by ERIK LEIJON
When famed American video game designer Will Wright—creator of Sim City and The Sims—has a wild new idea, people listen. In Spore, Wright had his most seemingly implausible concept yet—a game that takes players through the entire evolutionary cycle of a creature, from single-cell organism swimming around a primordial ooze to a society of space travelling super beings.
Conceptualized in 2000, the game originally dubbed Sim Everything will finally be hitting stores for the PC and Mac on Sept. 7. The San Francisco developer’s game about evolution has itself grown from far-out brainstorming sessions to the dense, much talked-about upright creature that gamers will be playing.
“I think that was one of the most fun parts of the project, and probably the most frightening for production and management,” says Spore lead designer Alex Hutchinson, who is now working at EA Montreal. “We were continuously brainstorming from the early stages right until a couple of months before we locked everything down, just to make sure we jammed as much into the game as we possibly could.”
Although simple in concept, Spore is a unique beast in the world of gaming. Players begin by creating their creature using Spore’s creature editor. Their little spore starts as a drop in a bacterial ocean and quickly progresses through four other stages of evolution. From single-cell form, the creature will grow into a full three-dimensional monster, capable of interacting with other newly evolved species in the creature stage.
Once the creature’s brain develops sufficiently, it will enter the tribal phase, where it will learn to grow food, create tools and build a great society. Next is the civilization phase, with the primary mission of taking over the entire planet. Finally, the conquered world will develop the technology for space travel, and that’s when Spore opens up an entire universe of planets to explore.
READY TO RUMBLE: Creature phaseTRIBAL TENDENCIES
Hutchinson, who as lead game designer was responsible for the gameplay mechanics in creature, tribal and most of the civilization phases, says the Spore experience is meant to be split into three equally important parts: creating, sharing and playing. Without a clear-cut goal, players can approach the game any way they want, and can choose not to progress from petri dish to other planets as quickly as possible. Hutchinson believes many players will simply spend their time creating new creatures and vehicles instead.
“A creation element is common in most games, but it’s not really a central element in most games—it’s a token piece on the side,” says Hutchinson, who’s originally from Melbourne, Australia. “We’ve inverted that problem and created a game that serves the creator.
“Let’s say you’re playing a sports game. You might make your character, but 99 per cent of it is about playing the game. In Spore, creating and sharing your character with others is a vast chunk of the experience.”
Not unlike humans, Spore creatures are social animals as well, interacting with each other within the grand cosmos of cartoonish looking monsters. Although sharing your creation with other players is a big part of Spore, the game is not like a massively multiplayer online (MMO) communal experience, like World of Warcraft. Instead of having players interact directly with each other, every unique creature or tool created is uploaded onto Spore’s server and then randomly redistributed to other players’ games—meaning your one-eyed goblin with a leg growing out of his head could be terrorizing a nascent village created by a player in New Zealand without your knowledge.
SOCIAL ANIMALS: Civilization phaseSPORECAST AND SPOREPEDIA
Explains Hutchinson, “Everything you see in the world is going to come from someone else’s game. If you go onto a planet and we need a creature to represent a predator, what we’ve done, instead of building a predator creature ourselves, the game will search through the creations that other people have made and choose an appropriate one for the situation. So the predator in your game will be completely different from the predator in someone else’s game.”
Being an active Spore player will extend far beyond sharing within the constructs of the game. EA and Maxis have created their own YouTube channel, Sporepedia (based on user-content encyclopaedia site Wikipedia) and an RSS Sporecast that will allow players to subscribe to each other’s channels and keep track of their creations.
In conjunction with YouTube, players can upload their videos to the clip-sharing site directly from the game. The Sporepedia—another of Hutchinson’s responsibilities—will keep track of every user’s experience, cataloguing every creature and tool used.
“We were basically creating a giant toy with rules,” says Hutchinson. “In a sense, there are win states, since you can win four times before hitting space [by evolving], but the goal was for people to create their own win states or their own stories. As developers, we’re making the tools to allow them to express themselves. The fun part for me will be sitting back in a week and looking at what stories people chose to tell with the tools we provided.”
LIKE A BIG BROWSER: Space phaseEXPANDING (THE GAMING) UNIVERSE
Hutchinson hopes Spore will represent a new vanguard of games unencumbered with traditional winners and losers, yet Spore still features a logical progression and rewards for succeeding through each evolutionary stage. For instance, as you emerge from the cell to creature stage, the game expands outward to include full 3D environments and more complex gameplay (since a creature is more developed than a single cell).
As you expand further and eventually into space, there’s a lot more a player can control and experience. The space stage was always meant to be the culmination, says Hutchinson, since it represented an opportunity to visit a near unlimited variety of planets created by other Spore users. “Think of ‘space’ like a big browser,” he says.
