Spore Demonstration Impressions February 14,2008 - Gamer 2.0: “So when Will [Wright] first came up with the idea and told the team, ‘We’re going to create a game that simulates the universe,’ what was the reaction?”

Alex Hutchinson, Lead Designer of Spore: “Well whenever you start a project everyone is pretty optimistic so it was pretty much like ‘Hell yeah, let’s do it!’ Three years down the road of staring at the computer gets kind of tiring, but now with a release date set you can see the end result and you know you’ve done something to be proud of.”

The only question left is how consumers will take to EA and Maxis’ upcoming Spore, one of the most talked about PC titles to ship this year. Despite rumors of Spore hitting other platforms, it's currently only hitting the DS and PC. Lead designer Alex Hutchinson said they are toying with a Wii version of the game and despite word that the game is already in development on the PS3 and Xbox 360, he says it is not currently in development for those platforms.

The last time we sat down and saw Spore was at E3 2006. EA has been mum about Will Wright’s latest project until recently, when we received a fresh new batch of 40 screenshots for the game and an opportunity to get an intimate demonstration of the game at EA’s Spring and Winter preview show in New York City.

We all know the general idea of Spore. You start out as a single celled organism and through the magic of evolution – sorry, Creationists – evolve not only into a being but a race whose ultimate goal is to roam the galaxy either as a friendly ambassador or as a galactic force of evil. Well, sort of, and that’s where things get tricky. Spore isn’t a strategy game, though it has strategy elements, and there is no real end or climax to the game; a trademark of Sims titles.

So what is Spore exactly? There are three core components to Spore; creation, content sharing, and the actual game. Much like with any Sims title there isn’t much direction or real point to the game. Obviously you want your creature to evolve over time, but that’s essentially guaranteed, and the level of complexity evident in Spore is both obvious and subtle.

In fact, it would be fair to call Spore an oxymoronic game. It’s complex, but not deep, complicated or overwhelming. It’s broad, but focused. It is what any Sims game should be, a tool more so than a game. Spore, like previous Sims games, is what you make of it. The single player “campaign,” if you want to call it that, is brief; taking you from the cell stage to the galaxy in a breezy 5 hours.

In our time with lead developer Alex Hutchinson, he stressed that the game isn’t even the most important part of Spore. The real focus is on the content that can be created by the community and having such content fuel the game’s many experiences.

Spore’s all about the content creation portion of the game, as Hutchinson said he actually believed that a certain percentage of the game’s players will probably spend little time actually playing the game and the majority of their time building monsters, buildings, ships, and such. All of this content is shared through an online database that Spore users can then browse and from which can pick out content to play with, and when visiting other planets in the game the user generated monsters will actually populate those worlds.

Spore is not, however, a multiplayer game of any sort. While you’ll interact with the creations of armchair Darwins across the world, you won’t directly be playing with them. These monsters will simply populate the world and behave in ways directed by the artificial intelligence. Hutchinson actually said that Will Wright’s big joke is that Spore is a Massively Single-Player Online Game; yet another oxymoron to add to the list.

Games, News, Reviews, Media and More