Will Wright is as the creator of Sim City and The Sims, and having made bundles of money on those projects he might well have just decided to spend the rest of his days in a villa in the sun ad vitam eternam ; however he preferred to get involved with a project called Spore. This game has been sought after for years. The principle is simple : to control a living entity from the unicellular stage to the conquering of space. EA invited us to a game presentation during the GC in Leipzig. Here are our first impressions.

Spore takes more or less the concept of the creation of life according to Darwin. The creationists will scream sacrilege ; in Spore there isn’t a God creating humans by a swing of a magic wand. You start the game as a unicellular organism in the ocean that ends up going onto the soil just to see what is happening there. The creature will evolve and will end up looking for a companion to create a community with [To put it politely –Ed].

The community grows, creates a town with agriculture, later commerce and then its factories. This new civilisation will then go on to conquer the planet and, finally, space. In game mechanics, Spore is separated into five stages : cell, creature, tribe, civilisation and then space.

The presentation skipped the cellular phase to bring us directly to the creature stage. Coming out of the water, our creation will bring some companions with it. Evidently the planet is far from being uninhabited. There are enemies, but also peaceful creatures that you can make friends with. For this, you just need to use the friendship icon ; a system very close in nature to The Sims.

Once you have the indigenous trust, then you must think of reproduction. Seduce an attractive partner and admire the egg that is created. This will enable evolution of the species, which you can affect through the use of an editor. There are parameters for everything ; size, skin colour, shape of the eyes, hair ; you create the creature that you want.

Your choices will be more than aesthetic : The choice of jaw will determine whether your creature is carnivore, omnivore or herbivore. Evidently, all the options will not be available from the start : you will have to win them from other characters or discover them, and each modification costs “DNA Points”.

The next step consists in creating a community important enough on the (still limited) world stage to become a tribe. To gain new members you can either convince people to come live with you, or use force. Pacifist or warmonger, the player will always have the choice. You also gain members by sufficiently feeding your group, who will then multiply.

Once you get to around twenty members, the community becomes a tribe. Fire, Tipis, traditional dancing, all the characteristics of this evolution are present. It is time to give them primitive clothes, pineapple crowns, teeth necklaces ; you can make your creature a fashion victim in no time. The main objective of this stage is to make your tribe grow, by battling face to face with other species if needed.

Growing your tribe will lead you to the Civilization stage. You must build your city in the Sim City fashion, with a power grid, commerce, farms, factories and leisure centres to entertain the inhabitants. The ensemble is once more fashioned via the editor. The forms can be classic or eccentric. The town hall can have the form of a snow man, an ice cream bowl, a Japanese dojo… Anything that you can imagine. Thanks to the online mode, it will also be possible to use the creations of other users. Having a simple town is not sufficient ; you must conquer new territories, by diplomacy or strength. Here again, the player is free in their actions, benign or otherwise. Once the planet is conquered, it is time to go and conquer space !

We can see that the Spore gameplay takes inspiration and ideas from several known games. Creatures for the genesis and management of the creatures, Civilisation for the conquering of territories, Sim City of course for the creation of towns, and The Sims for the interaction in between characters. According to the development team, the player should spend more than 50% of his time in the editor.

As we have seen, this allows for a rich and varied game. Creating a warmongering civilisation whose inhabitants are pink hair balls living in mushroom shaped houses is completely conceivable.

The online mode of Spore adds many more possibilities. Apart from the exchange of creations between players, it will be possible to come in conflict with several tribes or planets via the multiplayer. The players will then be able to compare their civilisation performances ; we can easily imagine the introduction of intergalactic battles ; and why not the alliances of planets faced with a menacing empire ? The possibilities seem infinite and we now understand why the game is taking so long to develop.

Spore seems to be one of the most promising games at Leipzig, though we won’t be seeing it until Spring 2008, which gives developers time to go over the finer details and to add more possibilities. Spore is a game to follow closely and is one that we impatiently await the first playable demos for.