Gaming and Culture

Nintendo gamers anxious to grow Spores will find relief in October.

Electronic Arts announced Monday that its Spore Hero for the Wii game console and Spore Hero Arena for the Nintendo DS handheld will reach store shelves in the U.S. on October 6 and international outlets on October 9.

Spore Hero for the Nintendo Wii

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Spore Hero Arena for the Nintendo DS

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

In Spore Hero, players can transform into heroic alien creatures on a mission to save their home worlds from certain destruction. By battling evil forces, solving puzzles, and collecting clues, heroes evolve over time. And using the Spore Creature Creator, gamers can build their heroes with assorted alien body parts.

In Spore Hero Arena, gamers can trek throughout space in a battle to defend planets from the galactic bad guys. Players can create their own heroes, combat aliens, and unlock special abilities to give themselves a fighting chance to save entire worlds. The game also lets people play with up to three friends in person or over a Wi-Fi network.

"Players' heroes take center stage as both games, distinctly tailor-made for its Nintendo platform, infuse creativity, combat and adventure to create a unique gameplay experience on the Wii and Nintendo DS," said Lucy Bradshaw, vice president of Maxis, a subsidiary of EA

The popular Spore game was originally available only on the PC and Mac. Last September, EA unveiled Spore and another variation, Spore Creatures, for the Nintendo DS. In May, EA announced a fall release for the Nintendo versions of Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena but hadn't revealed a specific date.

Aliens beware. Nintendo gamers will now be able to transform into galactic Spore heroes with the release of two new games for the Wii and DS.

To be unleashed this fall by Electronic Arts game studio Maxis, Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena, are new additions to the Spore universe created exclusively for the Nintendo platforms. Spore transports players to a virtual galaxy in which players create entire civilizations, explore new worlds, and befriend or battle alien creatures.

In Spore Hero, created for the Wii, players take on the role of hero to defend their planet from a dark alien force bent on worldwide destruction. The game includes a Wii-enhanced Spore Creature Creator, which lets players design their own aliens from over 200 different body parts (tentacles included).

Earlier this month, EA said that gamers had concocted more than 100 million Spore creatures.

In Spore Hero Arena, for the portable Nintendo DS, players create a gladiator-type hero trekking from one planet to the next to complete missions and vanquish dangerous aliens. Spore Hero Arena offers a multiplayer feature for use by up to three peoples locally or with one person over a Wi-Fi network.

"Whether it is the stylus-driven action of the Nintendo DS or playful controllers of the Wii, the massive Nintendo audience is the ideal home for Spore Hero and Spore Hero Arena," Lucy Bradshaw, vice president and general manager at Maxis, said in a statement.

The Spore franchise has grown in sales and popularity since the first Spore game was released last year. A recent addition to the franchise is Creature Keeper, a kid-friendly version of Spore. Another new game, Spore Galactic Adventures, will be unveiled in June for the PC and Mac.

With all this hysteria about the pig sniffles, you'd think that an announcement about 100 million strange little organisms would be cause for alarm. That's not the case, however, when we're talking about the oddball life forms that players grow and control as part of video game Spore. The game created by industry legend Will Wright announced Monday that 100 million creatures have been created, far outrunning the number of species on Earth.

The game publisher, Electronic Arts, started counting last June. That's when it first released its Spore Creature Creator, several months ahead of the full Spore game itself.

There's more Spore on the way. Electronic Arts' Maxis studio is releasing the Spore Galactic Adventures expansion pack for PC and Mac players, Spore Hero for the Wii, and Spore Hero Arena for the Nintendo DS. The player who created the 100 millionth Spore creature now has a chance to win a copy of Spore Galactic Adventures as well as a souped-up PC graphics card.

Last month, Will Wright announced his departure from Electronic Arts. Wright, who soared to the heights of video game fame with Sim City and The Sims, has said that his new project is an "electronic think tank" that goes by the interesting name of Stupid Fun Club.

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.

... Read more

GameSpot review by Kevin VanOrd.

GameSpot score: 8.0

The good

• Intuitive and comprehensive customization tools

• Oozes charm at every turn

• Impressively broad scope

• Great audio and art design.

The bad

• Individual game play elements are extremely simple

• Early stages aren't very engaging.

Spore is an enjoyable game that pulls off an interesting balancing act.

On one hand, it lets you create a creature and guide its maturation from a single cell to a galactic civilization through an unusual process of evolutionary development.

