Wright: "Play Spore for your entire life and you'll never visit everywhere"

By Johnny Minkley Published 25 July, 2008

Sims man wows Comic Con crowd.

Surely at the top of most gamers' fantasy dinner party invitation list, Sims creator Will Wright delivered a typically engaging and esoteric presentation at Comic Con 2008 this week, while performing an extensive demo of Spore that thrilled a packed house.

Alluding to the vast scale of his evolution sim, Wright revealed that the universe within Spore is so large and heavily populated with worlds that you could "play the game for your entire life and never visit everywhere". We're sure some of you will try anyway.

Wright began the hour-long session at the San Diego event with a fast-paced speech taking in the history of creative media and explaining how his early obsessions with science fiction and space exploration ultimately led to the creation of Spore.

With Spore, Wright noted that his starting point was the question: "how do we deconstruct the universe?" Answers on a postcard. The game, which takes players on a journey from the creation of single-celled life to a galaxy-conquering space age, has real-world science and major contemporary issues at its core.

And Wright believes games have a fundamental role in helping people to understand the sciences, which are generally handled in a "dull" way. Spore, he said, was in part about "taking all sciences and bringing them down into interactive toys".

Wright added that while many games make you "a Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins", Spore "puts you in the role of Lucas or Tolkien", with an entire universe to toy with.

Expanding on what he revealed during EA's E3 conference, Wright said that Spore: Creature Creator players have now created a staggering 2,124,343 unique creatures, up from the 1,756,869 figure announced at E3. He added that 14,000 videos had been uploaded onto YouTube via the title's dedicated sharing tool. Tom made a Rococo McSpuffers.

Wright also showed off MashOn, an in-game tool that allows users to create their own Spore comic books using still images or embedded video, talking up the evolution of videogames in general as "tools of self-expression". The comic-obsessed crowd, somewhat unsurprisingly, voiced its approval.

To further cheers and gasps, Wright demoed the game live, showing off the advance from the Civilization phase to space-faring, offering a glimpse at the range of possibilities the game will offer, including a space ship building tool that creates "in a few mouse clicks" what it would usually take artists "days or weeks" to achieve.

Spore is due out on PC in Europe on 7th September. Stay tuned for some very special coverage on the game on Eurogamer soon.

Picture of Johnny.

About Johnny Minkley

Eurogamer TV's Johnny Minkley is a veteran journalist with a lifelong passion for games and the games industry. He uses Twitter more than most people use air.

Read more articles from Johnny by visiting the Johnny Minkley archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (25) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Silvervein #1 4 years ago

    I'm a bit disappointed that they removed sea phase from spore: I was hoping to start an underwater civilization. Even so, the game might be quite interesting. We shall see...

  • defdaz #2 4 years ago

    Really want to be excited about this.

  • Darren #3 4 years ago

    How good will this game be really? I remember a game from years back on the Amiga and Atari ST (I think) and published by Ocean in which you "guided" (for want of a better word) a wire-frame create than evolved into a complex life-form. It was fascinating... for the first twenty minutes before you realised it wasn't really a game but a tech demo. Can't remember what the game was called unfortunately but Spore makes me think of that game.

  • dsmx #4 4 years ago

    IF the underwater stage has been taken out of the game why is there this on the spore website:http://eu .spore.com/whatisspore/article.... ?

  • ZuluHero #5 4 years ago

    but can I play for my entire life and never get bored? ;)

  • TheJuriel #6 4 years ago

    I'm intrigued, but I'm still unclear what the GAME parts are like.

  • Silvervein #7 4 years ago

    @dsmx
    Perhaps I'm wrong, however, I was under strong impression that water phase has been cut out. Even latest demonstrations show only cellular/land creature/tribal/civilization/galaxy exploration phases.
    I also seem to remember reading about water phase being removed somewhere. Still, as I said, I might be wrong.
    Thank you for the link, by the way.

  • Nostromo13 #8 4 years ago

    Certain people out there are going to try and refute that claim…

  • dsmx #9 4 years ago

    I'm not sure how you can say where is the game. First stage you have your little creature that you go round eating things and avoid other things that are trying to eat you. Which is essentially flow or pac man which as I recall are both games. There's the tribal phase which is sort of an Age of empires affair which was a game as well. You also have that civilization phase which is also as I recall a game. Even at the galactic level you have missions and so forth to do so I fail to see how you can say where's the game.

