Spore is a video game developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright, released in September 2008. The game has drawn wide attention for its ability to simulate the development of a species on a galactic scope, using its innovation of user-guided evolution via the use of procedural generation for many of the components of the game, providing vast scope and open-ended gameplay.
Spore is a god game. The player molds and guides a species across many generations, growing it from a single-celled organism into a more complex animal. Eventually, the species becomes sentient. The player then begins molding and guiding this species' society, developing it into a space-faring civilization, at which point they can explore the galaxy in a space ship. Spores main innovation is the use of procedural generation for many of the components of the game, providing vast scope and open-endedness. Wright said, "I didn't want to make players feel like Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins. I wanted them to be like George Lucas or J. R. R. Tolkien." During the 2007 Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference, Wright added that he wanted to create a "toy" for kids to inspire long-term thinking, stating, "I think toys can change the world."
History and development
Spore was originally a working title, suggested by Maxis developer Ocean Quigley, for the game which was first referred to by the general public as SimEverything. Even though SimEverything was a first choice name for Wright, the title Spore stuck. Wright adding it also freed him from the preconceptions another Sim title would have brought, saying "...Not putting 'Sim' in front of it was very refreshing to me. It feels like it wants to be breaking out into a completely different thing than what Sim was." Wright was inspired by the Drake equation and the 1977 film Powers of Ten when developing Spore.
Spore'''s development began in 2000, around the time that development began for The Sims Online. The earliest version was inspired by the SETI Project, as Wright admitted, "The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore." Spore's design documents were published in an issue of Wired in 2004 as a layout portraying the cycle of evolution, unbeknownst to the magazine and the general public at that time. At the 2005 Game Developers Conference (GDC), Spore was first revealed and demonstrated to the public during a speech on procedural generation.
It was officially unveiled two months later at E3 2005, the industry's annual trade show. GDC 2006 featured two Spore related talks, Building Community Around Pollinated Content in Spore and Spore: Preproduction Through Prototyping. A video released on YouTube shows "unedited footage of Spore that will be going to TV networks covering E3 2006", and includes an overhauled creature editor, a first look at the texturing tools, as well as glimpses at other aspects of the game. Such things were discussed on G4's Attack of the Show numerous times. Will Wright has said that the game was also influenced by many TV shows, films and toys, such as Lego and Star Wars. By E3 2007, the game's look had changed again, with major changes to the graphical style. The Sporepedia was inspired by Web 2.0.
At the DICE Summit, Wright playfully introduced four designers according to their design team personas, dubbing designer and senior art director Quigley as The Scientist, Chaim Gingold as The Toymaker, Jenna Chalmers as The Mastermind, Alex Hutchinson as The Cowboy, and himself as The Traffic Cop. Quigley revealed at the Summit the difficulty of making the editors (the creature and vehicle editors in particular) extremely accessible, stating it was like "art directing a million incompetents... [Gamers] don't have good sense as to what makes a good character, so you have to put in all these techniques and tools, so when they do something, it looks good."The New York Times reported a projected development cost of twenty million United States dollars on October 10, 2006.
In April 2007, Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson joined Maxis to work on Spore. Soon after, some video game sites theorized that this news indicated that the release of Spore might slip to 2008. A projected 2008 release was revealed three weeks later at an EA conference call, corroborating the speculation that a significant amount of development was still left to be completed. In a GameVideos interview with Garnett Lee, Wright explained, "I credit him with, basically, you know, being able to present [the Civilization phase] that has that many, ah, strategic possibilities but not have it being overwhelming from a gameplay mechanic sense."
By July 2007, the game was a complete, fully featured alpha build undergoing closed play testing. On August 23, 2007, a closed door demonstration of a playable build was featured at Games Convention 2007 in Leipzig, Germany.
At the 2008 DICE Summit, Electronic Arts CEO John Ricitiello stated, "It's probably the greatest creative risk maybe going on in the game industry today...I believe it's going to be one of the greatest franchises in our industry and will rival World of Warcraft or The Sims or Rock Band. It's going to be right up there."
Promotion and advertising were ramped up in May and June 2008, as the YouTube Spore channel opened, new trailers focusing on each phase along with developer interviews were released, and the Creature Creator was released, allowing players to upload their creations to the revamped official site.
Will Wright announced at E3 2008 that National Geographic would produce a television documentary on Spore, as scientists use the game to explain real-life biological, physical, and evolutionary science. This documentary would later be included with Spore: Galactic Edition. He also announced a partnership with SETI, taking part in the Celebrating Science 2008 activity on July 16, 2008, where Spore betas were available for play.Electronic Arts E3 2008 press conference
On August 14, 2008, Spore was declared to have gone gold.
