So just what is Spore? Spore allows you to control the evolution of life.

Spore is a single player game, but your creations and those of every other Spore player worldwide, go into a central database. All of the creations in that database populate the Spore universe. You don’t play directly against others but you do play against there creations.

The goal is to design living organisms that are successful enough to go on living, allowing them to evolve. Spore starts you in the primordial soup fighting for survival. Once you eat enough you can lay an egg, giving you a chance to add to your creature, a spiked tail for example. It doesn’t end there, you continue to evolve until your creature is more than just a few cells milling about, you’re swimming through the ocean, both prey and predator to both the games creations and other players worldwide.

Survive the ocean and you create land animals, if these evolve they can group together and form tribes. The tribes create villages and the villages become cities. When you’re sufficiently evolved you can escape your planet and visit other peoples planets and try and populate those. First a planet, then the galaxy, then the universe.

Spore is opened ended in the tradition of Elite and Will’s mega hit The Sims.

Eventually you evolve into a swimming trilobite-type creature and from there into a land animal that over eons gets a bigger brain, discovers fire and starts grunting a primitive language.

Before you know it the game changes from an eat or be eaten to a grander “Civilization”-like setting where your creatures are building cities and bullying the neighbors.

The cool thing with “Spore” is that you affect how your creatures evolve. Those traits you set early in the creatures’ evolution manifest themselves in strange ways throughout the game.

Wired has an interview with Will Wright about Spore:

WN: What do you think about people calling Spore “Sim Everything?”

Wright: That was actually my first choice for a name. I thought I would call it Sim Everything, but we needed a secret name for the project, and our lead artist, Ocean Quigley, said, “How about Spore?”

The more we thought about it, the more we liked it. It just felt right. It works on different levels: You start as a little spore-like thing, but also you’re seeding life in the world, and you’re spreading it like a spore. Also, the content you’re creating, that’s very much what Spore is: the compressed representation of something that you send around and which propagates.

Also, not putting “Sim” in front of it was very refreshing to me. It feels like it wants to be breaking out into a completely different thing than what Sim was.

Will gave an hour long presentation on spore at the 2005 game developers conference, Google video has presentation, it’s huge so it will take a while to get;

An edited version is doing the rounds, this is just over half an hour long and is also on Google video;

2005 E3 coverage is here, and Wired’s coverage is here. I got the images above from Wired’s E3 coverage.

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