  • Trikk #10 4 years ago

    What happens if your creature evolves to the point of creating computers, and your creatures creates a game called Spore?

  • Almighty #11 4 years ago

    Funny how much attention this game gets from EA. This weekend EA plans a big publicity stunt on a beach here in Belgium (Knokke). They will release more than 2000 inflatable Spore Creatures on the beach this sunday. Everyone can take one or more creatures home.

    Really looking forward to this game.
    Edited by 2 at 26/07/08 @ 08:38

  • Widge #12 4 years ago

    I don't like the "you'll never see it all in a lifetime" claim. I remember Liberation on the CD32 slated that the game was more massive than a lifetime... the thing was, play it for a while and it already felt like a lifetime.

  • Moz #13 4 years ago

    As far as being a game goes, i get the impression that it's going to have elements of flOw, the sims, sim city and civilisation

  • Eraysor #14 4 years ago

    It's out on the 5th you fools.

    I cannot wait.

  • George-Roper #15 4 years ago

    @Darren

    That game was ECO. I played on the Atari ST, plugged into a Yamaha keyboard. The music was ASTOUNDING.

  • EggyDeth #16 4 years ago

    Play Spore for your entire life and you'll never visit ANYwhere!

  • thedaveeyres #17 4 years ago

    He's turning into Molyneux

  • BadBoyBonner #18 4 years ago

    Darren

    [link url=http://amr.abime.net /review_4913
    ]http://amr.abime.net /review_4913
    [/link]

    Review there - showing your were not hallucinating - seems this game was one that passed me by - will have been around the time I was transitioning from an imported PC-Engine to an imported Megadrive after flogging the old Amiga.

    Sounds quite interesting and certainly share characteristics of Spore - nice display of knowledge fella.

  • dsmx #19 4 years ago

    Except Will Wright appears that he can actually deliver what he promised unlike Molyneux

  • Yeevle #20 4 years ago

    If the Creature Creator can keep me amused for more than 5 minutes then I am damn sure the game will have me hooked! I love life and will never visit everywhere either so...

  • Capn #21 4 years ago

    Whoa, that's quite the claim. One question that should be tagged along with that statement, is
    "Do I want to visit everywhere?"
    Surely I'll be too busy ruling my Kingdom of penis shaped monsters?

    OH C'MON! YOU'RE ALL GONNA DO IT ONCE.

  • InsoFox #22 4 years ago

    "Play Spore for your entire life and you'll never visit everywhere"

    Couldn't help but think 'of course not, I'll be too busy playing Spore.'

  • Meho #23 4 years ago

    Yeah, DRM is really getting bothersome as of late. We'll soon be remembering the golden age of Starforce with tears in our eyes... This is exactly the reasong why my copy of Mass Effect is safely on the shelf, along with the copy of Bioshock, while I play pirated copies... At least I am a nice enough person to have purchased the actual games despite everything. There are thousands out there who will never bother and will feel justified for doing so because the publisher saddled the products with unreasonable copy protection... Now, the debate can surely go on and on as to what makes more sense and does less damage...

    As for Spore, I kinda wonder will I actually want to play it my entire life. Or, you know, anywhere upwards of ten hours... The Creature Creator is a fun little thing for creative people with a lot of time on their hands. But if I were one of them I guess I'd be creating my own stuff rathet than playing games. I really wonder how the actual game will feel once we sit down to actually play it rather than marvel at procedural animation and stuff..

  • AOFanboi #24 4 years ago

    It's not like the old manual DRM was any better, like the code wheel thing on Bard's Tale III (or II?), or entering phone numbers in LSL 2 (especially if you bought the new edition where you get a grainy grayscale scan PDF which makes it a bit hard to tell the difference between the girls). Or the brown-on-black code matrix for some Amiga game - was it Frontier?

    But, yeah, modern DRM is only a problem for legit users since hacked and pirated versions are without DRM. Solution: Boy the game to get a "license", then download the pirated version to play un-inconvenienced.

  • BobsUncle #25 4 years ago

    So is that one normal persons lifetime, or some spotty geeky PC nerd with his 733t Rig?