Gameplay changes
The gameplay itself had numerous changes during development. The most striking was the shift in realism, from the gritty depiction of cellular and animal life in the GDC 2005 debut, to the current iteration of a more round, softer edged depiction of the creatures. The most visible change was in the cellular phase, which transformed the unicellular organisms into strange insects with cartoonish, human-like eyes, which were used "to make it cute", according to Wright during the 2007 TED seminar. According to Wright, the Spore development team was broken into two camps, the "Cute" camp that wanted to skew the game's focus towards a The Sims-type of game, and the "Science" camp that wanted to keep the game as realistic as possible. The final version was more or less a compromise between the two; Wright stated, "We ended up with a very nice balance of the two factors."
Another constantly changing aspect was the number of phases in the game. Initially, in 2005, the game consisted of seven phases: Cell, Underwater, Creature, Tribe, City, Civilization and Space. During the annual Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences DICE Summit on February 7, 2007, a slide was displayed (see image, right) which listed a total of eight phases. The Underwater phase had been removed, and Molecular was added (which was likened to Tetris). Furthermore, the Space phase was split into Terraform and Galactic phases; terraforming represented a limited form of power to slowly change planets within one's own system, whilst the galactic phase represented a more god-like power upon the acquisition of the interstellar space drive: being able to travel outside of one's solar system. The 2007 TED seminar in March 2007 displayed only five phases. The Molecular and Cellular phases had been condensed into one Cell phase. The City stage had been removed, and from Wright's demonstration it appears that the stage has been assimilated into the start of the Civilization phase. Furthermore, the two last phases were condensed back into the single Space phase.
In Wright's 2005 demonstration, the creature with which he began looked remarkably similar to his earlier microbe. This led many people to believe that the creature was based upon the microbe's appearance. However, in a 2006 video from E3, narrated by a senior programmer, it was said that the player will initially begin as a slug-like animal. The narrator further stated the reason for this was to allow for more player creativity. This created uncertainty as to which method would be used in the final game; particularly as a later video demonstrated the essence of the cell creature emerging from a pond. The 2007 TED Presentation in March 2007 again depicted a legless, slug-like creature emerging from the water, leaving a trail of slime in its wake. The cellular phase was renamed as the tide pool phase,Spore.com "About" page then called the cell phase months later. The final phases: Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization and Space were the five available stages at the final release of Spore.
Two notable locomotive abilities for the creatures were also the subject of speculation during the long development:
Flight A flying creature was seen briefly in the GDC 2005 demo, but for a long time since that appearance, it was unknown whether it would be possible to make flying creatures in the game, though it is now known that it is. Many Maxis-developed default Spore creatures feature feathers and wings, and it is now known that they are functional and not simply decorative. Wing types include butterfly-like wings, as seen in the IGN Evolution video, bat-like wings, and bird-like wings. In a Gadgetoff 2007 seminar demonstration, Wright made a bird-like creature with large, feathered wings; but it only flapped its wings and did not fly. However, on February 13, 2008, a hands on preview revealed that wings still give creatures the ability of limited flight. The Creature Creator and subsequent videos revealed that creatures have a limited form of flight: gliding. A creature's ability to stay aloft was dependent on two factors: the jumping ability (to get in the air) and gliding ability (how slow the descent is).
Swimming Similarly, the underwater phase featuring swimming creatures had vanished since its appearance in the original 2005 GDC demo, which led to fears that it may have been cut. However, in the July 2006 issue of PC Gamer (UK) their preview of Spore suggested that players would not only be able to create aquatic creatures, but would be able to develop them into a fully underwater civilization.PC Gamer UK, July 2006, issue 163, page 31 More recently, in the SXSW 2007 demo, each phase has a mentioned text goal on the screen and the stated goal of the tide pool phase is "become large enough to move onto land", by implication omitting a creature-underwater phase. The opening Flash player cinematic of the official site does feature underwater evolution of a creature, so it is possible that the underwater phase is simply a part of the larger tide pool phase.
During the SXSW 2007 demo, Will Wright said that the underwater phase was on the verge of being cut out. However, he has also said that, if cut, underwater civilizations would be one of the first things to add via an expansion pack. Though the final version of Spore released to stores had indeed proven the underwater phase had been cut, it is still possible for the player's creature to swim above water. If the player swim too far into the sea, then they get eaten by a sea monster, which is probably the present-game Maxis creature, Battered Feesh.
Release date delays
The game had undergone numerous delays to its release date throughout its development, having appeared at three straight E3 shows with the promise of a release that year.