Because the tools used to create and revise this creature are so robust and amusing, and each creation's charms are so irresistible, it's hard not to get attached to your digital alter ego. On the other hand, this intimacy is abandoned in the long, later portions of the game, when you lead your full-grown civilization in its quest for universal domination.

The idea sounds ambitious, though Spore isn't as much a deep game as it is a broad one, culling elements from multiple genres and stripping them down to their simplest forms. By themselves, these elements aren't very remarkable; but within the context of a single, sprawling journey, they complement each other nicely and deliver a myriad of delights.

Spore's greatest asset, by far, is its intuitive set of creation tools. If you've played the separate Creature Creator, released earlier this year, you're only seeing a small piece of the puzzle.

At various stages, you'll construct, for example, town halls, land vehicles sporting cannons, and aircraft that spout religious propaganda. The creatures are the true stars though, and you can mix and match legs, arms, mouths, wings, and lots of other parts into a beautiful work of art--or a hideous monstrosity.

Each part of your creation can be turned, resized, and twisted, so whether you wish to re-create a favorite cartoon character or develop an original concept, you'll probably find what you need in here. You don't need to be a budding Pablo Picasso to make an interesting creature, however; just slapping a bunch of random parts together can result in a truly hysterical beast.

Yet even if your onscreen buddy is a three-armed ogre with scales running up his belly, you'll be spending some time getting to know him in the first few hours of gameplay, and you'll probably develop some affection for him despite his hideousness.

Extensive community tools
You will need to put some creative energy into Spore, but if you aren't the artistic type or don't find the building- and vehicle-creation tools as interesting as those for your creature, you can use pre-made designs that ship with the game. Even better, you can utilize Spore's extensive community tools, inserting other players' innovations into your own game in progress. It's actually a lot of fun to sift through others' creations, if only to marvel at the remarkable amount of imagination on display.

And you can do this from within the game proper using an online database called the Sporepedia. In Spore, community and gameplay come together in a fresh and user-friendly manner. In fact, to get the most out of the game, you should be online whenever you play. Not only will doing so give you access to the Sporepedia, but most of the other creatures, vehicles, and even entire planets you encounter will have been created by other players. The early release of the Creature Creator has already proven that community involvement is a core aspect of the Spore experience, and the sharing factor is poised to give the game remarkable longevity.

In a game of Spore proper, however, you won't start off by molding the creature of your dreams. The game is split into five stages, starting with the cell stage. (However, once you unlock a stage, you can start a new game there and bypass any stage that comes before it.)

The creation tools at this stage are simple, limited to a 2D cell and a few odds and ends, like flagella and spikes. The accompanying game play is similarly minimal, and if you've played Flow for the PlayStation 3 or PSP, you will have a good idea of how it works. You choose the path of a carnivore or an herbivore at the outset, which determines what sort of food bits you can munch on. From here, you maneuver your cell about the screen using the keyboard or mouse, avoiding creatures that are looking to you for their next meal while grabbing a bite or two yourself. If you're an herbivore, you seek out the green algae; if you're a carnivore, you need meat, which means waiting for a fish fight to break out and gobbling up the remains, or starting the fight yourself.

You'll also uncover new parts as you swim about, and can then attach them to your organism.

To enter the cell creator, you send out a mating call, which lets you get romantic with another member of your species. Then, you add a few bits that make you swim faster or jab harder, and jump back into the gene pool.

However, it is all ultra-simple: You swim around eating so you can get bigger, and avoid being eaten. If you do fall victim to a sharp-toothed protozoan, you'll re-hatch with no real punishment. All in all, the cell stage may last you 20 or 25 minutes, which is just as well, since it's not very interesting and wears out its welcome quickly.

Soon enough, you'll leave the environs of the sea, add some legs, and lumber into the creature stage. You'll still find new parts scattered about, this time hidden within the skeletal remains of other beasts.

Again, the game play itself is pretty simple: You wander around exploring for other creatures and advance through the stage by either befriending other nests or conquering them.

If you want to go the aggressive route, you should equip sharp claws, tusks, and spitters; if you want to make friends with the local duck-billed orangutans, you'll go with parts that let you charm, sing, dance, and pose.

Should you decide on violence, the encounter plays out much like a very plain online role-playing game, in which you click on your target and use one of your four special abilities to do damage. If you want to make friends by singing and dancing, you'll play a little game of Simon Says, mimicking the actions of your hopeful buddies.

As you progress through the stage, you build up a little pack of followers, and they will join you in your battles--and your posing routines.

The gameplay in the creature stage may be simple, but it's here that you start to see what can make playing Spore such a special and rewarding experience.

