'Spore' is the new video game of life

With 'Spore,' the player is the creator

By Brian D. Crecente, Special to the Rocky

Published September 4, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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The Space stage of 'Spore'

The Cell stage of 'Spore'

The Civilization stage of 'Spore'

The Creature stage of 'Spore'

The Tribal stage of 'Spore'

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Spore is a universe in a box, a game that turns the fabric of creation and evolution into a plaything.

Within minutes of starting up, Spore players are controlling mitochondria, molding form and life into creatures, sparking evolution, conquering planets, shaping galaxies.

Heady stuff for a computer game, so it's not surprising that the people behind making it - and making it fun - were Will Wright and game studio Maxis, masters of simulation, creators of Sim City and The Sims and masters of PC gaming, having sold more than 100 million copies of the titles worldwide.

And as the much-anticipated, oft-delayed game hits stores on Sunday, its developers are confident Spore lives up to its hype and pedigree.

"I think Spore is extremely important," said Frank Gibeau, president of Electronic Arts' Games Label, which oversees Maxis. "I think it could have a dramatic impact on the industry.

"One of the things that make Will Wright unique is that he can see several years in advance of other people."

Undeniably, one of Wright's unique abilities is to predict and tap into trends that are just beginning to bud. But what Wright seems to do best is take complex systems - like urban planning or the behavioral patterns of ants or Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - and tear them apart and reassemble them into something people want to play with like Sim City, Sim Ant and The Sims.

In the case of Spore, Wright's intellectual inspiration was a heady mix of absurdly high-brow science, books on everything from the anthropic cosmological principle to the powers of 10.

Instead of tearing apart just one system of behavior or rules, Spore weaves the very strings of our existence into a game that tackles life, creation, everything.

Starting from a single cell

Spore is really five games in one.

* In the opening "cell" stage, players start by choosing a planet to call home and are shot through the atmosphere aboard a bit of space rock, tearing into a primordial tidal pool.

Once there, they control a single cell, fighting off larger creatures and eating smaller ones as they grow.

Think of the game as a free-roaming Pac-Man, but played while looking through a microscope. When you discover enough floating DNA, you can pause the game and evolve your little creature with parts, adding stingers, claws, eyes, you name it.

Eventually your creature evolves enough to crawl from the primordial soup and into Spore's next game.

* In the "creature" stage, players roam the countryside of the planet hunting for smaller creatures to befriend or eat. It plays like a typical action game, and it's in this phase that creatures can evolve significantly. You can give them arms, legs, mouths and all the body parts that will stay with them for the rest of the game.

* In the "tribal" stage, there's group combat and gathering as players work with others of their ilk to wipe out other species.

* In the "civilization" stage, you work to conquer a planet of your own kind.

* In the final, chunkiest "space" stage, players roam the galaxy abducting creatures, trading spice, terraforming planets, fighting off hostile aliens. While this free-ranging final stage does allow you to capture the galaxy, it has no real ending.

Create your own story

Spore's selection of stages gives gamers multiple ways to play, and once they complete the entire game they can choose to play any stage individually rather than as part of an epic journey from cell to space flight.

But then they'd miss out on the game's overlaying consequences of choice, a game mechanic that gives Spore a whole other level of depth.

The choices you make in every stage - whether you're a carnivorous or herbivorous cell, whether religion plays a role in the way you conquer the universe - affect the traits your species will develop as it evolves.

"Spore doesn't have a narrative with cut scenes," said Chris Hecker, one of Spore's developers at Maxis. "There is no overarching story. It's a story you make. The story the player creates is so much more powerful than any story we can create."

And Caryl Shaw, Spore producer, says playing the game is just a third of the experience.

"Spore is divided up into three parts," she said. "Play: You play the game levels we created. Create: You can make things in the game. And share."

The sharing comes via multiplayer gaming, which could be Spore's greatest hook.

Players can't connect with one another directly, only through their creations. Once made, these little digital automatons can be added to a universal encyclopedia of creatures.

The game automatically taps this "Sporepedia" to populate a gamer's universe with other people's creations.

"We really looked at what was going on in social networking," Shaw said. "That had an impact on how we designed the game. Whether it's sharing pictures with your mom, or Facebook or MySpace, we took the interesting stuff out of that and tried to make that part of Spore."

Through this pollination of creativity, Spore hopes to tap into that vast population yearning to express itself daily through MySpace pages, in YouTube videos and on blogs.

With the combination of creativity and interaction, developers see a virtual way for humanity to re-create itself - albeit in digital form with three eyes, six legs, a shark's fin and a tail of studded spheres.

"The fact that it has embraced the position of engaging players in the creativity process of the game and making it central to the game makes Spore unique," said Maxis Vice President and Spore executive producer Lucy Bradshaw. "Spore has the ability to transcend some of those niche ideas around video games or gaming."

