Mark my words now - Spore will forever change gaming. We’re talking the entire industry, here. And not just in one direction, either.

A game has never spanned so many genres. Arcade, Diablo, RTS…

A game has never shipped with so many amazing creation and tools. Effectively the game is the editor (it doesn’t ship separately) . From creatures, to buildings to vehicles - you create these ‘things’ and let them go

The game world is the biggest we’ve ever seen. Bigger than you can imagine. Galactic Big.

And because the game uses procedural functions to expand data from small seeds (more later), this galaxy can fit on your laptop machine, maybe even handhelds.

And all of the other creatures you meet out on your planet, and in the galaxy, are creations made by other players. They were downloaded seamlessly and in the background while you were still teaching your creatures how to use pointy little spears, and they have their own cultures, behaviors, and physical abilities designed by other people across the world.

Back in March Will Wright (The Sims, SimCity, Raid on Bungeling Bay) drove a Mack truck through an otherwise standard day at the Game Developers Conference. Officially Wright’s presentation was billed as a generic talk about game design. But as his presentation developed, the audience quickly realized that Will Wright was actually announcing his new game. Spore will have the largest scope ever attempted in gaming. Design a creature starting from the microscopic level, alter it through generations up and through the stone age, then influence its culture and its social planetary footprint (ie: conquer your neighbors) until your creatures are ready to move out into the unknowns of space. From here you’re given a UFO that contains many unlockable abilities - from the basic ‘transport your creatures’, to terraform tools, the genesis device, weapons, SETI tools, etc.

Sounds absurdly complex, bloated, out-of-control huge right? Well there’s an added kicker. Will thought long and hard about the future of the industry. He realized that blockbuster publishers spend money up the wazzo on artists who design game content to make their title bigger, brighter, more eye catching than their competition. This, of course, kills a huge potential on profit margins. Don’t get him wrong - he doesn’t wear a suit and he’s definitely not all about the money, but he does have a point here. Smaller game studios have been clossing left and right while the behemoths like EA continue to do well. Why? Because companies like EA own their own Motion Capture Studios, they have armies of artists, they’ve inked deals with Music companies for soundtracks… they effectively have all of their content-creation talent held on retainer. Smaller studios do not, and they’re suffering for it.

Wright hopes to change the way we think about game design. He wants users to design their own content. When you fire up Spore, you’re going to be given a blank canvas with which you physically design your own creatures from scratch. The editing tool looks like a breeze to use - you can add new limbs, stretch bones, affix weapons to your creature, etc. And instead of Maxis whipping the backs of in-house artistic talent to predetermine all possible behaviors for any bizarre creation gamers come up with, they’ve instead created procedural algorithms to determine the physics of motion of your creature. If you guy has 3 legs and a tail, then the game figures out how these limbs coordinate how to step forward, counterbalance with the tail, etc. It figures out what weapons you have (spiked tail, giant mouth) and attacks/eats other creatures accordingly. The game is all about emergent behavior that you create and control. It’s a giant sandbox of life from the microscopic to the galactic.

These algorithms are all over the place, too - small seeds of data are fed through algorithms which dictate creature behaviors, the layout and weather of planets, the solar system , etc. The game is sooo good at compressing data down into the seeds that the game can, and does, eventually move on the galactic level. You can zoom out and hover your mouse over distant stars to listen for radio signals from another civilization that’s living in this universe. If you chose to visit them, then you’ll come across creations that another player’s computer uploaded to the Spore repository and your computer fetched seamlessly while you were busy playing around with your critters. Picture an entire living galaxy of thousands of moving systems (stars age, explode, and then reform new planets over time) each populated with content created by players the world over, and it’s all contained right there on your laptop.

Out of control. Mind blowing.

Anyway - I recently fished up the original GDC presentation where Wright released Spore on the world. You’ll have to register on this site, but you can use bogus information (there’s no ‘we’ll email you with a password’ phase). The presentation is in flash - note that the slides on the right never appear, but yes - you will eventually see footage of the game in the video window. My recommendation is to NOT fast forward through the parts where you see Will speaking. This man is a genius. Everything that man says in the presentation is so golden and true, and is on the cutting edge of game design. Simply put, he ‘gets it’.

Enjoy.
–DDB