Creatures is an artificial life video game series created in the mid-1990s by English computer scientist Steve Grand while working for the Cambridge video game developer Millennium Interactive.
The gameplay focuses on raising alien creatures known as Norns, teaching them to survive, helping them explore their world, defending them against other species, and breeding them. Words can be taught to the creatures by a learning computer (for verbs) or by repeating the name of the object while the creature looks at it. Once a creature understands language, the player can instruct their creature by typing in instructions, which the creature can choose to obey.
A complete life cycle is modeled for the creatures—childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence, each with its own unique needs. The gameplay is designed to foster an emotional bond between the player and their creatures. Rather than taking a scripted approach, the games in the Creatures series were driven by detailed biological and neurological simulation and its unexpected results.
There have been six major Creatures releases from Creature Labs: between 1996 and 2001 there were three main games, the Docking Station add-on (generally referred to as a separate game) and two children's games, and there were three games created for console systems.
Overview The program was one of the first commercial titles to code artificial life organisms from the genetic level upwards using a sophisticated biochemistry and neural network brains, including simulated senses of sight, hearing and touch. This meant that the Norns and their DNA could develop and "evolve" in increasingly diverse ways, unpredicted by the makers. By breeding certain Norns with others, some traits could be passed on to following generations. The Norns turned out to behave similarly to living creatures. Norns respond to external stimuli, such as interaction with the player, and internal stimuli, such as changes in chemical concentrations or neural activities. Sight is simulated by having a group of neurons representing each type of object in the world. When an object belonging to this type is in front of the creature ('within eyesight'), the neuron becomes active and the creature can 'see' the object. The Norns possess simulated biological drives which give punishment when they are raised, and reward when they are lowered. The model for Norns' decision-making process is behaviorist and based on Norns learning how to reduce their drives. Dickinson and Balleine state that while this stimulus-response/reinforcement process makes the creatures seem like they are goal-directed, they are instead 'habit machines' responding in a learned fashion to particular stimuli.
Mutations in the genome can occur, allowing new characteristics to appear in the population and potentially be inherited by a future generation. Because the Norns have a lifespan of roughly 40 hours, users could observe the changes that occur over a large number of generations. Faulty genomes can also occur—for example, Norns which cannot see or hear, creatures which are either missing organs or have surplus organs, or immortal Norns due to a hyper-efficient digestion system. Creatures used the emergent approach seen in animats, but with the goal of more complex behaviours than locomotion. Grand describes the psychological model of the creatures as being inspired by rats. In 2000, Grand described the intelligence level of Norns as being like ants. Margaret Boden, in 2003, rejected Creatures as being a form of alien life as the simulated metabolism is concerned with controlling the Norn's behaviour, not on maintaining its 'physical' form. In 2011, Grand stated that while the Norns in Creatures could learn, generalise from past experiences to novel experiences, and react in an intelligent manner to stimuli, they could not think.
The genetics in Creatures are somewhat different from human genetics; they are haploid. There is no concept of dominant gene and recessive gene, much less recombination between loci. Nevertheless, the complexity of the simulated biochemistry meant that Norn behaviour was highly unpredictable.
Among the fans of Creatures were the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, who called it a "quantum leap in the development of artificial life", and author Douglas Adams. Creatures inspired some players to take up careers in the sciences.
History Originally conceived as a desktop pet with a brain, Grand later incorporated inspiration from The Planiverse to pitch a "little computer ewoks" game, like the game Little Computer People. Grand wanted players to have a rapport with their creatures, feeling that he should make the creatures seem "genuinely alive" to the player, showing "the 'right' kind of behaviour' in a variety of circumstances. To create this kind of behaviour, Grand felt it was necessary to program the creatures by simulating the building blocks of nature in a bottom-up approach, allowing the complex behaviour to emerge, rather than using a rule-based system approach. Grand later wished to include references to English and Norse mythology, to try to make the world more internally consistent, but found that the team wanted to make the game into a conventional adventure game. He later decided to scale back on the mythology aspects of the game, focusing instead on the artificial life point—eventually presenting the game as an artificial pet hobby, which provided some of the impetus to include genetics in the creatures. Creatures was developed as a consumer product by Millennium, and was released by Mindscape in 1996. The program was instantly successful, and an online community of players soon formed, swapping Norns, creating new objects for Albia, sharing tips on how to play the game and anecdotes about unexpected evolutionary changes that they had seen, and even creating new breeds of Norn. At one point, the Creatures online community was the largest of its type.
