were not ones that were originally planned to be included in Spore. Nor was the expansion long in the works, she said. Instead, she explained, the team at Maxis saw the ways that people were playing Spore and listened to requests from players to have more interaction and control over the space stage.

While EA isn't talking about total sales figures for Spore at this point, Bradshaw did say that to date, there have been more than 65 million creations uploaded to Sporepedia, and more than 6 million downloads of the Creature Creator, a tool that allows people to make their own Spore creatures without owning the full game.

Electronic Arts' much anticipated evolution game, Spore hits store shelves Sunday in North America, and for those that have been on the project since the beginning, it has been a long road from concept to completion.

The game's creator, Will Wright, who is famous for previous games like SimCity and The Sims said recently that the game has been seven years in the making, meaning the project was getting under way not long after The Sims launched and became the best-selling PC game of all time.

Wright has talked at length about how Spore's origins lie in the SETI project and other flights of his fancy.

"The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore," Wright told me last month. "As we thought about, it became apparent that evolution was a very important component. Some of the very first prototypes involved how you would move around and visualize the galaxy."

In the highly anticipated lead-up to the Spore's release from EA studio Maxis, in Emeryville, Calif., almost all the attention has been on the game itself or on its Creature Creator, which gives users an easy and sophisticated way to create complex beasts and which was made available in June as a free download.

But for many people, an equally exciting element has been the series of prototypes available for free download on the Spore Web site, each of which provides a look at the origins of a small piece of the larger game.

In fact, the prototypes were a crucial part of making Spore a reality. For example, since the procedural animation of the creatures in the game is one of its most-heralded elements, it's notable that before the system was ever built into the game, it started as a prototype.

"The earliest prototypes were making strange topology creatures and seeing if we could teach the computer to make them move plausibly, and later, show emotion and behavior," Wright said. "We had to find out whether the project was doable or not, or if some part of it wasn't doable, where we have to scale it back."

The first programmer on the Spore team was a Maxis veteran named Jason Shankel. Prior to joining Wright on his evolution project, he'd been working on a project known as SimMars, which was essentially a Mars terraforming game that was supported financially by NASA before the plug was finally pulled.

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On September 7, Electronic Arts will release its long-awaited and much-anticipated Spore. For many, this will be the biggest video game event of the year, and possibly even the last several years.

Spore, which was first announced in 2005, takes players through the process of evolution, from simple cell-like creatures, step by step, on out into space, is the latest from The Sims and SimCity designer Will Wright.

There is little question that Wright is one of the industry's most important figures, as evidenced by the packed houses he always speaks to and the reverence everyone from gamers to other designers to reporters have for him.

For Wright, the release of Spore, is the completion of seven years of work and the finished product is a far cry from its earliest concepts, which he and a small team were first discussing while The Sims was still fairly new. Yet by then, he was already seen as perhaps the industry's leading innovator for the entirely new genre of games he'd created.

Now, Spore is set to push that innovation envelope even further. And while no one yet knows if it will be a commercial or even critical success, it's safe to say that the excitement over the game--which has been raised in part due to the fact that it has taken Wright and his Maxis studio much longer to get the game to market than originally planned--is as high as any game in recent memory.

Proof of that excitement level was borne out by the more than 2 million people who downloaded the Spore Creature Creator after its June release. This free feature allowed anyone to make creatures for the game in advance of its release, something that served two key purposes. First, it got people energized and gave them something to play with before the game was out. And second, it provided millions of creatures to populate the game with on day one, since everything that individual users created for the game is shared with everyone else, despite it being a single-player game.

Earlier this month, the day before Wright set off on a worldwide, four-week publicity tour, I sat down with him at Maxis' Emeryville, Calif., headquarters for a discussion about the evolution of his evolution game. I wanted to know about the conceptual origins of a game unlike any other, and Wright was happy to tell me all about it

Q: What were the origins of Spore?
Will Wright: The earliest evolution of it had to do with the SETI Project. The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore. As we thought about, it became apparent that evolution was a very important component. Some of the very first prototypes involved how you would move around and visualize the galaxy. And then on procedurally generated creatures. Could we actually generate creatures through evolution so there was a vast variety of creatures rather than just the 20 or 30 fixed things that games typically include.

