Spore

When I was younger, my family had Sim City 2000 on our home PC. I loved that game. I loved having control over a city; building roads and freeways, deciding where to build power plants and fire stations, raising and lowering taxes... good times.

One of the main programmers for Sim City was Will Wright. Wright took his act to further titles like SimCopter and the wildly successful The Sims.

But with Spore, he's shown some major genius. This trailer can explain the game more easily than I can, so here you go:



The concept alone knocks my socks off. To go from single-cell organism to galaxy-ruling species and everything inbetween sounds incredibly fun and interesting. And if anyone can pull off the level of detail and micromanagement required to get the realization of this concept correct, Wright can.

The game was announced in 2005 and is scheduled for release in America in September of this year.

Electronic Arts offered a free demo for download on Wednesday; it's the Creature Creator, a slice of the game where you can design your own... creatures. I've had fun with it so far. Here are two of my attempts:



I call this one Hairplug. Initially he was supposed to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but then I couldn't make his arms tiny enough. His walk is a bit wobbly. The game doesn't seem to favor bipeds much.

This guy is the first creature I made. His name is Brandosaur, and he's something of a mammalian scorpion.



The genius behind Spore is that almost everything in the game is user-generated. As the trailer showed, everything from the creatures to their homes to their cars and spacecraft are designed by the player. These can be uploaded to a central Spore server, and then compared with other user-generated content. Wright calls it a "massively single-player onlne game."

Brilliant. The sheer number of variations we see already is staggering.

I'm very excited for this game to ship.