In 1996, Creatures won an EMMA Award. Based on sales of 500,000 copies of Creatures from 1996 through to the second quarter of 1998, it was estimated that at that time, there was a possible global population of up to five million norns.
Development of Creatures 2 began in Q3 1997. In 1998, the video games division of Millennium was sold to Sony Entertainment while those working on alife and Creatures formed a new company called Cyberlife Technology. Along with continued work on the Creatures titles, the company did work for industry and the British Ministry of Defence, famously attempting to teach live organisms to fly virtual fighter jets. Creatures 2 was nominated in the Artificial Intelligence category of the Game Developers Conference's Spotlight Award.
In the late 1990s, Grand left Cyberlife to form Cyberlife Research and focus on the production of new alife technologies, including work on a robotic life form he called Lucy as well as writing books about his research. The remainder of the company was renamed Creature Labs, and focused on video game development.
Sequels to Creatures, including Creatures 2, Creatures 3 and the small-children's games Creatures Adventures and Creatures Playground, were released by Creature Labs in subsequent years. Creatures Adventures won an EMMA Award in 2000. Creatures Playground was exhibited at E3 and nominated for a BAFTA Award in 2000. The final major Creatures release, Docking Station, was made available for download from the company's web site in 2001.
Development was suspended on future Creatures games on March 20, 2003, when Creature Labs ceased operations, but development and trademark rights have since been purchased by Gameware Development, Ltd. Gameware has revived the Creatures Developer Network, the shop, the forums, the Docking Station server, and has released many before-purchasable tools and add-ons for free.
Gameware staff that previously worked on Creatures developed a convergent media game for the BBC called BAMZOOKi.
In 2004, the Creatures games have been re-released in combination packs under the names Creatures: The Albian Years (C1, C2), Creatures Exodus (C3, DS) and Creatures Village (CA, CP). The Albian Years, and Exodus include the separate games, whereas Village has merged Adventures and Playground into a single game. At this time, it was estimated that there were thousands of Creatures players.Parry, L. (2004). A scripted sample-based music system for game environments using .NET. (Computer Science Technical Reports; No. CSBU-2004-14). Department of Computer Science, University of Bath. https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/publications/a-scripted-sample-based-music-system-for-game-environments-using-
Kutoka Interactive, a Canadian children's software company, has created releases of Creatures Exodus (Kutoka) and Creatures Village (Kutoka Kids) that are compatible with both Apple's Mac OS X and Windows XP. They were released on 30 September 2005, and can be purchased either directly from Kutoka or from other online stores.
In November 2009, GOG.com announced that they were offering Creatures: The Albian Years, Creatures Exodus and Creatures Village for sale on their site as digital downloads. In 2011, Creatures 3: Raised in Space, a PlayStation One game, was re-released on the PlayStation Plus service.
In 2011, Fishing Cactus announced they were developing Creatures 4, to be demonstrated at that year's Gamescom. A second demonstration was exhibited at Gamescom 2012. Creatures 4 is Fishing Cactus's most complex game to date. Creatures 4 appeared at the 2012 Paris Games Week. In May 2013, Fishing Cactus announced that they and BigBen were partnering with ProSiebenSat.1 Games as a distributor, and that the name of the game would be changed from Creatures 4 to Creatures Online. Another demo was shown at Gamescom 2013. Julien Hamaide, a developer of Creatures Online, presented about it at the Game/AI Conference 2014. In September 2015, Fishing Cactus halted the development of Creatures Online.
In 2016, Spil Games announced that they had bought the Creatures intellectual property from BigBen and were developing a free-to-play mobile game called Creatures Family to be released in 2017. In December 2021, Creatures 3, Docking Station, Creatures: The Albian Years and Creatures Village were released on the Steam games service.
Games
There were six major Creatures releases from Creature Labs. In addition to the three principal games, the Docking Station add-on (generally referenced as a separate game) and two children's games were released.
Main series (1996–2001)