Were you inspired by other video games?
Wright: I played a lot of space and strategy games, but one thing that always disappointed me in space games was that you're presented with a galaxy with maybe 100 worlds. It was never vast like a real galaxy. Even the Spore galaxy is a tiny percentage of a real galaxy, but you get the sense it's immense, with countless worlds to explore. And I'd never seen an evolutionary game where, again, there was a vast set of possible creatures you could come across and that could convey the diversity of real biology. So we started thinking about procedural solutions. Very early on we wanted to give players a really cool design editor so they could design a wide variety of creatures. A lot of our early prototypes explored whether we could do procedurally generated animations and textures and could we build an editor that was easy to use?

You had to invent all the systems, right?
Wright: We researched what little had been done in computer science around things like procedural animation, which was mainly around humanoids, procedurally generating human animations. But almost nobody was generating animations where you didn't know what the shape of the creature was. We had to basically invent our own kind of computer science for that.

What was that like to have to do that invention?
Wright: It was risk assessment: Can we solve enough of this problem to be confident we could solve it well? The earliest prototypes were making strange topology creatures and seeing if we could teach the computer to make them move plausibly, and later, show emotion and behavior. We had to find out whether the project was doable or not, or if some part of it wasn't doable, where we have to scale it back.

What are some steps or systems that you found weren't doable?
Wright: Surprisingly, some I thought weren't doable were. I'd never heard decent procedural music and I'd given up on it until Brian Eno came on the project. He'd been thinking about the problem for years. So we reincorporated it after rejecting it in the early phases.

Does Spore seem like the same game as what you showed at E3 in 2005?
Wright: It seems like basically the same game. We expanded areas that we didn't originally think would be important or fun, especially things like content sharing. We'd thought you would just play the game and stuff would appear. But as we developed more content and the ability to browse and explore it, we discovered how fun that process was and the social currency you get making something really cool and sharing it with other people. We borrowed the language of social networking and Web 2.0 to present what we're calling the Sporepedia.

Did the development of Sporepedia and the Web 2.0 elements contribute to the game taking until now to finish?
Wright: You can't really say it took five months, three days and 47 seconds more because of that. We're always looking at what we have, like we realized on the browser side that, Wow, it'll be great if we add these extra features but that's going to push us out a few more months, so let's also change the Creature Editor and some game levels and add achievements and mission-based systems. You're doing these things in parallel. Eventually, they have to be ready the same day. If one thing slips, you continue to polish and add a few little features you didn't think you'd have time for.

What are some ways creating Spore has been different than your other games?
Wright: One big way is the art team. Typically, we would just build a larger and larger army of artists to make more and more content, like in The Sims. But because we were doing this procedurally, our art staff was mainly concentrated on teaching the computer and giving players tools to make stuff. Another difference was the design density in Spore. Because there's so many different genres and levels, I had a designer for every game level and the editors and Sporepedia.

Originally, you referred to Spore as "massively single player." And now?
Wright: Spore is a hybrid. There's huge unexplored space between single-player and multiplayer games. With multiplayer games, there's tremendous design limitations: Nobody can peak, nobody can pause time, no one player can be super powerful. These limit the experience you can give someone. But there is a huge benefit of getting a million people collectively building an interesting world. So our hybrid model aims for the best aspects of a multiplayer game without the worst drawbacks.

Virtual world publishers talk about the benefit of aggregating the all the content their users make. What's your take on that?
Wright: I like the idea. I was trying to figure out how to lower the friction of creation to getting into the game but also how do you make the creation process fun, so you don't have 1 percent of people making stuff for the other 99 percent. Rather, how do you get 99 percent of people making stuff for the 100 percent.

What are some of the research influences for Spore?
Wright: A lot of Richard Dawkins' work. Edward O. Wilson, back in the very early origin of light phase. Stuart Kauffman wrote about autocatalytic sets, which are theories about the origin of life, like did life come to Earth on a comet or did it originate out of self-organizing chemical sets.

How would something like that manifest in the game?
Wright: Well, we actually took a different direction. At the beginning of the game you see this comet hitting the planet, which is a panspermia theory, which is the alternative theory to bio-genesis, which is that life formed naturally through chemical complexity on Earth. We ended up prototyping and exploring a lot of spaces that are not in the game. We're trying to look for the most interesting 20 percent out of the 100 percent of what we could put in the game.

What's the prototyping exploration like?
Wright: In the early phases it entails me talking to a programmer about some system we want to explore and we build a very simple prototype like the ones we're putting on our website. So start poking and prodding and playing with this little toy. It's fun to watch stellar formation animation. It's fun to play with autocatalytic sets. We'd build prototypes for each one of these and play with them and imagine a singular experience that involves some subset of these prototypes that use similar concepts that can be ramped in the players' mind so they're not having to learn, you know, 20 different things that are totally unconnected.

