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'Spore,' the new evolution game from Electronic Arts and 'SimCity' and 'The Sims' creator Will Wright, started with a series of small prototyping systems.

(Credit: Electronic Arts/Maxis)

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.

Electronic Arts may be hoping that it can someday license the movie rights to its much-anticipated evolution game, 'Spore.'

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

After several years of waiting, video game fans will soon be able to get their hands on the long-awaited new title from legendary designer Will Wright, Spore.

But if the game's publisher, Electronic Arts, has its way, a much wider audience of fans may someday be exposed to the game. Or at least a version of the game.

That's because, according to a Reuters report Wednesday, EA is hoping that it may one day be able to license the film and/or TV rights to Spore.

'Spore' developers were surprised by a user's creation of this skeleton because they didn't think this kind of figure was possible using the creature creator they had made.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

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.

The Sims 3, which is expected to come out in 2009, is the third full iteration of the best-selling PC franchise in history. On Wednesday, EA announced The Sims has sold 100 million units since it first launched in 2000.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

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.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

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.

(Credit: EA)

We managed to get a sneak peek at EA's upcoming Wii The Sims game, MySims. It's cute. It's really, really, really, really cute.

Unlike the make-a-Sim/live-your-life gameplay of The Sims or The Sims 2, the Wii's MySims focuses much more on helping out friends and building up a village. The result is a game that's part The Sims, part Animal Crossing, and part Lego Star Wars (without the blasters or lightsabers). You can build structures--starting with your own home but eventually others' homes, stores, and even dance clubs--out of basic blocks. Once you have the basic shape of your building done, you can customize it with different paint schemes, windows, doors, and other nifty ornaments. The building tools have plenty of variety, and your resulting structure can be anything from a cartoonish workshop to a stern brick tower. Of course, that's just the outside of the building. Things get much more complicated inside.

Like its predecessor, MySims lets you customize your home with chairs, desks, beds, and many other nifty objects. More importantly, it lets you customize the objects themselves. Every object in MySims is made out of basic blocks that can be rearranged, stacked, and shuffled around on your whim. Once the basic shape of your object is built, you can really go nuts with customization. MySims is full of "essences," little items that let you put extra little touches on your items, or give them special paint schemes. A spooky essence might let you put a creepy skull on your chair, and a cute essence might let you paint it with flowers. We saw several dozen different essences, so it's safe to say that you can get pretty creative when building objects.

Besides building things, helping out friends is another important part of MySims. As you build up your town, more and more people will move in, and they'll want your help. You might have to collect essences for them, or build furniture, or any other sort of task. In return for your service, they'll be happy and often give you even more essences to play with. And the more friends you make and the more that move into your town, the more of your town can open up. What starts off as a small clearing might become a village surrounded by a creepy forest with a big mountain in the background, all of which you can explore to find more essences.

With all of this customization available, you'd think online play would be a sure thing for the game. After all, what's the fun in building a castle full of robots if you can't share them with friends? Unfortunately, EA is staying quiet about online play on MySims. It would be nice, but we'll have to wait and see. MySims hits the Wii this fall, with a DS version coming out shortly after.

You've heard a lot about electric sports cars. Now a new generation of electric scooters is coming to town.

The Maxi-Scooter from Vectrix, an all-electric scooter that can go from 0 to 50 miles per hour in 6.8 seconds, will soon be available in the U.S., Jeff Morrill, director of marketing for the Americas for the company, said at the Clean Energy Venture Summit taking place this week in Austin, Texas.

Like electric car companies such as Tesla Motors, Vectrix is attempting to show that electric vehicles are a practical option for getting around town and that they can compete on many fronts with traditional gas burners. The $11,000 scooter, which runs on nickel metal hydride batteries, can hit 62 miles per hour, go from 0 to 30 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds, and can be recharged in 2.5 hours from a standard outlet. (Eighty percent of the battery can be recharged in two hours.)

It will go about 68 miles at 25 mph before needing a recharge, Morrill said. And, like other scooters and motorcycles, you can store helmets and other items in an empty space below the seat. The bike is powered by a hub motor on the rear wheel.

"We want to be the first zero-emission, high-performance, street-legal consumer electric vehicle," Morrill said.

Besides the electric engine and Vectrix-designed battery, the Vectrix is made from components familiar to the scooter world. The tires come from Pirelli, while other components come from Sachs.

Vectrix started selling the Maxi in Italy last November and two weeks ago in London. Right now, the company is seeking U.S. retailers and distributors.

In a test ride in the parking lot, it was pretty clear the Maxi had some pep. We got it up close to 30 miles per hour before we had to slow down to avoid hitting a speed bump.

Like other electric vehicles, it makes a lot less noise than its gas-burning counterparts. In fact, it makes no noise at all. The word "Go" is displayed on the speedometer so that you know the engine is on, Morrill said.