Spore

I originally heard of this from my friend Zach. He had mentioned something about Will Wright (creator of Sim City and The Sims and countless other Sim games) creating a new game which was effectively sim-everything. It sounded interesting to me, but I let it go. I didn't know much about it, and figured I'd know more when the time was right. And so it came to pass that I'd hear snippets of what was proposed for this game, and I grew covetous.

Here's the deal. You start the game as a microorganism, swimming around in a little puddle, potentially in the primordial ooze of your planet. As you eat and get bigger, you can reproduce and evolve. Soon, you develop complexity, becoming an animal of whatever design you choose. The program will determine how the beast should move, based off of the design (in the first video, Will Wright creates a three-legged thing with a hand on the tail arching over its back, and the program figures out how that thing will move). Anyway, after being a beast and attempting to make your way in the world, you reproduce and evolve, eventually developing the brain capacity to reach sentience. That starts the tribal phase. You're no longer evolving as a species, but instead you're evolving as a culture. Your tribe grows and develops, eventually becoming a city. As you develop your city and your culture, you develop technology, including space travel. You move out from your individual planet into the solar system, colonizing and terraforming other worlds, abducting things, making treaties, starting wars. It's life starting on a small scale, and developing into a huge scale.

One of the better things about this game is that it's largely about design. Sure, you're all about building a greater and better society, but its the design element that's so appealing.

When Matt was here a week ago, he showed a few videos that I had heard about, but had never seen. This first one is at the Game Developers Conference in 2005. It makes me drool, and it's nearly two years old.



This next one is at E3, 2006. It shows the game being more developed, which is cool, and ends with Robin Williams designing a creature.



Keep in mind, these videos are 40 minutes a pop, but they're so very yummy. It's making me quiver with anticipation. It's making Heidi say, "We need two computers, so we can both play." It's making Matt consider getting a Windows system.