In 2007 the videogame market grew 43%, generating almost $18 billion, according to the NPD Group. It is being launched at a time of extraordinary growth in the gaming industry. Spore, which will be available initially for PC, Mac, Nintendo DS, and some mobile phones, could sell five million copies in its first year, according to Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan Securities. Interesting - and very profitable, hope executives at Electronic Arts ( ERTS), which acquired Wright's company in 1997. "We have no idea what these tools will be used for, but it's going to be interesting to find out." "When you unleash a new level of creative tools at a mass level, it usually explodes into something unpredictable," Wright says in his toy-filled Emeryville, Calif., office. Spore creations could become widgets on a Facebook page, animated videoclips passed around on YouTube, even physical objects etched in plastic by a 3-D printer. Wright and Lucy Bradshaw, the project's executive producer, have provided a variety of ways to take the characters and environments created inside Spore outside the confines of the game. Given the power of the modeling software, however, players may decide to blow off the formal game and do nothing more than explore its design tools. Wright calls this novel arrangement massively single-player gaming. The creatures you create in your copy of the game - using what is essentially a consumer-friendly version of a high-end Hollywood 3-D modeling program - are automatically added to a central database and used to populate other players' universes. There's not much violence in Wright's simulations, but there's plenty of interactivity. Moreover, the game puts a new twist on what's currently the hottest game craze - massively multiplayer fantasies like World of Warcraft, in which players use the Internet to bloody, bludgeon, and maim strangers they meet online. Play your genetic cards right, and your civilization can take to space and colonize other planets and galaxies. Whereas the Sims and its many expansion packs came with pre-made characters and drew on easily recognizable earthbound life, Spore gives players the tools to construct their own creatures, from single-cell organisms paddling through warm seas to sentient beings that can make friends, form tribes, and build complex civilizations. Spore is easily Wright's most ambitious project yet (its original title was Sim-Everything). His biggest hit, the Sims, is the bestselling computer game of all time. Starting in 1989 with his breakthrough computer game SimCity and following with titles that include SimEarth, SimAnt, SimLife, and SimFarm, Wright's franchise of simulation entertainments has generated more than $2.5 billion in revenue. That's in part because of the oversized reputation of its creator, Will Wright, one of the world's most famous and successful game designers. Although it's not due out before midyear, Spore is already the most eagerly awaited computer game of 2008 - the recipient of more than half-a-dozen critics' awards even before its release.
As if in thanks, my little two-headed Cyclops launches into a sort of victory dance. It took me less than three minutes to create the beast from a palate of clay-colored parts, and only a few swishes and clicks of a mouse to rearrange its arms and heads in a more conventional order. "You attached the arms to the head," says Theresa Duringer, one of the people helping finish Spore, the computer program that gave birth to this fully animated, if sad-looking, being. This poor creature has arms stuck around its ears, raised up and flapping comically in the wind, like a Hell's Angel riding a chopper with impossibly high handlebars. That was probably a howl of embarrassment.
It lets out a howl and bounds off its marbleized perch into a prehistoric forest. (Fortune Magazine) - A gray-and-red-spotted lizardlike creature with two heads peers at me from the computer screen through eyes located, Cyclops-style, in the center of each forehead.
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