Wow, if this game turns how half as innovative and good as it sounds, it'll still be freakin' awesome!

IGN.com -- Spore

E3 2005: Spore
Will Wright evolves gaming into a six headed creature with a hankering to conquer the galaxy.
by Dan Adams

May 19, 2005 - Will Wright is a mad genius of gaming. If his career in the industry hadn't already pointed at that, his newest project Spore cements the fact that he's one of the most creative and bold risk takers in the industry. To put it simply, and this is not a simple game, Spore allows players to create and evolve a life form from a microscopic organism in the goop of early life up to a highly intelligent being, in order to expand through the galaxy and thousands of other planets with highly user-customizable content along the way. Better yet, it provides community functionality that is unprecedented, even in view of The Sims franchise. This is one insanely ambitious piece of gaming, and I am now hooked.

The Evolution Game

Spore is named after how the game begins. All life has to start somewhere and most likely that somewhere is a nasty pool of watery muck. In this case, the view is centered on a microscopic creature in that can swim and eat. Other life forms in the muck have evolved for defense and attack. Unfortunately, your creature is fairly weak and needs to evolve as quickly as possible. In order to do that, the creature has to eat as much as possible while avoiding the bad things. It actually looks more like a tiny mini-game at this point. After eating enough, your creature will lay an egg behind it, symbolizing the chance to evolve into the next generation. Clicking on the egg will bring up the evolution screen.

The evolution screen shows a 3D model of the creature shown in the game world. It can be rotated, moved, and most importantly, altered in this setting. Life span points can be spent on evolving your creature into new and wonderful things. Different options will make themselves available for each generation. It's a little unclear how these life span points are gained, though we think that it's through eating creatures and doing different things before evolving.

The first evolution that Will added to his micro creature was a simple spike onto its head to give it a defense (and offense) mechanism. Suddenly the creature could turn the tables on its attackers.


Will then zoomed ahead in time to ten generations down the road. The creature had undergone some huge changes evolving up into a creature swimming through the open oceans. It was a floppy lizard looking creature that swam like a retarded dolphin. Movement is actually completely linked to the design of the creature's body. Spore uses a procedural animation system that will figure out how the body should be moving depending on the shape and bone structure. Every creature we were shown -- from the long legged freaks to the short legged bloated beak creature whose head almost tipped it over while turning and the fluffy Care Bear looking creature -- had a very plausible animation for its structure. But after laying another egg, Will changed the creature dramatically. Not only can you change the parts of the creature, but you can also change the shape and size of the creature, creating a completely unique design. Creature textures can also be changed as well. Stripes and spots can be added or some other mix of coloring and design.

In the case of our water-born lizard creature, Will changed the shape of it, bending its tail to a curve up over its head, adding two hind legs with feet and only one front leg, creating a tripod type of creature. After leaving the evolution editor, the creature dropped down to the ocean floor like a rock and had to walk out onto land, finding itself suddenly in contact with a whole new range of creatures.

The completely awesome part about that is that all of the creatures that you encounter will be creatures that someone else designed on his computer. Spore isn't an online game, but it has some aspects of being one. Anybody who creates content in their version of Spore will have it automatically uploaded onto a master server (an optional feature) and then downloaded onto other computers running the game without ever having to worry about an interface, giving a near endless array of player created content. The system is even smart enough to fill out the ecosystem of the planet. So if there's some sort of niche creature missing from the system, the game will look through the database and pull down a player-created creature which fills that void.

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Three legged tripod creature, which I'm calling Tripod from now on, began to run around the environment and explore, even having to run away from a gigantic spider-looking creature with blades on its arms. As usual, Tripod needed to eat to survive and evolve. Because he was given a weapon on the tip of his tail, Will ordered him to attack and kill another animal. After a very one sided battle, Tripod started to feast on the creature. In another impressive move, the creature showed learning ability after being ordered to drag the body to a new place and eat it. The choice to become a predator will be completely up to the player as well.

At this point, the creature had evolved far enough that some lovin' had to take place in order to procreate and evolve some more. The sequence for the mating was procedural as well, and was funny as hell thanks to the awesome love makin' music playing in the background. A little sax to liven up the nest and before too long, an egg popped out again.

This time, instead of evolving the physical form any more, Will evolved the creature's brain, which begins a whole new section of the game.

The Tribal Game

Once the brain has been upgraded, the creatures will move into a different mode of play and begin early societies. Now, instead of evolving though the creature evolution screen, creatures will learn and grow in a social sense through the use of tools and other objects. The awesome thing was, every time that Will placed something near the Tripods, they jumped up in surprised excitement and immediately ran over to it to examine it. Each of the Tripods grabbed a weapon with their tail claw when the weapon rack was placed down, and carried them around. Even better, after a fire pit and drum were placed, some of the creatures began beating on the drum while others danced around in circles hefting the weapons. Apparently these kinds of tools will actually encourage the development of religion and other types of pursuits.


Will also was quick to point out that other tribes of the creatures (in this case, the Tripods) formed all across the planet and were also trying to build up their societies at the same time.

At the center of each tribe is a hut that acts as the marker of the society. This hut can be upgraded to a newer, nicer hut as well, which will open up new objects for the creatures to interact with, leading to more improvements. Eventually, the society will become complex enough that it moves into the next stage of the game.