In the recent Electronic Arts quarterly earnings call, CEO John Riccitiello suggested Spore might one day become a label of its own. Are some of tehse directions you're talking about the basis for the expansion packs an ongoing label requires?
Wright: When a game is released, we have a good sense of how we can expand it in different directions. But you do first have to get it out to the public and see what they do with it. As we see the fans doing various things with it, it will become pretty clear to us that, Oh, yeah, this would be probably the best direction and we already have an expansion map, so we know how to navigate that terrain. But we're also exploring entire other forms of media and starting to think, what does this brand mean. We want Spore in a very general sense to become this intersection between science and creativity.

What do you hope fans will learn about science from Spore?
Wright: I want this to be more on the motivational side than the education side. I really want to spark people's interest in these subjects. People still tell me they went into, you know, civil engineering because of SimCity. It wasn't that SimCity taught them how to build a city, but it got them interested in how fascinating the subject is. That motivation is far more powerful than just trying to pour facts into their head. So, if nothing else I'd like people to come out, sit back, look up at the stars and think a little bit deeper about what a galaxy is.

I've heard Spore was originally known as SimEverything.
When I design a game, at the very beginning, I design a box, and with Spore many, many years ago, the title on the box was SimEverything. I can show the team my box and say, Look, we want to build this, imagine what will be in this box. Spore was feeling pretty unique and SimEverything almost felt like a parody of the Sims brand, which is why I liked it. But my lead artist, Ocean Quigley, actually came up with Spore as the code name for the project. But after a couple of years of calling it Spore, the name seemed to fit on so many different levels, especially as we thought deeper about the pollination and things like that. At some point we said, Let's just call it Spore.

What is it like to be at the end of this process?
Wright: It feels nice. It's a big transition, because we've been working, working, working on this thing and it's kind of like, a Frankenstein thing where you flip a switch and it comes alive and roars off into the world, and you don't know what kind of hell it's going to raise. So it's kind of scary and exciting at the same time.

After more than three years of anticipation, Spore is almost finished.

Electronic Arts' evolution game, from legendary designer Will Wright's Maxis studio, is about a week from going "gold," I was told Tuesday by Thomas Vu, a producer on the game who gave me a demo Tuesday morning. Going gold, of course, means the game is about to be sent to manufacturing. EA has said that Spore will launch September 7.

As you probably know, Spore is designed to task players with evolving through a series of stages, from the initial cell stage, to creature creation, to a tribal stage, then onto civilization, and then out into space.

Over the last few years, I've had a number of opportunities to see the game in its various stages of development, and let me tell you: It's looking good. What was a fairly rudimentary system back in 2005 when I first saw it at E3 in Los Angeles is now a polished, slick game that looks just about ready for prime time. Its interfaces all seem to work, there were no obvious bugs and it just seemed like a game that is doing what it's supposed to.

"Thank goodness," is what EA must be thinking. Spore has been the industry's most-anticipated title for at least a couple of years. When I first wrote about it, during E3 in 2005, in one of the very first extensive interviews with Wright about the game, I penned these words: "Next year, Electronic Arts will release Wright's next attempted masterpiece, Spore."

Clearly, Maxis didn't release the game in 2006, nor did it come out in 2007, when it was also planned for launch. There have been all kinds of reasons for the delays, but whatever happened in the past, the game is definitely looking good and I think I would be willing to put some money on EA making its September 7 deadline.

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With Electronic Arts' much-anticipated evolution game, Spore, not scheduled to hit store shelves until September 7, it seems that it is stoking fans' interest by releasing bite-size teasers every week or two.

Last month, EA released the first video of the game's cell stage, in which players evolve their creatures from primordial murk.

And on June 17, it will release the game's creature creator, allowing anyone to make Spore creatures for free that they can use later on when the game is out.

Now, it has put out the first video and detailed screen shots of the tribal phase. This is when players have moved beyond the cell stage and are now competing for, or sharing, territory with other tribes.

Spore is a single-player game, but it has elements of multiplayer titles, most specifically the ability to upload creations to the Internet that others can then download. This means that players, though using the game by themselves, will be enjoying the entire community's creations.

I've included video of the tribal stage below. Please forgive the lo-fi quality. It was an experiment in using Qik's streaming video service to get the video up on this blog quickly.

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.

If you lined up the boxes of the 100 million units of The Sims products that have sold since Electronic Arts' monster-hit franchise first launched in 2000, they would stretch from New York to Moscow.

