![]() ![]() Its surprise debut at the 2005 Game Developer's Conference left the standing-room-only full-house crowd to spread hushed disbelieving "did you see it, too?" sentiments and covert blurry cell-phone photos across the internet, all of whom were left unable to fully express in words the potential magnitude of what they'd just witnessed, and each subsequent demonstration has only added more to think about, more to see, more to digest.ĭespite former grandiosity, the expansiveness and infinitesimal minute detail of the Sims that came before it now seeming like a simple twinkle in Spore's placeable and replaceable segmented, stalked, or long-lashed eyes, Will Wright sits sideways in his office chair, effortlessly ready to field any question, knowing that there isn't any space in his Space he hasn't already traveled through before.įor a game which 'sim's life, the universe, and everything in between – every bit the culmination of decades' worth of those now bite-sized pieces – and which is modestly innovating on a number of fronts from its player-driven generative technologies to its "massively single player" pollinated content, ask Wright what he's most proud of and you might expect a litany of engineering achievements. We're here in an attempt to get to wrap our minds around everything, by which we mean Everything. His office is as you would expect it would be – covered top to toe with maps of the solar system, remote controlled toy robots, books, and scribbled notes expanding even to the glass door onto his office patio. Just what other surprises Maxis has in store will remain secret in the short few weeks before the game is released, but the feature below, originally written for Edge magazine, brings more clarity with a look back at where Spore has come from, and the stuff it's made of. Other details have since cropped up and are looming as lusciously large as the game's ever-nearing release date: massive 'epic' creatures that can be killed for special bonuses and eventually be player-created, the ability to domesticate creatures as the Tribe level, trade routes, resource harvesting at Tribe and Civ levels once evolution has been locked down, and controlling entire fleets of allied ships as you make your way across the universe. At the same time, Riccitiello also hinted at the game's microtransactional future – a Sims Store-like marketplace of new parts for Spore's various editors – an idea that was in the breeze during my visit but that I was made to un-remember with a wave of a Maxis mind-control wand, and was previously officially denied, but seems now to surely be in the cards. Since then, Creature Creator user data has addressed that latter issue, with EA head John Riccitiello himself recently expressing surprise at the one-third female downloaders of the early-release trial. What I found there, though, was a game still under day-to-day expansion beyond the galaxies it had already created, a team still dynamically morphing and terraforming its near-limitless landscapes, and revealing aspects that have still to date gone relatively untouched – interspecies relationships, rare Maxis-custom-created 'storybook' planets giving players a more whimsical experience than its generative formulae allow, and a creator still working out the million dollar question: will its sci-fi leanings limit its universal appeal? It was also precisely when Brian Eno's involvement had been announced via a Long Now Foundation talk, which, coincidentally, I had stayed up all hours the night before to listen to, and subsequently found myself in state of gentle delirium for the visit proper, a state not eased by the sharpness of the minds behind Spore: Will Wright's infamous ability to jump from one end of a cultural/scientific extreme to the next via a segue that only comes clear on later, deeper introspection, and tech lead Chris Hecker's similarly notorious lightyear-a-minute speech pattern compounded by the wide algorhythmic stride of his own mathematical mind. I originally visited what I was instructed at the time to refer to as "Spore Group" (but has continued to retain its original Maxis name since) in the summer of 2006, which, referring to Wired magazine's recent timeline, puts the game at a point when it had just earned itself nearly a year of additional development – one we now know would extend itself over a year more. ![]()
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