Spore

Spore is a simulation computer game designed by Will Wright that is currently in development by Maxis to be published by EA Games. It is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2006. Wright has a history of designing innovative, successful games like The Sims and SimCity, and Spore appears likely to continue that trend. It is remarkable both for its innovative technology of the game design, as well as the expansive range of sci-fi game play.

Spore is, at first glance, an evolution game: the player molds and guides a single-celled species across many generations, until it becomes intelligent, at which point the player begins molding and guiding a society into a spacefaring civilization. Spore's main innovation, the basis of its scope and customizability, is that Wright has returned to procedural generation.

At E3 2005, the game won the following Game Critics Awards: Best of Show, Best Original Game, Best PC Game, and Best Simulation Game. Answering a question about gameplay, Wright said that there are games that let their players ".....feel like Luke Skywalker. I want Spore players to feel like George Lucas."


 * Release Date Estimated Fall 2006
 * Spore is a single player game, NOT multiplayer.
 * ESRB Rating Pending (RP)
 * Platforms: PC/Mac?/XBOX?

What exactly is Spore?

 * Spore is the next game from Will Wright/Maxis, probably best known for being the makers of Sim City and The Sims. Spore takes elements from many of Maxis' previous games such as Sim Earth, Sim Life and Sim City and blends them into a simulation that allows the player to influence the development of a life form from a single-cellular stage, through multi-cellular life in the oceans and on land, to the development of sentiency, tool-use, and eventually interplanetary and interstellar flight. All of the information we have about the game at the moment is from the talk/demonstration "The Future of Content" given by Will Wright at the Gaming Developer's Conference and the demo and interview given at E3. More information and pictures can be found at the official site (which includes links to various gaming sites) and of course Steve's podcasts.

When will Spore be released?

 * Spore is currently slated for release in Fall of 2006 but this is subject to change.

Is Spore the final name?

 * The official site is currently called Spore and a picture of Will has been seen with a poster behind him that has Spore on it. There is speculation though that it may become known as SimSpore.

Do you require an internet connection to play?

 * No as the game will come with tens of thousands of creations included on the CD. Having an internet connection will give you access to all the custom content created by other players and therefore would greatly increase the longevity and enjoyment of the game. In addition there are plans to be able to swap creations with other players via other media.

How exactly does the multiplayer aspect of the game work?

 * The game has been described as a "MSOG" - Massively Single-player Online Game. There is a central database which collects creatures/buildings/objects that where custom created by players, stores them, and then distributes them to other players. The creatures are compressed in size to about 1k from as big as 5Mb; using methods inspired by the "Demo Scene" to compress complex graphical information into very small sizes.

How will the nature of the content that is added to your world be decided?

 * In the demo Will Wright said the computer would pick and choose what to add based on the computer's categorization of the content it receives, and based on the created content in your own world. How exactly this works is unknown though it is transparent to game play, ie it happens in the background, you don't have to go and search for content to download. You can also track your creations to see where they are being used via the central database. In addition there are plans to allow manual swapping of data for non internet users. It's not yet known if you can pick content manually to be downloaded from the central database but unless it is a balance issue then you probably will be able to.