Forgetting for the moment that many of those boxes would become awfully soggy if lined up like that, it's worth giving a curtsy of respect and admiration to EA and The Sims franchise for reaching the 100 million units sold mark, which EA announced Wednesday.

Originally, The Sims was a not-well-loved stepchild of Will Wright's hit games, Sim City and its brethren. But legend has it that the EA brass wasn't too excited about an extension of that series that tasked players with running whole families as the goal rather than building cities or buildings or helicopters.

But Will Wright isn't the reigning numero uno superstar of the video game world for nothing, and when the original The Sims hit the market back in 2000 it almost immediately became a phenomenon of unparalleled success, eventually spawning a franchise with two (so far) major iterations and seemingly dozens of expansions that allowed players to be rock stars, students, have special pets, and so much more.

Wright, in fact, became such a rock star himself that he was able to spin off Maxis, the company he founded and then sold to EA, as a separate studio that for the last few years has been focusing exclusively on Spore, an evolution game that some have jokingly called "Sim Everything."

Spore, in fact, is likely to be the king of all god games, the genre that The Sims popularized. In a god game, players control the world around them, building things and destroying others. The progress of the environment is entirely up to them, as are the fates of all the characters in the game.

Of course, not every iteration of The Sims has been a hit. After watching the original The Sims vault to the top of the charts, EA decided to release a multiplayer, online version. The resulting The Sims Online became the poster child for how not to build a social virtual world, and after sputtering and coughing for a year or two, it more or less disappeared from radar as other virtual worlds took its place in the public eye. Recently, EA has relaunched it as EA Land, promising to fix some of the major problems that plagued The Sims Online, like not being able to create true user-generated content.

But that was all just a sideline, as the regular, single-player The Sims games marched on to total dominance in the industry. Only a few games are even in its league, titles like the Halo and Grand Theft Auto franchises, and maybe one or two others.

These days, The Sims is available in 60 countries and in 22 languages. Its community Web site attracts 4.3 million unique visitors a month, EA says, who, in total, have made more than 70 million original creations. The more than 100,000 videos The Sims players have made have generated 200 million views.

For me, while I've never been a big-time player of The Sims, I hold the game in a special place in my heart, because pretty much the first tech culture story I ever wrote, the one that I attribute to really getting my career started, was about the emergent behavior of players using the wedding album feature in the original The Sims. Almost everything I've done professionally since has emerged, in one way or another, from that article I wrote in the summer of 2003.

So, while celebrating 100 million units sold is really nothing more than a marketing milestone, it is nonetheless noteworthy and a visceral sign of something really, really big and which has made a real mark on society. The game, in all its iterations, is the leader in what is now a growing field, and at EA, has been recognized by being made into one of the video game giant's four distinct divisions.

Think about that for a moment. A game the company wasn't really all that hot about making in the first place ended up becoming one of its four major divisions.

A tip of the hat to The Sims.

Thanks to my good friends over at GameSpot, I can now finally let out my breath: Spore is going to come out next spring.

For nearly two years, Spore, the next title from The Sims mastermind Will Wright, was all people in the video games industry could talk about. Well, OK, maybe not the only thing, but one of the major ones.

Then, suddenly, people stopped talking about it as its launch date slipped and slipped and no one knew when, or even if, it would come out.

But according to GameSpot, Wright went on BBC Radio Five Live yesterday and issued the kind of proclamation that, to video game fans, is matched only by major news events like the end of World War II and the Apollo 11 going to the moon.

So, perhaps I exaggerate a little bit. But maybe only a little. Spore represents a new generation of games, the so-called massively single-player game, and countless people have been very eagerly awaiting the opportunity to get their hands on its incredible character generator, to play in its exponentially evolving levels, as your sporelike character joins a colony and then a village and then a city and then a whole planet and then leaps into space and so on and so on.

I've played with Spore a little bit and I love it. Who knows what the game will end up being like, but what I've seen so far, I've been blown away.

Accuse me of being a cheerleader, but I say Wright and his team get the benefit of the doubt.

However, it was troubling that Electronic Arts kept delaying and delaying the game's launch. It was originally supposed to be released this year, but the date kept slipping.

So, it was reassuring that EA is finally willing to let Wright talk about a release date.

According to GameSpot, the BBC quoted Wright as saying Spore would be "roughly available in six months' time."

And as for why the game was delayed in the first place, Wright seemed to indicate that he had been putting it through some pretty rigorous testing, all in the hopes of reaching a mainstream audience with it.

"I'd like the people who played The Sims to be able to play Spore," Wright told the BBC. "I don't want it to be just (for) hard-core gamers."