Looking beyond 'Spore'

Electronic Arts is already thinking of how to use the technology throughout the industry to create a new type of games.

EA's Gibeau says he can imagine EA using the underlying technology and concepts to create a robust action title, a deeper real-time strategy experience and a role- playing game, all built around Spore's central player-creation concepts.

"What's so beautiful about Spore is that it's extremely malleable," he said. "You could add RPG or action, you could take it to different platforms, like (Web-page) flash games, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii.

"It really travels well to other platforms."

Gibeau says Electronic Arts is already looking at how it might license the engine that drives Spore to other designers to allow them to create games with it.

For Hecker, Spore is perhaps the first step in achieving a long-running personal goal he's had for gaming.

"I have a dream that eventually games will become the preeminent art form of the 21st century," he said. "Film was it for the 20th century. I have this hope that games will be in that pantheon.

"We have to push a lot of fronts to do that, and I think Spore pushes on one of those fronts, player interactivity and creativity."

The five stages of Spore

Spore isn't just a game within a game; it's five games within a single title. Playing through the stages, gamers work to evolve their life form from single-cell organism to intergalactic travel.

1. Cell - You drift about in a primordial soup, avoiding other cells (or eating them if you're a carnivore and not an herbivore) and hunting for bits of drifting DNA. As you add new parts to your creature, you move closer to sprouting legs and evolving to the next stage.

2. Creature - Now on land, your personalized creature has to hunt for other creatures to befriend or eat in a 3-D world. Adding new parts makes your creature faster and stronger, and it gains special abilities until it learns to move in a pack and finally evolve.

3. Tribal - In this stage, Spore plays like a simplified strategy game as you work to gather food, research new weapons and tools and take out neighboring tribes. You can no longer modify your creature, but you can create the clothes and armor it wears. Once the continent is cleared, your species makes the leap to cities.

4. Civilization - Now you concentrate on crafting buildings, vehicles, boats and planes as you wage large-scale warfare over the planet, capturing cities and eventually the world.

5. Space - With the world safely under your belt, you create a spaceship and start to explore the galaxy. You scan new life, abduct aliens to transplant, and search for cash-earning spice on planets ripe for conquering. It's in this stage that the game really opens up, allowing you to skim along the surface of a planet or zoom all the way out to a galactic view of the universe.

'Creature Creator' minigame an early hit

"Spore fans are 38 percent God," Will Wright told a gathering of gamers in July.

While Spore is an engaging game that blends a multitude of genres, the heart of Wright's latest creation is the act of creation itself.

Built into the core of the title are more than a dozen tools designed to build the very pieces of the game that users will then start playing.

Players create everything - the tanks, planes and ships of war, the uniforms and the national anthems of their blossoming civilizations, the ecosystems and biospheres of a galaxy of planets. But the most central act of creation comes from molding the first life form out of the lumps of virtual clay that make up Spore's world.

Developer Maxis felt so strongly about getting gamers involved in creating Spore's central creatures that it released a stand-alone mini- game months before the full title hit shelves.

The Creature Creator sells for about $10 and allows gamers to mold slabs of gray flesh into virtually any shape by clicking on the vertebrae hidden inside and stretching, contorting, bloating or shrinking them. Once the mass of flesh is shaped, players flick through a wide selection of moldable arms, legs, hands, feet, eyes, mouths, horns and tails and add them to their creation. Finally, players slap on some color and the creature comes to life.

The diverse selection of body parts and the ability to place them wherever and however you like make it possible to create a nearly unlimited number of creatures for the game.

Once they're created, the creatures can be uploaded to the Sporepedia, Maxis' database of creations, which is automatically tapped to pollinate all players' galaxies and worlds when they play the full game on their own.

The result, the developer hopes, will be the delight of both discovery and creation rolled into one potent experience.

"Here you can create everything and experience it in the game," said Maxis Vice President and Spore executive producer Lucy Bradshaw.

"And the surprise of running through your own galaxy and running into other players' content is magical."

Developers hoped that gamers would produce 100,000 creatures by the time the full Spore game launched. Their estimates were off by a couple of million.

"I was really hoping we'd get 100,000 creatures by September and a million by the end of the year," Wright said while demonstrating the game in Los Angeles in July.

"We hit 100K in 22 hours and a million by the end of the first week. The numbers are just blowing us away."

As of last week, gamers with a passion for creation had churned out more than 3 million unique creatures for the game.

"I think people played with the Creature Creator and told their friends about it," said Caryl Shaw, Spore producer for Maxis. "There's really nothing like the Creature Creator. It's powerful for people to know that they can create something when they didn't know they could."

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