Seeing your creature slowly evolve from a flat cell to an awkward, gangly land dweller is fun, particularly if he doesn't look as though such a beast in real life would be able to walk, much less bounce around the forest.

This is where your relationship with the creature is most prominent, and that connection is what makes the exploration of the creature stage so interesting. When you encounter a towering six-legged atrocity charging at the locals, you'll hightail it out of there--yet still be in awe, just as if you were the little guy himself.

It's more about the gawking than the playing, but whether you're joining a pack of polka-dotted parakeets in chorus or catching a glimpse of an overhead UFO, there are some legitimately appealing moments to be had.

Controlling a tribe
Once you reach the tribal stage, you will lose some of that connection with your creation. You will no longer be playing as an individual, but rather controlling a tribe, and the stage plays like a slimmed down real-time strategy game.

It's disappointing that you can no longer make adjustments to your tribe's main features past this point; you can, however, adorn the creatures with different clothing items for the duration.

Fortunately, the charm and personality of the creature stage is still very much evident, and you'll still have the same thrills as you encounter excellent and unusual creatures as you order about your small group of wacky travelers.

Conceptually, the tribal stage is similar to the creature stage, only now you focus the violence on an entire village, including structures. If you like that sort of thing, you can go so far as to equip tribe members with torches and set the enemy village ablaze. If you'd rather woo your neighbors with the sweet, soothing sounds of song, there are a few instruments at your disposal.

Spore then pulls an about-face when you reach the civilization stage. Gone are your creature-controlling days; your beloved brutes, once the jewels of your eye, will now populate the cities, and you will instead create fleets of land, sea, and air vehicles.

Now you don't have just a tribe--you have an entire society to handle, though you shouldn't let the name of the stage lead you to think that you'll find the complexity of Sid Meier's classic series here.

The creation tools are just as easy to use--and just as comprehensive--as those of the creature creator. Designing a mass of metal may not have the same charm as molding a living being from scratch, but the tools give you more control over patterns and colors, so expect to lose more hours of your life tinkering with the possibilities.

You'll also create a town hall, a house, a factory, and an entertainment venue, and placing these in your cities has an effect on the happiness of your residents. However, the happiness mechanic is so simple that most players should be able to beat the stage on even the highest difficulty setting without giving it much thought.

The stage plays out like an even broader version of the tribal stage, though you will be dealing with some light resource gathering.

However, the main strategic element comes from the three different ways you can conquer your foes: economic, religious, or military. Each city is limited to one of these three brands based on how you choose to play, though the process plays out remarkably the same, regardless.

For example, if you go for military victory, you send your attack units toward your enemy cities in standard RTS fashion. To convert the same city, you send religious vehicles over to broadcast a holographic image that preaches to the citizens.

It's neat to watch the transparent creature spouting the word over the opposing city--it's just too bad that the game play is so limited. Each city can produce only one type of land vehicle, one type of air vehicle, and one type of sea vehicle. If you go for a pure military victory, for example, you will see only three units in the stage. It's breezy and enjoyable, for sure--it's just not deep or challenging.

The final frontier
And in its final transformation, Spore enters the space stage, where many of the previous gameplay elements coalesce.

As a result, this stage feels like an actual destination, and while it's not nearly as complex as the space exploration games it cribs from, it does exhibit the great charms of the early stages that are missing from the civilization stage.

This is partially because it harks back to the creature stage, putting you in control of a single spacecraft (one you build using the wonderful creation tools, of course), and sending you off to explore the great black beyond.

The scope of this stage is suitably massive. You travel from star to star, exploring newly discovered planets and searching for your galactic neighbors, and you can skim the terrain of a planet--or pull the camera light-years away to see the entire galaxy at a glance.

This stage is somewhat reminiscent of 2002's terrific Space Rangers and its sequel, and even exhibits some of that game's wacky humor.

You travel from system to system, grabbing missions from the local civilizations who will crack jokes about everything from cake to umbrellas. Most of these missions are quick and to the point: abduct this creature and bring it back, eliminate a bunch of sick animals on this planet, eliminate all of our enemy's turrets on a neighboring world, and so on. Just as in the creature stage, you will eventually pick up some AI companions, further allowing you to expand across the galactic map.

To expand, you can't just plop down a colony and watch it evolve. The economy moves much more slowly in this stage than in previous ones, so you need to be careful about how you spend funds based on how you wish to play.

Nor can you just choose any planet. Some worlds are simply incapable of supporting life, while others need to have the environment altered to allow for expansion and population. This is where the terraforming tools come in. Not only may you need to drop items onto the terrain to increase the density of the atmosphere or make the air hotter, but you'll need to jump-start the ecology by throwing in plants and creatures abducted from other worlds.

