Ever thought you could do the whole creation of the world thing better? A new game called Spore, by game designer extraordinaire Will Wright, gives you your chance, reports MATT GREENOP
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In a unique collision between video games and science, a new title called Spore is redefining the genre known as "God games". Dreamed up by Will Wright, considered the Spielberg of the gaming industry, it takes a whole new look at evolution.
Players flex their creative muscle by making species from scratch using simple tools that furnish art-quality results.
The game begins with the Big Bang, and as the dust settles, players restart the universe with their single-celled organisms (with eyes for aesthetics), and work through levels as the physical and mental attributes of their creatures improve.
They drag themselves from the oceans and enter the creature phase before forming tribes where culture, religion and technology lead them to civilisation. Once the creatures are civilised enough to identify a salad fork, they head off into space, exploring and populating new planets.
An epic God-game that has no real rivals, it melds single player creation with a huge social networking aspect that allows creatures, buildings and vehicles to be shared with other gamers.
Will Wright has an unparalleled history in gaming, with a string of success stories that have netted publishers millions of dollars, like the SimCity series.
His biggest creation to date is The Sims - a voyeuristic world where players build houses and fill them with possessions - which has continued to astound industry insiders with consistent sales that have crossed over traditional gaming boundaries. Female gamers account for an unprecedented 60 per cent of its players, attracted by the creative aspects of gameplay, not to mention the opportunity for shopping, real or not.
A vibrant online community has sprung up out of its success, with websites and internet swap meets to share content and experiences. High level game publisher Electronic Arts is banking on Spore to repeat this success, with EA Asia president Jon Neirmann describing it as "extremely important" to the company's plans this year.
"With Spore, we think that we've got a game with similar appeal across all boundaries," he said. "Like The Sims, it's something that is accessible to young and old, men and women - it's fun for everyone."
To sweeten Spore's upcoming release, a Creature Creator was released for download - it's a simple editor that allows players to create high-quality animated beings through a simple drag-and-drop interface Wright describes as "20 mouse clicks to Pixar quality".
Wright was hoping for 100,000 creations to be online in the two months before the game proper released. This was achieved within 22 hours of the Creator becoming available.
Currently, there are around 2.6 million creatures on the www.sporeshow.com website.
"That exceeds the number of creatures on Earth," said Wright, who developed an equation to measure God's seven-day effort against the Spore faithful's creativity. "It's meant to be a game with the player in the primary creative role. So while playing the game, players are creating the whole universe - the creatures, the buildings, the cities, the vehicles, essentially the entire planet.
"If you could take the entire universe and turn it into a toy, what would that toy look like?"
Very much a toy with education value. Spore's inspiration comes from the SETI programme (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) and the game itself allows players to manipulate the behaviour of ecosystems as they strive to make inhabitable planets.
"When you're actually flying around the universe and you find a star, that's the point that it substantiates the system," he explains. "It randomly generates planets, downloads species, cities, buildings and vehicles, so you actually bring these places into existence, and there's a world evolution simulation that's running in all of these systems."
The climate, gravity and evolution models used in Spore are technically extremely advanced and demand serious processor power to run effectively, but Wright reckons advances made by his development team pale in comparison to what the Spore community has been pulling out of thin air.
"The most satisfying part for me is seeing what the fans do with it," he says.
"I've already been just astounded at what they're doing with the Creature Creator - it's blown away any expectations I had both in quantity and quality. I'm in total awe."
But it's not just the male average gamer that's producing the most spectacular creatures.
"I think adults have basically learned to close off possibilities, where kids haven't.
"To a kid, anything's possible, and that's why when you give a high-powered imagination tool like Spore to a young kid, the things that come out of their imagination are just astoundingly wonderful things that we would probably never think of."
"You naturally extend the boundaries of yourself in a game," he says, "there's a transition of your identity as you get immersed in the game `I am that character' or `the system is mine'. There's this unique blending where the human mind can expand what it is with technology."
LOWDOWN
Who: Will Wright, the Spielberg of gaming
What: Spore, his online game which allows a player to control the evolution of a species from single-cell organism to space explorer.
When: Released September 5. IT'S life, Jim, but not as we've ever known it.