The City/Civilization Game

After showing some of the early society, Will moved the demo forward into more advanced civilizations based around cities instead of mere tribes. These cities were homes to the Tripods and their families, evolving along the course that Will set for them. Cities are pretty small areas for the most part and seem more to represent cities rather than serve as ever expandable metropolitan areas like Black & White 2.

Players will be able to set buildings inside of their city walls to serve certain purposes. What these purposes are is still a bit of a mystery, but it looked as though they serve as factories and maybe food plants and so on like any other RTS might have. The great thing about these buildings is that they're also completely customizable. Objects can be added onto their mesh, the shape can be changed, the size can be adjusted, the colors and textures can be fixed, and then these buildings too will be uploaded onto the central server. When constructing a building, the game will actually hunt the database for a good starting point that fits the style of your civilization and other buildings. Once placed, this base model can be altered to your liking. Just moving the camera up to the closest city over gave a good look at the variety of city styles. While Will's was a bubbly happy-go-lucky city of happy party Tripods, the one right up the way looked futuristic and severe in its industrial nature. Apparently the civilization there was a much more ordered bunch of Tripods that were maybe a bit more efficient.


When this civ sent out vehicles into the field, you could see that style reflected in them as well -- probably because all of the basic unit types can also be completely customized. Will's Tripods had much goofier looking vehicles as well to show off their style nicely. And, as you should have guessed, all of these will be uploaded as well onto that central server and base vehicles will be chosen by the game out of that crop for a basic starting point that fits the style of your civ and your buildings. Very nutty and very cool.

The point of this part of the game is to bring the planet together. Whether that's through diplomacy, trade, or beating the other civilizations with a stick and taking their cities from them is up to the player. At this point, the camera can start panning out a bit more, giving players a better look for their strategic decisions as well, begging for some strategy. Finally, after getting to a high enough point of technology and society, the space race begins.

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The Terraforming Game

Once a player can buy a UFO, which will be very expensive (money is gained through trade and conquest), the game will change again dramatically. This UFO not only can fly around over the planet and zoom out to see the entire globe (which is an actual sphere where you can see cities and terrain) but can also collect specimens using the abduction beam.

It's still a bit unclear what all can be done with this feature, but Will used it in a creative way to discover new habitable planets. Once a couple of crazy spider creatures with claws were picked up, Will zoomed the camera view out past the planet into a view of the entire solar system. After finding a planet a bit farther away from the sun, Will zoomed on in with his UFO and then dropped the creature off to see what would happen. Unfortunately for the creature, there was no atmosphere on the planet and it soon exploded into a bloody spray from the lack of pressure.

Seeing that this planet needed an atmosphere first, Will set to creating a livable surface for the Tripods. Cities can still be founded on the surface regardless of the atmosphere as clear bubble domes will surround cities keeping them safe. In fact, civilizations that evolved under water would even be able to place cities down that had bubble domes filled with water to accommodate differently evolved creatures (there's no rule about having to leave the water and climb onto land to evolve into intelligent creatures). But instead of simply leaving well enough alone, Will started activating volcanoes across the planet surface to begin creating the atmosphere. Abilities like this can be purchased as technology upgrades for the UFO. One of the biggest upgrades is the genesis device that terraforms a planet right before your eyes.

The Interstellar Game

After terraforming planets in the Tripod home system, Will zoomed the camera out even farther to a view that showed a ton of stars. Each of these stars is an actual system that can be traveled to in the UFO. Answering the question of "is there other life out there?" is easy enough with the radio telescope. Putting the cursor over the other planets will give a radio transition of the area. Get a signal and you'll know it's inhabited. After finding a planet with a signal, Will zoomed down to that system and went looking for the civilization living there (there was only one planet so this was easy).

After finding the city with very crystalline buildings, Will attempted to make contact via a musical language bit ala Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These guys (someone else's creatures) fired on the UFO. Will then shot back from the UFO in a small action sequence. After realizing his regular weapons weren't doing much damage, he backed out into an orbital view. From there he blew up the planet with a super weapon. Thousands of voices cried out at once... and then were silent. The resulting debris made an asteroid field that circled the sun. Will traveled off to other planets.


This is the kind of thing that Will is most excited about. It adds the feel of a massively multiplayer experience without the worry of screwing up someone else's game when you blow up their planet or having someone else blow up your planet.

As with the planetary game, conquering the universe is simply a choice. Trade and diplomacy are also options. Players who want to go the Star Trek route and create a federation of planets can do so.

The Galactic Game

Finally, Will pushed back the view one last time showing off the last level of scale that pushed us over that final edge and forced us to ask the question, "Is this guy freaking crazy?" The answer is probably yes. That final view showed that the tons of planets in the Interstellar game were actually just a very small fraction of a gigantic galaxy where every star you see holds a potential enemy, ally, or colony.

Do colorations for your creature have advantages or disadvantages? Is there a certain amount of physical evolution before you can evolve the brain? Can creatures develop clothes? Do planets continue to terraform even if you leave them to travel elsewhere? These are only a small fraction in the galaxy of questions that we have now. Because of time considerations, there was no opportunity for a Q&A.

Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for new info about Spore. It's got an awesome premise that's already looking pretty well put together. It may not win any graphical achievements like some of the flashier strategy and shooter games out there, but it has more interesting features than we've seen in quite some time.