Space stage keeps players busy
These tools don't just limit you to gameplay necessities, however. You can terraform entire swaths of land, putting craters and plateaus where you see fit, or even dyeing the water purple. In space stage there is, for the first time in Spore, a lot to do. At times, you are shooting lasers at enemy saucers, like a 3D action game; at others, you're outfitting colonies with turrets; at still others, you're negotiating trade routes with your allies. It's a pleasant and accessible mix.

Unsurprisingly, none of these elements is as deep as you would expect in a deep space strategy game, but the real joys come from swooping onto a planet and skimming its surface to see your own creations--and those of others--populating them, and in various stages of advancement.

The stylized, colorful visuals keep your eyes constantly engaged, from big, bulbous trees to herds of tentacled younglings frolicking about. The animations are top-notch, so while it's hard to imagine what a bowlegged, long-necked crane with four toes on each foot would actually look like as it ambled about, Spore makes such sights look goofily authentic.

It isn't a technical powerhouse; there is a good bit of geometry pop-in, and the game does not appear to support anti-aliasing. Its charming, exaggerated look more than makes up for it though, and on three separate machines of various specifications, Spore ran smoothly at the highest settings without a single crash.

Spore's sound design shines from beginning to end. The creatures themselves sound terrific, and are the source of much of the game's overflowing charm. The creature and tribal stages sound enchanting, from the thumping beat of the drums when you order tribal units to the squawks and squeaks of your creations. The subsequent stages are of similarly high quality. Of particular note is the customizable ambient music introduced in the civilization stage, and the hysterical incomprehensible Simlish spoken by the various galactic leaders.

Spore keeps a timeline of events, pinpointing every decision you've made and assigning you into broad categories based on your overall behavior (social, adaptable, and so on), so there are plenty of reasons to try a different approach.

Not that these varied approaches make for drastically different gameplay, but they do give you a reason to revisit the amusing moments that make Spore unique.

Taken on their own, its pieces are nothing special. As parts of a singular ambitious vision, they work far better. Throw in the best customization tools seen in years and an enthusiastic community brimming with creativity, and you have a legitimately great game that will deliver hours of quality entertainment.

For Mac users, one of the best pieces of news of the year was the announcement in January by Electronic Arts that it would be releasing a version of its long-awaited evolution game, Spore, on their beloved platform.

But if you're one of those Mac users who is shaking with anticipation at playing the new game by SimCity and The Sims creator Will Wright, and you don't have both an Intel-based machine and the Leopard version of the Mac OS X operating system, I'm afraid you're out of luck.

This news isn't new, as it's been listed on the Spore system requirements for some time. But having noticed it Tuesday morning, I did a search and didn't quickly find any stories out there that talked about it. So, I thought it was worth a quick mention.

On Windows machines, it requires XP or Vista, so a much wider range of fans will be able to play on that platform. But on the Mac, only those that have pretty much the latest hardware and operating system will be able to do so.

Still, that number is probably in the millions, so there's a big market there. It's just a shame those other Mac users are locked out. On the other hand, as one Mac user friend said to me Tuesday, it's an excuse to upgrade.

SAN FRANCISCO--If you're a video game fan, you are probably quite aware that Electronic Arts' evolution game Spore is just days away from launch.

You've played with the , you've read the stories, you've watched the videos. Maybe you've even had a chance to see Spore's creator, Will Wright, give one of his famous talks on the subject.

But if you're not a gamer, you might not have any idea what Spore is. Until now, that is.

As I was returning from lunch Wednesday, I noticed a giant billboard on the side of a building just down the street from CNET Networks' headquarters with the phrase, "Tired of your planet? Flights leaving daily at Spore.com."

So far, this is the first advertising for the game that I've seen in public. But I can only assume it's just the beginning of what will be a very large ad campaign.

After all, EA has a ton invested in the game, and the stakes are high, both for the company and for Wright, the highly regarded designer behind SimCity and The Sims among others.

And while I'm sure I'm a couple days behind on this--I was out of the office since last week--I haven't heard any other talk about Spore billboards, so it caught me by surprise, especially since I've been following the progress of the game so closely and also since the billboard is just feet from my office.

Either way, I'll be very interested to see how this presumed ad blitz takes shape: Will there be TV ads? Big glossy spreads in magazines? An alternate-reality game?

If you happen to run across something interesting, please do consider dropping me a note. I'd love to hear about it.

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.