A recurring theme in Spore is how every game experience will be completely different. Even the music, created in conjunction with Brian Eno, will shift and change based on what’s happening on screen. Even though Hutchinson is now at EA Montreal, working on a yet-to-be-announced title (not Wii Spore, a title rumoured to be in development at EA Montreal, though EA has no comment), he’s looking forward to Spore’s evolution once players get their hands on the game.
“We’ve been working on the game for a really long time and when you see people who’ve done things you weren’t expecting or creating creatures that surprise you, that’s the most fun. It means players are engaging the game as we intended them to—they’re making their own rules.”
Shoot, fight, puzzle
Everything from Star Wars to
maraca
music this season
WHO WILL WIN? Mortal Combat vs. DC UniverseERIK LEIJON
Pencils down class, time for a simple math problem. If you receive a no-interest education loan from the provincial government, and you spend 50 per cent of it on alcohol and weed, how much does that leave for video game purchases?
School books will remain a constant for this equation ($0), value “x” will mean the number of consoles you own, and be sure to add the correct amount if a new PC video card is needed.
September kicks off with the release of the highly anticipated, oft-delayed god game to end all god games, the revolutionary evolutionary strategy game from The Sims creator Will Wright, Spore (EA - PC/Mac). A different, more portable friendly versions of Spore will also simultaneously hit the streets for the Nintendo DS and cell phones.
On Sept. 8 and 9, 2K Sports and EA Sports will drop the gloves yet again for another head-to-head battle between their two competing hockey franchises. The cover boys this year are Columbus sniper Rick Nash (2K) and the Sens Daniel Alfredsson (EA). Montreal developer Ludia will be extremely busy in September, releasing a couple of TV adaptations, The Price Is Right (Ubisoft -DS, Wii, PC, Mac) and Hell’s Kitchen (Ubisoft -DS, Wii, PC, Mac).
A stand-alone sidequest to one of the best PC games of 2007, Crysis: Warhead (EA - PC) should tax your computer considerably later this month. Lucas Arts is promising the most cinematic Star Wars game yet with The Force Unleashed (Lucas Arts - PS3, X360, Wii, PS2, PSP, DS, iPhone), which takes place in between the third and fourth films.
2D side-scrolling will be back and more animated than ever in Wario Land: Shake It! (Nintendo - Wii). A long-awaited FPS sequel is Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway (Ubisoft - PC, PS3, X360), a team-based WWII shooter. Most importantly in September, though, is the grand return of the greatest (i.e. only) maraca music game ever: Samba de Amigo (Sega - Wii). Get ready to be out-posed by the best.
SPOOKED
In time for October—the spookiest month of the year—is the next-gen return of Silent Hill, entitled Homecoming (Konami - PS3, X360). Who cares if the game was adapted into a lousy horror movie, I’m still wearing two pairs of underwear when this scarefest hits stores—three if you include EA’s alien monster game, Dead Space (EA - PS3, X360, PC).
If slick cars, hot Pacific nights and Mannie Fresh beats interest you, Rockstar’s Midnight Club: Los Angeles (PS3, X360 - Rockstar) should satisfy that need for speed. Why is there a children’s TV show called The Naked Brothers Band (not a portmanteau of topless poseur Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers)? Who knows, but the Nickelodeon series will get the Wii treatment this month (THQ - Wii). Publisher THQ does have something more appropriate for the older gamers in the Grand Theft Auto-esque, violent crime drama Saints Row 2 (THQ - X360, PS3, PC).
Continuing down the path of violence, there’s a new Golden Axe (Beast Rider), believe it or not (Sega - X360, PS3). More big sequels coming out in October include SOCOM: Confrontation (SCEA - PS3), Fable 2 (Microsoft - X360) and the unbelievably and deservedly hyped Fallout 3 (Bethesda - PS3, X360, PC)—the only game capable of making a nuclear war-ravaged dystopian future look appealing.
PUZZLING PLANET
One original title that deserves checking out is the amazing looking and completely oddball LittleBigPlanet (SCEA - PS3), a puzzle game that promises to be one of the most unique gaming experiences of the year.
In November, the money-printing Tom Clancy banner shall be raised again, this time in a new strategy game entitled EndWar (Ubisoft - PS3, X360, PC). Tony Hawk developer Treyarch looks to resuscitate the James Bond franchise with their Quantum of Solace adaptation (Activision - PS3, X360, Wii, PC). Here’s hoping the game is better than the film’s name.
Gears of War 2 (Microsoft - X360) and Call of Duty: World At War (Activision - PS3, X360, Wii, PC) will undoubtedly be some fanboy’s dream come true, but Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe (Midway - PS3, X360) will finally determine who would win in a fight: Batman or Sub-Zero.
If Mortal Kombat isn’t enough of a blast from the past for you, anthropomorph duo Banjo-Kazooie will return after an eight-year hiatus in Nuts & Bolts (Microsoft - X360).
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