What is Spore?

In Will Wright’s Words

The core of it is, we want the players to create their own worlds, all the way from the microscopic scale up to the galactic. At every level of the game there is a simulation of life, society, civilization, exploration, the player’s kind of pushing back against, but as they create each level of this world it’s automatically shared with other players, so that the players playing are also creating the game worlds for everybody else. (Popular Science, 2007)

In My Words

Spore is many things and different phases of the game will appeal to different players. Sure it’s about evolution and on this site we pride ourselves of talking about some of the more cerebral topics behind the idea of Spore, but in the end that’s not what it is for the average gamer and it’s not what the developers intended it to be. At its core, I think more than anything Spore is a game of creation and creativity. It’s about making things that only you have thought of, about testing your own imagination and letting your inner child loose. Some of us grew up playing Legos and I think we are naturally attracted to Spore because of the resemblance in the amount of control you have over the implementation of your ideas.

Spore Editors

What makes Spore so magnificient is the presence of a large number of in-game tools that allow you to create every thing from your very own carnivorous Care Bear to an attack helicopter.

• Phase 1 - Organism
• Phase 2 - Creature
• Phase 3 - Camp structures & Armor
• Phase 4 - City buildings, planes and land vehicles
• Phase 5 -  Spaceship editor & Terraforming (not exactly an editor, but similar purpose and effect)

Once you reach the space phase, you can go back and play with any of the editors as much as you want. But until then, you are limited to the editors available in your phase (ie. only phase 2 can use the creature editor).

Gaming Resemblances

Each phase of Spore has a really different feel and plays a lot like an entirely new game. During Will Wright’s earlier presentations, he compared the different phases to existing games. For those interested, there was actually a Phase 0 planned and it would have been played at the atomic level with a sort of tetris-like gameplay to it. But it was scrapped and won’t make its into the final game.

• Phase 1 - Supped up Pac Man with an organism editor (this is a relatively short phase to introduce the game to the player)
• Phase 2 - Diablo 2
• Phase 3 - Populus
• Phase 4 - Civilization
• Phase 5 - Something new

Gameplay Thoughts by Will Wright

I always thought of it kind of almost as a T, where the base of the T is you working your way up the levels, where there are goals from cell to evolution to tribe to civilization. Once you get to space, though, the game opens out — that’s the top of the T †where now there are these different metagames, different kinds of metagoals you can pursue, and it becomes more of an open-ended sandbox up at the space level. So its kind of a combination of directed gameplay at the base of the T working your way up and opening up into a sandbox at the top that’s more Grand Theft Auto-like. (Popular Science, 2007)

The Man Behind Spore

You may have heard of Will Wright (before this article) and even if you haven’t, you have definitely heard of the games he has masterminded. Both The Sims and the SimCity series have been products of his imagination and his latest creation is Spore. The two games are rather different but they have one very important link: immersion. You feel directly invested into the game, if things don’t go your way - you cringe. This element is also present in Spore, as Will Wright wants you to care about your creature and the success of your species. If you wish to learn a bit more about this very influential game designer, you should read his biography on Wikipedia.

Sim Everything?

That was actually my first choice for a name. I thought I would call it Sim Everything, but we needed a secret name for the project, and our lead artist, Ocean Quigley, said, “How about Spore?”

The more we thought about it, the more we liked it. It just felt right. It works on different levels: You start as a little spore-like thing, but also you’re seeding life in the world, and you’re spreading it like a spore. Also, the content you’re creating, that’s very much what Spore is: the compressed representation of something that you send around and which propagates.

Also, 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. (Wired, 2005)